Maternity Returning: Guilt

If you’re a ‘stay at home mum’, it’s easy to feel guilty for not contributing to the household income. If you’re a ‘working mum’, it’s easy to feel guilty about not attending to your child 24/7. If whilst you juggle work and home you also desire some fun or even just ‘you-time’, god help you and your conscience!
It’s easy to feel guilty whichever way you turn. And the frustrating thing is that guilt is an entirely redundant emotion. Guilt serves nobody, least of all the new small person in your world.
So what is the solution to this redundant feeling? Winnacott wrote of ‘the good enough mother’ because this is all we can ever be. The good news is no such thing as ‘the perfect mother’ and the even better news is that the gap between the two is the essential space within which our children grow and learn and discover who they are. If we grown-ups did everything for our children, we would deprive them of the opportunity to discover for themselves, what they can do. 
This is the comforting theory. Holding this in mind it is perhaps also important to establish practically, for ourselves, that we are dividing the pie-chart of our time in a way that suits us best. Juggling all the commitments we have, parents rarely have the chance to consider if the way they are doing things is the way they most want.
Things develop organically, out of need in the moment, but as time passes, redundant decisions remain and we divide our time in the same old ways and experience the same old guilt. We forget we can make changes. Given half a moment to really examine our rituals and routines, we might want to amend our ways?
My colleague once said to me, when I was new to parenting  that ‘things don’t get easier as a mum, but they get different. And you learn to cope with each new thing when it comes along’.
Parenthood requires a fluidity, both in meeting your child’s needs. Might you also need a flexibility in dividing the pie-charts of your time and career so that they also meet your needs too. 

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