Going for the gold in mom guilt? Forget it!
If the Olympic Games had been founded by modern American moms (rather than ancient Greeks with chariots and time to kill), the prize for Most Abject Guilt would be a coveted gold. I refuse to compete. I like to say I was born without the guilt gene, but after reading Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bebe, I’m thinking I was born in the wrong country. Frenchwomen, Druckerman reports, don’t express guilt over their choices to work or not, nurse or not or – this resonated most with me – over wanting to remain fully themselves after becoming mothers.
It’s not that average French mamans don’t feel conflict. But they appear to believe that since perfection isn’t possible, it’s not desirable, making guilt irrelevant.
But in the thoroughly American circles in which I run, if you’re a mom who’s not actively feeling guilty about something you’re doing (or not doing), you can’t compete in the games, and often the competition is all. Because the trick to racking up degree-of-difficulty points is not just to experience guilt, but to make it evident, with words and actions, that your guilt is bigger and badder than other moms’.
Let’s say you work outside the home, and Monday mornings make you sing like the proverbial lark, anticipating that even the worst work stress might be offset by such sweet spots as draining an entire cup of coffee while it’s still warm. You can go ahead and feel that way, but if you say so aloud, you better do so minus the lark-song, and with the addition of a self-deprecating “OMG, I can’t believe I admitted that. I feel so guilty for leaving them.” In other words, working for a necessary paycheck is worthy if you’re appropriately guilty about it. But you don’t even pass the qualifying round if own up to working because your career is a part of your identity you refuse to relinquish.
Let’s say you stay home, and you have let the phone go to voice mail every single time the class mom has called, because you simply cannot sit in on another meeting to decide which craft project the second graders will do for the Valentine’s Day breakfast. You don’t admit that, except if accompanied by a pefect-10 of a backflip: “OMG, I feel so guilty that I’m not doing enough to contribute, so of course sign me up.” Bonus points if you skip Zumba class in favor of being a Girl Scout leader.
You’re supposed to feel guilty if you get your roots touched up or your highlights highlighted without tossing in “but I let it go for so long because who has time?” Bonus points if you indicate your grays or split ends with a rueful, knowing, “it’s okay because I’m just a mom” smile; points deducted if you breeze happily into the salon or call a graying, greasy ponytail a temporary condition, not a badge of motherly honor.
You’re supposed to feel guilty if you didn’t sign up your kindergartener for t-ball, so now that he’s in fourth grade, he “can’t” try Little League (your fault!). You’re meant to feel guilty if you tell your daughter that tap and ballet are enough, that you can’t afford (much less finagle time in the schedule for) hip-hop and Broadway.
Gold-medal guilt gets its sheen from the visible strain for perfection, which no one wants to admit doesn’t exist (even Michael Phelps smoked pot; and didn’t Nadia Comaneci have an eating disorder?).
But what if we all just, you know, stopped? Admitted that we don’t feel guilty for (just to use one example) telling our 7-year-old that Chuck E. Cheese doesn’t do 8-year-old birthday parties, when the real reason is that there’s not enough Purell (or Xanax) for you to book a party there, so how about bowling, kiddo? Admit that we work because we want to feel important and interesting and connected to the world outside our homes, as much or more than because we have to for economic reasons? Admit that being home all day with a toddler or two makes you feel like a hamster on a wheel, or that commuting to work with a breast pump and a bunch of half-finished reports make you feel like a different kind of hamster on a different sort of wheel?
What if we all just had a café au lait and a croissant and sighed in a Gallic sort of way, and left the competition to the ancient Greeks?
Whadya think?
Best post yet. Graying, greasy ponytail had me on the floor.
You’re right. It’s so ingrained in your culture that I don’t even notice all of the times I’m playing along. Thanks to your post, I’m going to make more of a conscious effort to opt out.
Loved this Post!!! My news years resolution this year was to make 2012 all about me and a little less about my little ones… and try to do it without the guilt! I’m trying to include my own sorry social life into the schedule. Meet up with friends I haven’t been able to squeeze into the schedule. When truthfully It was my guilt preventing me from doing so. How could I possibly think of leaving my kids when I am away from them for fourty hours a week already? My new outlook has made me a bit happier at work too. I’m trying to bloom where I am planted, and I’m planted here, I have bills to pay. Also, I’ve started a graduate program, all for ME. At first I thought how can I be away from my family even more. I need to make myself happy and guilt free. Next, I have to fit in ZUMBA class!!!
ps loved the purell and xanax comment
Amen. That’s all.
Spot on, as usual, Schipani. Good work!
Yes. A thousand times, emphatically, YES!
I’m not a mom, but I love your ideas. It’s so hard to be friends with some moms because they won’t spend time away from their kids!
Maybe they don’t want to be friends with me, but maybe it’s that they feel guilty for doing grown up things.
Weren’t things different when we were kids? I don’t remember my mom ever trying to entertain my siblings and me. She did her thing and we could hang out with her if we wanted, which meant we helped make the beds and helped cook. If we didn’t want to be with her, then we played outside. I remember my parents being very adult-centered and I don’t feel any the worse for it.
It is my new years resolution to stop feeling guilty. I am very aware of the guilt that gets thrown around in mommy circles, and I HATE it! It drags me and all the other moms down. I haven’t been perfect…but I’m getting better at letting things go
Oh my! You had me roaring with this post. I played back all the times I had guilt and fought it because, deep down, I am English and we have less guilt over parenting than Americans….but WAY more than the French! I work but wish I didn’t now the kids are older…yep, I was not guilty about leaving them in daycare…it was a relief at times (bad mom). But now I want to be more involved and can’t…that isn’t guilt…just sour grapes. (Takes sip of wine…) So you have a dedicated follower in this Britican (British American) who loves your blog!
Thanks, Katy! I’m an honorary Brit myself — a dedicated Anglophile who lived and worked in London for a few years (before kids, sigh). It suited me in many ways. I guess, though I’m quite thoroughly a New Yorker, I’m in many ways a woman without a country! Welcome.
Denise
YES. YES. YES!!! I am loving what you are writing. I’m newer to the mom-game(my daughter will be 3 in a couple months and her little sister will be born right around the same time)…..but all along I have felt this sense of not getting into the whole mom-guilt-complex. It serves NO ONE well. There is nothing good to come out of it. I am opting out! So I’m loving what you have to say here. Thanks for being a refreshing voice on the momscape (-; I found you through your latest Babble.come article and followed over here. I will be getting your book and just pimped your blog on my Facebook as well! Thanks again!
Well, thanks, Jen! You can also friend (me, or the book) on Facebook. I appreciate the plug on your page, and good luck with the transition from one to two. It’s a doozy! Here’s my (unsolicited) advice on that front: don’t slip into feeling guilty for having to divide your attention between your girls. Talk about a bad trap — you feel “bad” for the older kid because she no longer has your undivided attention; then “bad” for the baby for having to be carted along with the older. But what’s wrong with that?! It’s called being part of a family!
best,
Denise
I read your “Why I walk” article in BHG (Apr. 2012) and followed it to your blog… Started reading this post. My husband and I are “trying” and the more I think of being a parent (something I’ve wanted all my life) the more anxious I am about not being myself. We are the last (probably smartest) of our friends to have kids and I see all the Moms around me turn into a pile of mush; they’re not who they used to be. I understand it’s not all about you anymore, but seriously? I have to baby-proof MY house for you to come over? (Okay, I admit that’s more my sister-in-law than my good friends..). I don’t want to be that person; after reading your post, I want to be like the french mamans! I will be reading more from you as I prepare to have a child and stay the same
Thanks for your comment, Julie! A big part of staying who you are after the giant upheaval that happens when you become a mother is to think it through beforehand. Start as you mean to go on, I always say! I hope you keep reading, and thanks again,
Denise
Oh my gosh, how timely that I found your blog and this post. I found you through a DailyWorth email by MP Dunleavey. Anyway, I feel like I am being consumed by guilt. Literally eaten alive by it. I don’t have enough milk supply and I’m struggling, chained to my pump for hours a day, to send bottles to daycare for my 5 month old. I cut my hours back at work when I had my second child, but I work at a CPA firm where they literally post everyone’s hours each week and the people with the most hours get accolades. So there’s my work guilt – I can’t compete with the 25 year old with no kids or hobbies.
I plan to grab a cup of coffee and read your back posts. I was raised by parents that pretty much never gave in to expensive bull$&#* or helicoptering or any of that and I think I’m better for it. I just needed a reminder that that’s still a good strategy.
And I just put a hold on Bringing up Bebe at my library.
I recently got into a nonstop Facebook arguement over a “girl” (who is a mother to quite a few at 23) saying she is soo glad to be a stay at home because she “just couldn’t imagine not putting Sophie first”. I of course had to interupt her gleeful reason to stay at home with stating that if a woman has to work or WANTS to work that her kids are not second fiddle to work and that us working moms (as do the majority of women) should and do put their kids first at all times. I was mad as a wet hen that day and still believe that not every woman has to stay at home to raise perfectly well adjusted, NORMAL children. I do not feel guilty because my kids get to go and do alot more experiences than most kids their age because I work to show them the many beautiful things life has to offer. We get to do these things because my husband and I work hard to make it happen. I am not content to sit in my house everyday, perch my kids on the couch to watch Disney and converse with the other stay at home moms in my neighborhood about the latest and greatest sale I made on Ebay or to be sure I am the only one wiping my kids noses or behinds! Ugghh!!!
I don’t think a mother should look down on another for choosing something different, and I feel that’s what you’re doing here when you say, “I am not content to sit in my house every day…” It seems an unkind generalization to me; these things wouldn’t make me happy, either, and I don’t work outside the home.
Never been big on guilt and my kids know it. I subscribe to the saying, “If Mama Ain’t Happy, Ain’t Nobody Happy”. You all know it’s true. Now cut yourself some slack and live by it.
A friend sent me a link to your blog after she read my latest blog post. I’ve I forwarded it to my 2 daughters. Even grandmothers struggle with guilt!
I love your blog (found it through a link from the Free Range Kids blog) and couldn’t agree with you more. I sometimes feel like there is a weird feedback loop of guilt “confessions” and “absolutions” when I’m with a group of moms. Lots of people express their guilt and lots of people tell them they shouldn’t feel guilty but if you say you actually don’t feel guilty about a certain topic, then they look at you like something is wrong.
We live in a neighborhood with many VERY involved parents where there are lots of kids with schedules more hectic than mine. After Christmas, I pulled my girls (4 & 5) out of all but 1 structured extra activity and both of them attend their activity on the same night during the week. Not that they were doing much more but the schedule meant we were running to activities on Saturday and Sunday and no one was having any down time. We had to “get up and go” every day of the week. When I mention this activity reduction to some of the other parents, they agree that too much is no good and they wish they could make their schedules less hectic BUT ….
Oh well, I am trying to hold my own and keep the guilt in check
Well, thanks for making me feel guilty about feeling guilty about most of that stuff!
Like:
Actually enjoying going back to work when my twins were 3 months old.
The feeling of freedom I had when I finally put away the breast pump after enduring it for 6 months.
Admitting I need Xanax.
Sometimes enjoying my hours at work more than my hours at home.
NEVER EVER wanting to be a stay at home mom.
Not wanting more kids.
Letting my now 3 1/2 year old twins play on their new swing set alone, in a completely fenced-in yard where I can see them through our back door, when other parents won’t let their 6 year olds outside without adult supervision.
And finally, not really feeling guilty about my parenting, letting my kids be who they are and just enjoying my life.
Thanks for being another “mean mom.” I truly think our kids will be the strong, independent ones who carry and support our society.
I’m just finding this now, but for me, it’s so timely and so welcome. I have a 10 month old daughter who I love more than I have words for, but I’m a better mother when I get time away from her. I’m going back to work full-time in four months (teacher) and I can’t wait. I took a few days away for some me-time while my husband watched our daughter. I loved it and they loved it, but I got comments like “I would have NEVER done that with my child!” Kindly go screw, lady.
Thanks for this. So much.