Mommy Guilt? What Mommy Guilt?

A couple weeks ago, my daughter came home with information about a “wedding” in her kindergarten class. You see, Mr. Q and Mrs. U were getting married (because they love each other, you see) in an effort to teach the kids about phonics and all that jazz. My daughter was going to be a bridesmaid and they were going to have cake and punch and dancing and pictures of the wedding party. All the parents were invited to come and watch the ceremony.

“Can you come?” my daughter asks me.

“Sure,” I say, looking over the flyer. “I’ll be there.” I figure, I make my own hours and this is why – so I can be there at 10 in the morning to watch my daughter’s classmates get married.

But then I realize my son has a field trip on the same day and being that he’s only 3, I figure I need to go with him. They’re hiking at the local nature reserve and there’s ravines, a 2-mile trail, and other stuff he could get into.

So I can’t go to the wedding.

I take my son on the field trip and we hurry to pick up my daughter.

“So…whose parents were there?” I ask nonchalantly.

She quickly rattles off the names of every other students’ parents, meaning I was the only one who hadn’t shown up. Grr…

“I’m so sorry, sweetie,” I say to her.

“Why are you sorry?” she asks.

“Because I said I would come but then I couldn’t.”

She shrugged. “Daddy wasn’t there either. It’s okay.”

And then it hit me. She knew she had two parents who loved her and occasionally other things come up. She knows I wanted to be there but I had to take care of her brother, so why was I tripping so hard? I’m quite sure my husband wasn’t crying himself to sleep because he couldn’t be two places at once.

I’ve come a long way in terms of handling my mommy guilt, to the point where it creeps up only rarely, and once I realize it’s presence, it doesn’t stay nearly as long as it used to. Here’s four questions I had to start asking myself:

Are my expectations realistic? Like the example with the wedding and the field trip, it’s unrealistic to think I could be at two events at the same time. I chose the accompany my son outdoors because I didn’t want him falling off a cliff, whereas my daughter would be safe and sound indoors with her classmates.

Have I accepted that there is only so much one person can reasonably do in one day? I used to take a lot of pride in how many things I could check off my to-do list each day. If it was seven things, that was great. If it was ten, even better. If it was twenty, I felt amazing. But I was just looking at the quantity versus quality. If I do three things that really matter (research babysitter, pay the mortgage and make dinner), then that’s pretty amazing and I need to be happy about that.

Do I strive to make everyone happy each and every day? Have you read those funny signs that say “I can only please one person per day; today isn’t your day. Tomorrow doesn’t look good either”? Take that message to heart! I would kill myself trying to make it through the day without the kids having a meltdown, without things going haywire at work, and making sure I spent enough time on my marriage/relationship with my friends, keeping up with school work, etc. But honestly, it wasn’t working. I realized I couldn’t keep all the balls in the air every single day for the foreseeable future. So I found it okay to drop some balls every once in a while. It meant I didn’t always have to be the first one there to pick up my kids every day. I didn’t have to be the room mom every Wednesday and Friday. I didn’t have to have dinner ready promptly at 5:30 every day in time for my husband to come home to a hot plate. I don’t even know where these expectations came from but it definitely wasn’t from my family so why was I stressing?

Do I often “wake before the quake” – get up before the kids do? I heard stylist June Ambrose coin this phrase (and I mention the concept in my book, Make It Happen) and I loved it. So often we feel guilty because there is simply so much to do. But why aren’t we starting our days off with the acknowledgment that this job is hard work and we need to prepare ourselves mentally for it? I find that (when I manage to get up early enough) the days are a lot smoother. Because my kids weren’t my alarm clock, I had time to prep and figure out the day ahead.

Am I helping my children see that, yes, I’m Mommy, but I’m also a Friend, a Wife, a Daughter, an Employee? We spend so much time shielding our kids from the messiness of our other roles, but when we do that, is there any wonder why they won’t let us go to the bathroom in peace? In their eyes, we don’t have needs. We don’t need sleep. We don’t need quiet. We don’t need to sit down and eat in peace at the end of the day. But maybe it’s okay to let them in on the little secret that we’re humans too and we have needs just as much as they do.

Am I giving myself credit for the things I DO do? I give my kids hugs all the time, I wash their blankets at dinner time so when they snuggle in bed they’re still a little warm, I let them buy things from the $1 bin at Target and I don’t let a day go by without telling them I love them. I’m a good mom so mommy guilt can kiss my grits.

Do you struggle with mommy guilt? How do you cope?