6 Essential Keys to Dealing With Mommy Guilt

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Mommy guilt plagues even the best mother on Earth. Whether you let your child watch TV for an extra hour so that you could finish cleaning the kitchen or decided not to record their three line performance in the class play about the solar system, guilt comes creeping up your throat and settles there uncomfortably. What should be a minor matter begins to distract you and cause you to be angry with yourself. You start to wonder what you were thinking. How could you do that to your child? What is wrong with you? How could you be so self-centered? You are a terrible mother! The negative thoughts come hard and fast and leave you miserable over what may be nothing. Few things are better at making mountains out of molehills than mommy guilt, but it is a difficult emotion to beat. All mothers want to do the best things for their children and be the best mother possible. Mommy guilt tends to rear its ugly head when mothers feel that they are not living up to their own, often impossible, expectations. Far from making them better mothers, however, mommy guilt usually just leaves a woman feeling despondent. Here are six essential keys to dealing with mommy guilt and overcoming the issue.

Take a deep breath.

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The first thing to do when mommy guilt starts creeping in is to take a deep breath. There are some occasions where you should feel guilty about either not doing something for your child or buying the wrong thing. There are many times, however, where the guilt a mother feels is massively out of proportion to the actual problem. When you start feeling guilty or worrying that you are not a good mother because of something you did or did not do for your child, make yourself stop and pause. Take a deep breath and calm down. You cannot do anything for either yourself or your child if you are suffocating on your own, possibly misplaced, guilt. Calm down and stop panicking. Wait until you can think clearly and logically. Then, you can address the problem if there is one or deal with getting rid of the guilt if there is nothing that needs to be addressed.

How much does it really matter?

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Once you are calm, you need to decide if you have a real reason to feel guilty. “I am not a 100 percent perfect mother” is not a real reason to feel guilty. Take a few minutes to really consider what you are feeling guilty about doing or not doing. In the grand scheme of things, how much did it really matter? Did your actions or lack thereof hurt your child? Did you frighten them? If the answer to both of those questions is no, think about the slightly smaller scheme of things. If there is still no real issue, then you need to work to set the guilt aside. Do keep in mind, however, that you need to look at potential problems from your child’s point of view. They will not care that you let the TV babysit for an hour while you did the dishes though you might feel like the worst mother ever. On the other hand, getting the wrong balloons for a birthday party seems pretty minor to you, but if your son has been excited for his Batman themed celebration for weeks, bringing home Superman balloons instead makes it look like you have not been listening or did not care.

Why did you do or not do it?

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So, you are feeling guilty because you came up with excuses to avoid being one of the parent volunteers who help with the school play. The excuses may or may not be true, but the fact of the matter is that you wiggled out of doing something in which your child wanted you to be involved. Mommy guilt starts creeping in, and you start wondering if you need to have a “business trip” suddenly be canceled so that you can help. Before you start coming up with stories to cover up your previous fib or drown yourself in guilt, think about why you wanted out in the first place. Did you want to avoid being the volunteer simply because it was a minor inconvenience, or did you truly feel you did not have time? Were you worried about being bored because you do not like theater, or were you looking to avoid the inevitable verbal sparring match when the catty moms decided to pick a fight? Think about your reasoning and see if you really need to feel guilty. It is one thing to avoid something simply because you are not interested, it is another to do what you need to protect your own mental health and sanity.

How many other people do or do not do it?

So, you desperately needed to get the house clean or were willing to sell your soul for 30 minutes of peace and quiet so you could get the bills paid. It is raining, so you cannot send your child outside. You do not have time to arrange a playdate, and all her friends are out of town anyway. You loathe the idea of paying for a babysitter to come by for less than an hour, and you really do not have time to track one down anyway. So, you plop your baby girl in front of the TV and turn on “Moana.” You breathe a sigh of relief for the first 10 minutes. The following 50 are spent feeling like a monster for letting the TV babysit your child. Everything you read says you need to limit children’s exposure to such things!

Before you panic, ask yourself, “How common is this behavior really?” If you let the TV babysit your daughter every day for hours at a time, there might be a problem. An hour or two here and there so you can get some work done will probably not do any harm. Also think about how common it is among other mothers. Popular does not necessarily equate with good or right, but if 70 percent of the mothers you know are not worried about feeding their children store bought granola bars instead of homemade ones, you are probably in the clear if you let your child have a store bought snack.

Find some solid support.

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Motherhood is hard. Anyone who says differently has never been an actual mother. Children are fussy and either refuse to tell you what they want or tell you at the sort of volume that can rattle windows. They want specific, frustrating things, and they change their minds every 15 minutes. You have to remember birthdays, buy school supplies, make nice with teachers and keep your child from hurling themselves off everything they can climb to the top of. Exhaustion alone is more than enough to send your mind spinning in circles.

When you are dealing with mommy guilt, one of the best things to have is a solid support network made up of people who understand exactly what you are going through. Find some other moms you know and trust to help you deal with any issues that arise. You will get sympathy, empathy and hopefully quite a bit of good advice.

Give yourself some grace.

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You are not perfect, and you should not expect yourself to be perfect. You are human. You will make mistakes. That does not make you a bad mother or a bad person.

Go look in the mirror and repeat that six times. Now, try and actually believe it. For some reason, mothers find it difficult to do the latter. They might accept imperfection from themselves in other areas of their lives, but they are convinced that when it comes to child rearing, they must be instant experts. This is ludicrous. Children are difficult, exhausting and sometimes seem to exist to confuse parents. They do not come with instruction manuals and even if they did, the rules change constantly. You are human. You will make mistakes, but that does not mean you are a terrible mother. When you mess up, give yourself some grace. Forgive yourself, learn from the mistake and move on.