Mom Guilt.

Let’s talk about mom guilt.

If you are a mother, you know it. If you are friends with a mother you probably also know it. We feel it about everything. All the time. Always.

Simply put, “mom guilt” is the weaponization of a mother’s love for her child.

I have been thinking about it a lot recently because I have been feeling it a lot recently. For the past 14 months (and 5 days) I have been home with my son, Ezra. I think the term “son” is excellent, as he has also become my sun- the center of my universe and the light of my life. He radiates with joy, and because of that, I radiate with joy as well. But, recently he has not been so joyful. As it would turn out, two introverts can in fact make an extrovert. Ezra is proof of this. Here is his story.

We knew it was time for daycare when Ezra hugged a small sailor statue at his great-grandmother’s house. He thought it was a real person his size. He tried feeding it goldfish and playing with it. It was maybe the most pathetic thing I have ever seen.

This, of course, was not without warning.

When Ezra was around 10 months and I would bring him out to stores with me, he began scoping out other children. When he would see them he would find a way to stare and yell “Hey!!! Hiiii!” and then probably also “Dada”. He is not a wordsmith yet, but he is adorable. Parents, and the shy children of these parents, however, were not exactly charmed by the toddler proclaiming random words at them in a target during a pandemic. It became increasingly evident that our child needed to be around other children.

Seeing as we are still in a pandemic, and at that time it was a very very active pandemic, we started to beg the few people we knew with children his age to have play dates with us. We tried to appeal to them by sharing the pathetic sailor story. We told them about the very very small bubble we were in. We ever tried to tempt them with the reality that both of us were working from home.

It did not work.

With that prospect off the table, we attempted to bring him to play areas where children would also be. These were much better than the target-staredowns or hangouts with his buddy the sailor, but it didn’t come without some serious setbacks. Perhaps the most concerning one was how socially ignorant our child proved to be. He didn’t know the first thing about playing with other children, especially older children. This adventure ended when my dear son ran into the bathroom with a random woman while I was trying to console a crying 5-year-old whose meticulously designed train tracks were the victim of hurricane Ezra. Everyone- the 5-year-old, the random women, the two moms, and the other child present were all really mad at me. I have never left a place so fast.

All in the background we were on a waitlist for a daycare. Neither Isaac nor myself… nor the director of the daycare, thought that a spot would open up for months. Then it did. With all options exhausted, we knew it was a gift from God that we needed to act on. Ezra did not stop laughing during the daycare tour we went on last week. He did not know what to do with himself as he was in a room with five other children between the ages of 12 and 24 months. He just ran and laughed with them. It was the happiest I have ever seen him. At that moment my heart was both overflowing with joy and exploding with guilt.

See, before I could even get to talking about my feelings on this topic, or how I have felt mom guilt slowly crush me through this process, I first needed to justify myself in sharing many of the reasons I made the decision. I felt a need to justify myself to you. To put my child’s feelings first just so you, my anonymous reader, would know that I care and did everything I could. As if sending my son to daycare was an act of giving up.

Behind each story is a mother crippled by guilt. A mother who dreads going to target in fear of being judged by other mothers. A mother who turns on the tv… like all day… just so she can get some work done. A mother who doesn’t know how to entertain her toddler, because all he wants is a friend. A mother, who deep down, just wants to spend her day thinking and creating, rather than cleaning and crafting. A mother who has gone to great lengths, including pausing her time in the workforce, to protect her son from COVID. And, a mother, who above all else, was quietly dying inside realizing that she was never going to be enough for her son.

I am that mother, but I am also going to guess that you might be her too.

So, I go back to this. Mom guilt is the weaponization of a mother’s love for her children. It is us, the mother, trying to be better for our kids, grasping for heights that we could not possibly reach. It is also us, mothers, who love our children so much, that we also love other people’s children, and in doing so, we set standards for each other as mothers that are generally unnecessary and also very unreachable. It is society, only focusing on what a mother is doing, completely excusing the father from any responsibility for their child’s wellbeing-- and applauding him at the first sign of effort. It is a symptom of the patriarchy, telling women that we must be the caretaker of our families. It is a symptom of feminism, telling women that we can, and therefore must, do it all. It is also us as children, expecting our mothers to give us the world. It is the unspoken burden of becoming a mother. A weight that we carry, afraid if we put it down, then we will have to face the fact that we are never going to be perfect for our children.

Except, we are perfect for our children. In fact, the only universal barrier between us and our perfection as mothers is the guilt that we allow to slowly kill us. It is time for us to love and nurture ourselves the way we love and nurture our children so we can love and nurture our children the way we want to.

It is time to cancel mom guilt.

Until next time,

Amy xoxo