Happy Guilt-Free Mothers Day

Look what I found between the sofa cushions - an extra day.  Where did that come from?

Did you see Sandra Parsons' column in The Times yesterday?  She's certainly spot on to note that the more Middle England the child, the more they view a trip to McDonald's as an immeasurable treat.

However, one sentence made me pull the face.

One of the things you learn in personal development, is that if a client talks about 'you' doing or feeling something, what they really mean is 'I'.  So if someone says "You know when you do X and you feel a bit Y", they are really talking about their own feelings.  But it helps to mentally distance these things, because then you can blame it on somebody else and avoid taking responsibility for your own feelings.

So when Sandra Parsons writes about working mothers:  "You feel feel permanent guilt at not being a good enough mother", although it reads like an attempt to tar the lot of us with the same brush, it's really the writer's own feelings about her own life coming through. 

Regular readers will know that this blog is a parental guilt-free zone.  My children were not born with a free package of guilt, and I resist any attempts to palm one off on me. I don't feel guilty about any aspect of working and parenting.  I'm doing the best I can.  When I go wrong I aim to do better.  Why feel guilty about that?

The part I do think Parsons gets right is about our lives being out of control.  But then that's true for anybody, whether you're a parent or not.  Absolutely nobody is in 100% control of their life.  This is why perfectionism rarely works - life, with its regular curveballs, will always change your plans.

It doesn't do working mothers any favours at all to promote the myth that we must all feel guilty that we're somehow not good enough.  And sometimes it feels positively radical to say that you (of course I mean I) will have no part in keeping the guilty myth going.  Even with an extra day, life's too short for that.

Comments

[Linda]

Hiya - yes this bit:

I don't feel guilty about any aspect of working and parenting. I'm doing the best I can.

Exactly how I feel. I may miss them when I am at work so I charge accordingly - like a low-rent Erin Brockovich.