When a baby is conceived, three things happen: a new life is created, the world instantly becomes filled with buggies and babies you had never noticed before, and women develop something they will live with for the rest of their lives, ruining almost every moment, which would otherwise be perfectly fine: maternal guilt.
It’s like a switch: from the second you are pregnant, everything you do makes you feel guilty – you conceived at the wrong time of the lunar calendar, you didn’t eat enough Vitamin C when you were a teenager (or indeed any), you didn’t hold your baby within 5 microseconds of being born so it probably won’t bond with you properly and thus hate you forever, you bottle fed your child, you didn’t make home-made butternut squash puree (you BAD MOTHER, YOU), you didn’t do controlled crying, you once dropped a wok on their head, containing a badly-seasoned stir-fry. You get the picture.
It doesn’t matter how hard we try to get everything right, we still feel guilty about everything and we’re convinced that we’re failing in some way. And this continues to absurd levels when we go back to work.
Maternal Guilt is the bane of so many of us. The work/stay-at-home battle is probably the hardest of all: if it’s not working mums feeling guilty about leaving their kids in childcare, it’s stay-at-home mums feeling guilty about not working.
Part of the problem is the deluge of advice we’re given about what we ‘should’ be doing for our kids.
Every month brings a new survey or report. One week oily fish will turn your baby into Einstein; the next too much oily salmon is bad for them. Daycare is a fast-track to an ASBO one week so we’re encouraged to stay at home; but then nurseries are hailed as the best way to encourage inter-personal skills the next week, and we’re encouraged to get out there and work.
Many of us are incredibly lucky to have choices available to us that our mothers could only dream of. But with this choice comes guilt – because the very fact that we can choose means we are open to the accusation – internal or from others – that we’ve made the WRONG choice. A choice that will damage our kids, or make them unhappy or unhealthy or just not give them the ‘best’ – whatever that is. Can we ever win??
The answer, of course, is yes we can. And the way to do it is ridiculously simple, and entirely in our own hands: we can simply choose not to feel guilty.
That’s it. If you don’t listen to the Evil Guilt Fairy in your head, telling you should do this and should do that – if you know you are actually doing a perfectly good job most of the time, you can free yourself of guilt almost immediately – and be a much happier person for it.
I’m all for doing away with thinking about ‘should’ and concentrate instead on doing what we do as best we can, and finding our own level of ‘enough’. And that’s different for every family and for every parent – and every day. Good enough, really is good enough.