Parenting Without a Manual
with Talyaa Liera
I'm Talyaa, the poster child for the concept that there's no one right way to be a parent. I went from stay-at-home attachment-parenting mom of four to being the non-custodial parent, working as a professional writer and channel-psychic. Let's talk about throwing away the parenting manual and exploding the myths and mystique of motherhood!
Check out my personal blog at Juxtapositioning.
|
I saw something on Twitter yesterday that kind of tweaked me the wrong way. It was a tweet, or actually a short series of tweets, from a women who I know to be strong, savvy, and businesslike. She’s an author, consultant, and CEO of a business. She’s just the sort of working mom we all tend to aspire to being. But here she was, falling all over herself and wracked with Mommy Guilt because her worklife got in the way of her homelife and she failed to show up at a Kid Thing (and more than once) that she knew the kid was passionate about.
Guilt.
Can we please get rid of it once and for all? Why are we so caught up in the cult of guilt?
I admit, I am not immune to guilt. I am living an unorthodox mommyhood situation (my children’s father has primary custody and I mother from afar) that gives me cause for plenty of wallowing moments. But hey, I OWN my guilt (which means I write about it). Awesome. Cough.
Okay, so this Twitter mom was probably just shouting out a momentary GARRRRGH to the universe. She’s probably not lying face down on the floor right now and beating her forehead to a bloody pulp. In fact I just saw her tweet about the dentist. But even that momentary guilt is unnecessary, isn’t it?
But we can’t seem to get away from it. It’s everywhere we look.
Google “mommy guilt” and you get 804,000 responses that include books, how-not-to articles, workshops by famous mommy bloggers, and blogs with the phrase “mommy guilt” in the title.
(Yes, I am painfully aware that I have added to the critical mass of Interwebs Mommy Guilt.)
[By the way, Google "daddy guilt" and on the very first page you quickly move away from dads who worry about being a good enough dad and right on to BDSM (!!).]
So where does this come from? Someone glib would probably say it comes from a desire for perfection. I dunno, is that it, really? After all, we see through the brittle shell of perfection that Betty Draper wears around her like pink Playtex armor on “Mad Men.”
My version of perfect motherhood was a cross between what I knew from my own mom (and resisted mightily) and the attachment parenting model I created that demanded that I submerge my personality inside the perfect image I created around me. If that isn’t a recipe for disaster, I don’t know what is. I couldn’t be my mom. I didn’t want to be my mom. As good a mother as I was, my ideal was always better. My ideal spoke quietly. My ideal smiled all the time. My ideal was peaceful. My ideal didn’t mind spills on the floor. No, it had children WHO DID NOT EVEN SPILL. How’s that for perfect parenting?
So all this leads me to surmise that maybe it’s not mommy guilt that’s the issue here, but it’s more that we second guess our choices and don’t trust our own strengths as parents. Our children are important to us. We want them to have good lives and grow up to be happy people. And, like trying to hold onto a soap bubble, we think they’re fragile beings who are scarred for life when we have human moments.
I think that parenting is one thing where you really do get points for trying hard. Truly being the best parent you can be — at least in a given moment, which means being able to let go of regretting the less than perfect moments so you can learn from them — is much better than being robotically perfect.
At least, that’s what I tell myself in the mirror. I’m good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!
Where does guilt fit in your parenting picture?
[Image: Sammylee on stock.xchng]
Subscribe to blog via RSS
I’m not sure I’d call what this woman experienced “mommy guilt.” It sounds like plain old guilt. She let someone down. She regretted it. And maybe that’s not a bad thing.
To me, bad “mommy guilt” is where you waste time wondering if you ought to feel guilty for a choice you have made, just because someone else might have made a different choice.
But the fact is, when you make a commitment and you fail someone, that’s bad. Whether it’s your colleague, your mom, your friend, or your kid. If you didn’t feel badly at least momentarily, there’d be something wrong with you, in my opinion.
SKL | March 24th, 2010 at 7:26 am
Mommy guilt comes in when she says “are you going to come to the assembly” and I have to say “no sweetheart, I won’t be there”. Then I get mommy guilt “Mrs. J will be there, Miss S. will be there, why can’t I)?
But then I do try to get to a lot of things. And hey, when I was a kid, concerts were in the evenings so both parents could attend. Why don’t they do that again?!
I’m with SKL in that if I promised to come to X assembly and let work get in the way, that can fall at the same level as promising to volunteer at the soup kitchen and reneging for some other thing with more perceived importance. If I commit I should honor the commitment, to the non-profit, or the child, or even a friend.
Mich | March 24th, 2010 at 10:12 am
When I was a teen, I christened mommy guilt as GMS (Guilty Mother Syndrome). Yes, my mom had it and so, I suspect, will I (or maybe I do already).
But I think it’s okay to miss some of our kids’ events. I know parents whose children are 16 and they’ve been to every single game/event/practice. I don’t know if this is the best model, either.
Perhaps the only fact is that we’re dealing with people and emotions (mostly our own), and this is hardly a science. If you buy into guilt, you have to buy into its counterpart: forgiveness.
Ironic Mom | March 24th, 2010 at 6:39 pm
Yesterday, my husband lost out on a job offer because he pushed for different hours than what he would have been hired for. We agonized over this for a couple of weeks. The hours were noon to 8pm, 6 days a week. We have one car. I leave for work at 0615 and drop Amelie off here on base at the daycare center. I pick her up at 4 pm. They close at 5:30 pm. We have no family and most our friends are childfree and have crazy hours.
How, we asked, will we do this? Amelie’s in bed by 7:30 each night. So, OK. Our landlady (her Nonna) can watch the monitor while I come get you at work, after working all day and then tending to Amelie each night. But what about when I’m TDY? Or deployed? Who would watch her until he got home?
They wouldn’t work with him on these issues. And he realized that he wouldn’t see her but for one day a week. And he wouldn’t see much of me either. So rather than bow his head and take the job anyway, it was mutually agreed that this couldn’t work.
Guilt? I had it. He lost out on a job when so many don’t even have an offer, because of my career choices. He doesn’t see it that way, but I felt terrible yesterday. I really did.
Phe | March 25th, 2010 at 8:57 am
Hey, Karen–
I like your writing style! Great piece above about mommy guilt. I am so with you that mommy guilt is completely unnecessary. I like to distinguish between “toxic guilt” which is the kind I think you are talking about, and “healthy guilt/your conscience.” The toxic kind is the pervasive, icky guilt that lines moms lives like plaque lines arteries. It whispers (sometimes yells) that no matter what you do, you’ll never measure up, never be good enough, you can’t trust your instincts or intuition because you could make an inrreparable mistake, etc. Your conscience, in my way of thinking, says to you, “Oops. I crossed over the line of my own values. I need to re-think this.” BIG difference. There is more than one way to parent well. The moms I coach don’t start off believing this, but later realize that they know more than they think they do, and that comparing their insides to another mom’s outsides is pointless.
Thanks for a great piece.
-Karen
Karen Bierdeman | March 25th, 2010 at 8:11 pm
mommy guilt is a force to be reckoned with. it helps me to think about my mom and how she handled me. let’s all keep our heads up.
seeking moms | March 26th, 2010 at 9:40 am
It feels to me like you are positioning things like they are all or nothing and that’s what *doesn’t* work for me as a parent. I get the desire (and need) to not completely lose who you are as a person to the cause of being a mother. I completely agree that it’s simultaneously important and necessary that we remain the women we were before kids and grow into our role. But (and I’m sorry - this is going to come off like I’m judging you), I don’t think the answer is to relinquish your role in raising them either.
I’m a mother who works outside the home and it is hard. My child is in day care and there are days when the drop off just kills me. But, I know that it’s important for her to have a full and engaging day, for me to work hard in my career and for then us to all come back together again. I guess what I’m saying is that I try to achieve balance… so that I don’t have to deal with as much Mommy guilt.
I don’t mean to suggest that it’s easy because it sure isn’t. It’s just what works (most of the time) for me.
Heather Kelley | June 9th, 2010 at 1:34 pm