Love, Guilt, and the PTA

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Mothers of my generation face a unique predicament. Having watched and/or studied the struggles of our foremothers to carve a place for themselves outside of the kitchens and laundry rooms, to trade house dresses for pinstripes (remember Dress for Success and giant shoulder pads?), and grilled cheese sandwiches for work luncheons, we feel compelled to prove that we too can have successful and fulfilling careers. On the other hand, many of us (my cohort group here is female friends and family members) either secretly or outwardly feel guilty about putting our children in daycare 8 hours per day while we earn a paycheck.

I don’t think stay-at-home moms are immune to mommy guilt either. Even when I’m home with the kids during the summer, I worry that I’m not playing with them enough, that they’re bored, that I should spend more “quality” time with them, do educational activities like reciting works of Shakespeare and creating dioramas of the world’s various habitats out of shoe boxes and construction paper.

We all know (or have heard about) selfish mothers. The ones who use the grocery money to buy crack, and allow their toddlers to wander the streets at will. But most of the women I know do not fit into this category. Instead, we overcompensate. If we took a poll, I’m willing to bet that more than a few of us have found ourselves frosting cookies or cupcakes to look like clowns/cute animals/holiday decorations at 2 in the morning for a classroom party the next day. How many mothers do you know who are up early on Halloween to put the finishing touches on the costumes? And mom is almost always the last person in bed on Christmas Eve.

Where did we learn this? Probably from our own mothers. I can clearly picture my mom staying up until all hours of the night before a junior high school dance to finish sewing my dress together because nothing in the store fit my exact specifications of 7^th-grade fashion. She sat through my sister’s 3-hour dance recitals, arriving an hour early to get good seats, and spent several blistering summers learning baseball lingo so she could cheer on my brother’s team (and my mom doesn’t even LIKE baseball). Mothers make sacrifices, not because they feel guilty, but because they love their children. And we do it gladly. Check the manual; it’s in the job description.

Maybe I’m stereotyping here, and I apologize if there are exceptions, but fathers don’t seem to share the same guilt. I’m not suggesting fathers don’t love their children just as much as mothers and spend just as much time with them. If truth were told, J is much better at just sitting and playing with the kids than I am. I’m more of the planning, organizing, and executive function in our household. But when it’s time for fathers to take a break, they seem better able to do so without feeling the need to rush through to get home to the kids. We moms could learn a lot from their example.

A few weeks ago, I got strep throat for the first time since I was a kid (Note- Strep throat is either MUCH worse in your 30s, or I’m just a much bigger wimp than I was when I was 6). I was lying in bed thinking that I might die, but also going through the running list of things I SHOULD be doing instead of being sick. It was a weekend, so I was feeling guilty that I was missing out on precious non-working hours with the kids. This experience got me to thinking.

Moms get tired, and sometimes we get sick, and sometimes we just want to lie on the couch and read a book. It’s okay for kids to learn to play alone and to sometimes be bored. (If I recall, the best games, plays, forts and costumes happened when adults weren’t involved.)

So my resolution for this year is to try to feel less guilt when I spend time working out (that’s my other resolution) instead of going to pick the kids up right after school. I also want to reconnect with my girlfriends who I extraordinarily miss. Most of them have their own children and guilt, or will very soon so it’s a challenge for us to get together. But we need to laugh and drink wine before we aren’t allowed to imbibe because the alcohol will react badly with our blood pressure medications.

I also want to practice being. Being is the state of consciously doing one thing at a time, something at which fathers excel (I meant that as a compliment in case it didn’t come across that way). If J is watching TV, he watches TV. If he’s playing with the kids, he’s playing with the kids, and so on. Conversely, if I’m watching TV, I’m also checking my e-mail, attempting some new project that will not be recognizable when placed next to the picture I saw of it on Pinterest, or making a grocery list. Often, when I’m playing with the kids, I get up in the middle to check on dinner or straighten up the living room. My goal this year is to enjoy whatever it is that I’m doing in the moment instead of constantly thinking ahead to the next thing that needs to be done or what we can do next with the kids.

German poet and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “Nothing is worth more than this day.” Maybe he was on to something. Happy 2013!