#No Mom Guilt May

10 ways Mom Guilt ruins my life.

Being a mom is synonymous with guilt in American society, especially for those of us who work outside the home. No matter what we do as moms we’re always doing it wrong and can always be doing something better. Sometimes the feelings of guilt are so overwhelming they can cause us to feel anxious, depressed and even trigger irrational anger. There are more than 10 ways in which mom guilt ruins my life, but here are the ones that feel the most persuasive going into the May.

1. Distracts from being present during our mornings together. Morning time can be a source of connection and stress. In May my oldest child’s school often celebrates the end of the year with daily themes. I always feel a twinge of guilt when we miss a day, or I just half-ass the attempt.
2. Heightens my anxiety around water. As a native Floridian the awareness of safety is never far from my mind whether it be predators, or drownings. May here is the start of alligator mating season and pool season. I want to take my children to the rivers and pools, but sometimes my anxiety about keeping them safe prevents us from doing that. I don’t want them to miss out, and I don’t want to hold them back.
3. Makes me irritable when surprises occur. I spend so much time in February through March signing my kids up for summer activities and trying to parse out how much time off work I will need to take to make sure my young kids have supervision, any last minute deviation or even feedback can set me off into a spiral. Surprise project added to my workload? Anger. Requesting a different summer camp to be with friends? Rage. I hate the summer season; I would like nothing more than to spend time with my kids instead of bank rolling their camps. 
4. Intensifies my FOMO. I feel guilty 100% of the time that I am not with my favorite people (my children). I hate people, but I like my children. I don’t want them to be in daycare, or aftercare, or summer camps. I want to hang out with them and their friends. I want to be there for the mundane daily spats and boring shows, I want to be there for the silly and sticky. I would rather deal with my children’s tantrum then the BS my work brings me… any day.
5. Overcompensate by overspending or being over lenient.  It’s hard enforcing bedtimes especially on the weekends. Sometime my guilt at not seeing them all day leads to later bedtimes or extra Popsicle or extra long silly baths and extra book or cuddle. The knowledge that my children will only be small for so long and want me in their space is ever prevalent in my guilt.
6. Angry with my partner. My partner is the fun one (at least that’s what my guilt tells me). Sometimes I get so wrapped up in my own inadequacies that I lash out on him for making the kids laugh or playing video games with them or running around the back yard. I want to play too! The guilt holds me back.
7. Hyper-focus on what I can control. I have been cleaning since I was a tween, my mother instilled the virtue of a clean kitchen before bed. I feel the level of clean my kitchen is at is the only thing I can control in my life. The need to scrub the counters sometimes takes me away from prime snuggling time, and I also feel worse when it feels lived in. A well-used kitchen isn’t always clean, that doesn’t make me a failure.
8. Exhausts myself trying to make memories and fake it. I work so hard to research and plan activities on the weekend for us to do as a family. I milk every hour on the weekend, but sometimes my kids just need to relax. Sometimes I need to relax, I can’t always be cleaning or adventuring or working or playing. My guilt drives me to do more, plan more, take them to more places and give them more experiences. But at what cost? Sometimes Saturday comes and I can’t get out of bed all day because I’ve done too much and gone too hard that month. Missing out even a day because I physically can’t get out of bed kills me.
9. Withdraw from myself due to disappointment. I bet you can guess by now that I have always been a high achieving type A light kind of person. I am not good an dealing with failure, with not meeting my own crazy expectations. I am not good at dealing with the guilt that comes form “failing” my kids or “failing” to be a “decent” mom. Sometimes the only thing I can do is disassociate with romance novels or doom scrolling. If I detach from myself I don’t have to deal with the guilt, but I also can’t get through it either.
10. Crashes me into a sad episode. I’ve learned over the years you can’t disassociate forever, eventually the big feelings find you or at least the find me. It often feel like there’s a monster following me through the motions of my day, and the instant I sit down to escape it swallows me up. I call these “sad episodes” because I don’t always like to acknowledge my own depression, but my guilt unchecked will lead me there every time.

So, what are we doing to combat our guilt and try and not suffer the consequences? In the month of May we’re going to acknowledge the things that make us feel guilty, whether it be screaming at our kids, losing our shit or disappointing ourselves. By naming the things that cause feelings of guilt maybe we can openly discuss why we don’t need to feel guilty or action steps we can take to prevent it from happening in the future. After all if our child told us they were feeling guilty about failing us or not being good enough what would we tell them?

Your best is good enough, and I love you.