Mommy Guilt - Chapter 1 Book Excerpt

Before the twinkle in your eye becomes an expansion in your waist, the conversation about starting a family takes place. It usually goes something like this:

Well, maybe you say a little more, toss around the financial responsibilities, check out the space in the house, or generate a quick list of names. One thing you rarely do is have a conversation like this one:

“Do you want to be the cook, maid, nanny, chauffeur, chaperone, or banker? I think I’d like to be the disciplinarian and dictator.”

“All right, I’ll take on nanny, cook, and chauffeur, but we have to toss a coin for the others.”

Of course, if the initial conversation covered all these important details, far fewer people would have children. These details, though, often leave mothers frustrated, stressed, guilty, depressed, and experiencing moments when they wonder why anyone would ever embark on the journey through parenthood.

With this book, we hope to show you how parenting can become more enjoyable for you, your spouse, and your children. Remember, we didn’t say fun, we said enjoyable. As parents ourselves, with more than 450,000 hours of parenting to our credit (and counting!) we have retained valuable knowledge certain to be of value to you, too.

Within these pages, we discuss some of the most common parenting issues -- the kind that can easily max out your guilt-o-meter. We offer practical solutions while introducing an underlying philosophy: We believe that your parenting experience is a gift, and you have the right to open it up and enjoy it! We hope you will read Chapter 1 through Chapter 3 in their entirety. Beyond that, the book may be used as a reference guide when situations arise that stress you out and you need to bring sanity back into your family life. Not every area in this book will apply to every reader, since we know that most moms are basically happy and experience countless hours of enjoyment with their children. Yet, we all appreciate a bit of support and encouragement to help us over the rough spots in taking care of our families. And that’s why we are here. Think of us as a brigade of your closest friends sitting on your bookshelf, ready 24/7 to help you with life’s most stressful parenting issues--from the mundane “how to get dinner on the table every night” to the major leaguer “how to stop yelling.”

Whether you choose to read our book from cover to cover and absorb the entire Mommy Guilt-free philosophy in one trip (minus the guilt!) or you pick our book up whenever the need presents itself, we hope you will feel encouraged that you are not imagining your Mommy Guilt. Indeed, according to 1,306 parents surveyed for this book, 96 percent said they experience feelings of guilt associated with parenting. It is our goal to help you overcome the pangs--and sometimes downright agony--of Mommy Guilt. When you overcome Mommy Guilt, you are free to focus on the truly important things in life, like the happiness of your family. Getting rid of the guilt in your life will make you a more competent and confident parent and spouse.

The tiny bundle of guilt

And so it begins, before we go through pregnancy, labor, and delivery or adoption. We feel a deluge of emotions. For some couples, this is enough to leave them wondering, “What did we just do?” For others, it is such a wonderful experience that they can hardly wait to do it all over again. In any case, everyone goes home to start the honeymoon with a new, expanded family. This honeymoon tends to be much shorter than the one immediately following a wedding. After a few days and nights without sleep, everyone feels like crying. (If this is the stage you are at now, don’t panic! Babies won’t know, or care, if you feel like you don’t know what you are doing! They also don’t care if you go without a shower until 3 P.M., leave dirty dishes in the sink, or forget to brush your teeth.)

For most folks, the decision to have a child wasn’t made to impress everyone by being a Supermom or Superdad. If yours was, it's time to remove that cape and change your plans. Most of us decide to be parents so we can have a special bond with a little life that we will love, take care of, and nurture into a wonderful human being.

So if your baby is two weeks, two years, or twelve years old, forget all those things that are going wrong and spend a few minutes just holding your “baby.” Ignore the telephone, delay the dishes, or turn off the TV. Close your eyes and enjoy the moment. Now, take the memory of how good you feel after that brief time of pure happiness with your child and put it in an easily accessible place in your brain. This is what we mean by enjoyable. The moment won’t make all the other things go away, but it will remind you why you wanted to have children and of what's really important.

What’s next? We can tell you that some things will have to slide, and we will help you to prioritize. We will continue to remind you that almost all moms experience this feeling of Mommy Guilt--and once Mommy Guilt gets a hold of you, it may never let go, even through years of parenting or raising multiple children. In fact, a whopping 70 percent of Mommy Guilt survey respondents said that parenting more than one child caused them to feel an increase in guilt. For 40 percent, their guilt has increased as their children grow older.

The joy we derive from being parents is in our ability to appreciate and embrace the existence of our children. Enjoying children is not the same as spoiling them--nor will too much enjoyment of parental life spoil a parent. Indeed, a mother's state of mind strongly influences the emotions of her household. When a mother is happy, the whole family is happier.

Spoil a parent, now there’s an interesting concept. As you are reading this book, you are probably feeling anything but spoiled. We want you to take a few steps toward the idea of spoiling yourself. The first step is to escape guilt. In order to escape guilt, we must first know what guilt is. Guilt, defined by Webster as: “1. The state of one who, by violation of law, has made himself liable to or deserving of punishment; culpability. 2. Wrongdoing; wickedness. See synonyms under sin.” When did it become against the law to not feed your child enough vegetables? Leave clothes in the dryer overnight? Fall asleep in the middle of the day? Serve a bowl of cereal for dinner or (gasp!) dessert before dinner? Is it really a sin to work outside your home? Alter your career path to stay home with your children? Not have a home-cooked dinner on the table at 6 P.M. every evening? You see, according to Webster, we are not doing anything criminal that defines us as guilty. We’re giving you a “Get Out of Guilt Free” card to help you have more fun with your family--and your family to have more fun with you. The next step is to actually release any guilt or unpleasant feelings associated with the idea.

I remember the precise time when the guilt-free epiphany came to me. I had just given birth to my first son. It's funny about that new mother period--everyone imagines it will be this tranquil time of oohing and aahing over the new baby, the blissful homecoming as you sweep back into your former life with this little bundle of joy. Hardly anyone talks about the fights. There are fights. In talking with other moms and dads, it is a truth that people somehow don't readily remember, or maybe they just don’t readily admit to it. But I remember and admit it.

So here we are with our lovely little baby. I am making every attempt to nurse this child, with limited success, and my husband is being a jerk about it. (At least, in my hormonally infused brain, I felt like he was being a jerk, thinking to myself, “Hell, it's not like he could do this at all, but there he is accusing me of doing it wrong!”) I became so upset about it that I couldn't nurse at all. And being unable to nurse made me even more upset. What a lovely cyclical event it turned into! Lucky for me, my oldest and dearest friend had come out to help that week. She and I had a long talk about how bottles were invented to feed children, not to make moms feel inadequate or guilty. She reminded me that my husband probably felt a bit helpless and his jerky-ness was a result.

After that talk, I nursed as best as I could and began to supplement feedings as necessary. While I wanted to be the perfect mom, I realized then that the definition of perfection is fluid from person to person and situation to situation. I promised myself that I would simply focus on being a fantastic parent within the scope of my own abilities.

Supermom meets super guilt

Lucky is the mom who dispenses with guilt when it first hits in those new baby days. Lucky and rare. While we are fairly certain that generations of moms have suffered from some form of Mommy Guilt, it appears that today’s moms have been harder hit. Is it the supermom image, the feminist movement, technology, or geographically dispersed family units? It is a combination of these things and more. We cannot deny that we are expected to do it all. The question is, who has that expectation? The answer is us. Women have fought a long, hard battle toward equality with men. We can fill the same jobs and do the same work, but it isn’t complete quid pro quo. Men are unable to get pregnant, they don’t give birth, and although they have nipples, they cannot nurse. We enter motherhood through the things that only we can do and quickly expand our self-images. We see ourselves as supermoms--doing it all ourselves forever, with grace and style!

Does a father suffer from feelings of guilt? Don’t assume, ask him. Some men have instances where their behavior falls so short of their own standards that they feel guilty about it. But walk into a room full of dads, ask them if they feel guilty over parenting and they’ll probably give you a funny look and wonder what you are talking about. Men are twice as likely to experience absolutely no feelings of guilt associated with parenting than women are, according to our Mommy Guilt survey. Of course, these men suffer negative feelings about parenting, but “frustration” and “anger” are often the names given to those feelings.

So why do moms name it guilt? Could it be that we also feel frustrated, upset, and angry but, since we are mothers, think we should not feel these emotions? Could it be that we worry that a carefree attitude is somehow equivalent to not caring enough? The authors of this book believe this reason to be at the root of it. We believe Mommy Guilt is actually all of our negative emotions about parenting lumped together, including feelings of inadequacy.

Anger, frustration, confusion, denial, and desperation are all actually part of the process of parenting. Parents who tell you that they never have these feelings are not coming clean. Parenting will test everything you’ve got, and in solving problems and helping your child through new experiences (wonderful and painful), you will know a kind of joy that simply can’t be found any other way. Parenting will be the ultimate life-experience gift you give to yourself. It is better than graduating high school or finishing a two-year quilting project, better than bungee jumping, and better than being promoted at work. But, to get there, you’ve got to turn your energies toward enjoying the experience of being a parent. You’ve got to empower yourself by recognizing that you’re going to experience those negative feelings, and ditching the guilt associated with them. Once this happens, you can give yourself permission to feel good about what you are doing as a parent. And your kids will feel good about having you as their parent!

As mentioned earlier, if we thought about all that parenting entails before we signed up for the experience, our population would be in decline. Since we can’t return the children, we must figure out how to enjoy being parents, and our children will naturally be all the happier for it.We are going to show you how to cast aside the Mommy Guilt and turn, instead, to the Mommy Guilt-free philosophy.

Mommy Guilt is available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon, and other retail bookstores.