Family

Judgment days: The guilt list

Mother of two Eleanor Black on learning to be perfectly good enough.
Eleanor Black learning to not be put off by guilt of motherhood.

Mother Guilt, that bitch. I know her well.

It’s been one of those days. The children are eating chicken nuggets (and not the free-range kind) in front of the television as I write this. Marooned in a sea of Lego bits that I can’t find the energy to pick up. Watching a cartoon that is possibly a tad too mature for them.

Meanwhile, I’m holed away in my office after spending my “working” hours helping the toddler give birth to an “owie poo”, because he refuses ever to eat a scrap of vegetable or fruit matter and has been sluggish for most of the year… It’s not pretty, and it’s not what the Plunket nurse had in mind for us.

This is not the norm at our house, and it needn’t worry me, but it does. Like most mothers, I tend to focus on the slice of family life that doesn’t measure up to the standard I set for myself, forgetting to be grateful for the rest. There are endless authorities and commentators to tell me where I’m going wrong, which doesn’t help me maintain a rational perspective.

I only need to pop onto Facebook or Instagram to see photographic evidence of my inadequacies: other mums are better organised (there are some truly remarkable pantries out there), they cook better food, they organise more educational family outings, they throw birthday parties of such a high standard they could go professional, and they are all having more damned fun than me.

I know, I know: people use social media to curate their lives. No one is that excited about candied apples and homemade pom poms. Still.

This year, our first child started school. We took a bunch of photos of him looking adorable in his uniform (some went on Facebook, of course) and blinked back tears as we watched him take his place on the mat in front of the teacher, one little guy setting off on his journey. And, unsurprisingly, I found my worries and guilt around him ramped up a notch.

Is he making good friends, does he eat enough during the day, does he remember his manners, is he kind to the other children, does he have my dim maths brain, does he need more sleep, does he ever yell at his school mates the way I sometimes yell at him and his brother? (The yelling, that’s high on my Guilt List, ever since the two-year-old tried to put me in time out.)

The truth is, our schoolboy is doing great. He comes home with certificates and “happy notes” and sticks to add to his collection, but the gnawing guilt remains.

There are plenty of times that I don’t feel guilty and then wonder if I should – I feel guilty for not feeling guilty enough. Like, for instance, when my friend won tickets to Justin Timberlake and we giddily went out on a school night, relying on others to bath our kids and coax them into their jammies. I sent my husband a text to crow about our amazing seats, just three rows from the stage. “I could just about leap on JT,” I wrote, “if there weren’t so many security guards.”

“Where is the tooth?” came the reply. Oops. I wasn’t home to play Tooth Fairy for the five-year-old. “Bedside table,” I wrote, before slipping my phone into my bag and taking another sip of my drink.

It didn’t always used to be like this. In the 70s and 80s, when I was growing up, mothers seemed to have a lot more wiggle-room. It wasn’t expected that parents should focus so aggressively on their children, nor were there so many “experts” droning on about the rights and wrongs of child-rearing.

Middle-class parents like mine didn’t feel obliged to spend all of their free time pursuing enrichment activities for their children, driving from lesson to lesson, from sports field to auditorium. They didn’t seem to think they should be in control of every aspect of their children’s lives the way we do now, managing our kids like talent and feeling responsible for every single one of their disappointments and small victories. I envy them that.

The solution, of course, is to practise refusal. To stop shouldering guilt that does not belong to us. To allow our children to fend for themselves a bit more. To be kinder to ourselves. Let’s start now.

Words by: Eleanor Black

Photos: Tony Nyberg

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