A Summer Full of Guilt and Glory
On a warm and breezy Saturday morning, we sit in the grass, me with a coffee mug in one hand and the other holding my little boy loosely.
“What do you see?” I ask my five-year-old son, gazing out from the top of our backyard hill. I’m trying to foster his skills of stillness and observation.
“Nothing,” he says, sounding bored. I am also trying to foster those same skills in myself, punching down feelings of hypocritical irritation that he is not yet interested in a process I haven’t even mastered for myself.
“I’ll go first. I see the big lake. And I think I see some little boats out there today too.”
He sits up a little bit and cranes his neck. “OH! I see them, Mom! Little white specks! I don’t know if they are that little. It’s a big lake. They might be big boats, Mom.”
Now he’s hooked. Vehicles of any kind are pretty much guaranteed to pique his interest.
We spend the next ten minutes just looking and noticing. A big fly on a yellow flower. His sister’s feet as she wiggles in her sling chair. The mushrooms growing under our pine tree. For a few minutes, we are just observing. Just being. It’s completely lovely. I assume this is the relaxing feeling people are referring to when they talk about meditation. That’s never a thing that I’ve been good at, so I wouldn’t know.
My daughter starts to fuss in her chair down on her porch. “Let’s go, bud. I have to get G.”
“No! I love talking. Just five more minutes.”
Then he’ll ask for another five minutes. And then five more after that.
He would sit here all day with me if I let him. I want to let him, but while he is one of the most important people in my life, he is not the only one. His sister is high on the list too, and right now, she is hungry. Only two, she is not capable of waiting for her snacks or capable of getting them for herself.
“No, H. I can’t. I have to feed your sister.” She needs me more in this moment, and I have to go.
On these weekends, I will say “No, H” or “Not now, kiddo” or “I can’t. I have to do this first” because I have to load the dishwasher and play with his sister and walk the dog (and write this essay). I’ll also acquiesce as much as possible. I’ll sword fight, even though I’m worried about getting hit with a stick. I’ll put on music I don’t like, because it’s his favorite. I’ll race cars and I’ll build towers and I’ll watch him jump off the couch 300 times, feeling grateful that he wants to jump on the floor and not me.
But I feel a pang of guilt anyway, as I get up and walk down the hill without him. All our time together never feels like it makes up for all the “no”s.
Wait. Hold on. Cue record scratch.
Reader, this is supposed to be an essay about our joyous summer together before my sweet son starts kindergarten in the fall. And yet it only took fifteen minutes of free-writing for my ever-simmering guilt complex to surface.
“Why?!” you ask. “How could you possibly feel guilty?” you may say as your knee-jerk reaction. If you’re a Millennial mom though (or dad, as I acknowledge that this is not a problem felt solely by one gender), I assume you’re intimately familiar with the concept. It’s almost inescapable. On another day, I might have tried to pretend that this guilt thing is not a regular problem for me. But today, not even a third of the way through this essay, it has already devolved into a reflection on why I felt guilty having to cut short a fun summer moment with my son. So, I might as well accept the reality of my situation.
“Parenting experts” love to talk about this dilemma. They even have a name for it: Mom Guilt. And they have many solutions to this problem. So many trite, contradicting solutions.
“Have a ‘yes!’ hour!” “Try to include your children in your work!” “Validate their feelings of disappointment, but hold your boundaries.” “You REALLY need to have boundaries.” “Say ‘no’ and stick to it!” “You’ll never get these years back! Spend as much time as you can with them now, and don’t worry about anything else!” “But don’t spend too much time structuring their play. They need to learn independence.” (Side note: if unhelpful advice is a thing you can’t handle, I’d suggest you reconsider your aspirations of parenthood.) Fascinatingly, few of these experts seem to recognize their own complicity in the perpetuation of the Mom Guilt™ problem.
And despite recognizing the absurdity of it all, these pearls of wisdom eat at me. Am I doing enough? Am I doing this right? Will my children resent all the time I didn’t spend focused solely on them?
And these thoughts compound with my more specific guilt that eats at me too. Have I chosen the right modes of treatment for my medically complex daughter? Am I a good wife to my husband even though I always leave the grossest dishes for him to wash? Am I a good friend even though I forget to send text messages back for days at a time?
My decades in organized sports and my fascination with small business podcasts have ingrained in me the need for constant improvement. I am hounded by the concept of a growth mindset, an idea I don’t fully subscribe to but haven’t seemed to escape either. As of the moment, it only serves to constantly remind me of the thousands of things I could be doing better, parenting most of all.
Well, reader. Here’s the truth. This is all bullshit. You know it, and I know it. I don’t know who invented Mom Guilt, and I’m really tired of perpetuating it in my house. I could spend the next few weeks leaning into the bullshit, focusing on every “no”, every redirection, and every moment that was procrastinated when either I could have finished work or spent more time with my children or done something slightly more productive than whatever I did instead.
Or I can bask in how glorious this summer has actually been. I can cherish all the “I Spy” games and short walks and little conversations about the size of boats and the pool trips and the errands that turned into lunch dates. I can relish in the lazy snuggles on the couch with his sister when we were too tired for anything else. I can revel in the loving way my kids play on the floor together when they don’t know anyone else is watching.
We’ve had a really nice summer together. And we’ll keep having a nice summer together, even though I tell my son “no” a lot, and I let my daughter’s nurses do all her daytime care instead of caring for her myself, and I make their dad wash all the really sticky PB&J dishes at the end of the day.
Screw you, Mom Guilt. We’re having a glorious summer anyway.
