– deeply rooted in the past – & what you can do about it now
If you are a working mum, chances are that your life is full! Full of laughter, full of play, full of color and chaos, full of healthy meals, full of delightful moments with the whole family, fabulous family outings and vacations… or maybe not… maybe it’s not just like that all the time – mostly, sure and especially on social media -, but not exactly all the time…
Motherhood in real life
Technically, come to think of it, yes, there is laughter. Yes, there is color (on the new rug) and chaos (literally everywhere). But there are also tears and shouting, because you opted for the wrong cup or you cut the sandwich incorrectly, or just because you decided bath-time could no longer be avoided, or because you said the wrong thing at the wrong time to your teenager. And with that, there is also a whole lot of guilt – mum guilt to be precise.
Where mum guilt creeps in
Many of us still live in pretty traditional setups. Even if you and your partner are striving to divvy up care work more equally, it often doesn’t come easily, but needs careful planning and hashing things out. So here we are, actually pretty well organized (not to call it optimized), well-read when it comes to modern needs based and gentle-parenting , and yet, we feel guilty:
- Guilty for meals that are not quite as healthy as we know they should be;
- Guilty for homes not as picture perfect and tidy as we see on social media, in catalogues and invariably at that perfect friend’s home (who frantically tidied and cleaned ahead of our visit);
- Guilty for sending our kid(s) to childcare while we are at work;
- Guilty for spending the evening in front of the TV with our partner, because we are both exhausted from the day (when we ‘should’ be connecting and having meaningful discussions about life).
But let me backtrack a little.
The roots of our mum guilt – past perfectionism
Most of us raised as girls will have learned how important perfection is and that only perfect will do. Perfection at all levels: motherhood, relationship, professional life, and impeccable looks, of course. Yes, we can do it all, and it all needs to be perfect. Now you are asking yourself, what this has to do with a patriarchal society, or maybe not, but bear with me as this is really a crucial thing to understand, if we want to move past the guilt and into our own strength.
Girls were expensive (parents had to accrue a dowry) and had to be married off to a good family (not least to form alliances). The best chance a family had for their daughter to find a fitting match was to be as perfect as possible in all matters of family life (i.e. care-work) and physical appearance. In short, she had to be an asset and not a liability for her new family. The physical appearance was a sign of health, so important when it came to ensuring healthy heirs.
The ‘motherhood penalty’ – how the past impacts the present
Nowadays that we have long gone beyond this paradigm, the patterns have still been passed on over and over… and over, so that they are hard to extricate. At the same time we are no longer just in the home space, of course, and luckily so. Yet studies show that most care-work is still done by women. We are also participating in society at many other levels – not least as professionals at work. Our physical appearance (obviously) also matters in the public domain, so much so that I will dedicate a separate article to the female body and how it is being objectified by past and current culture.
Studies furthermore show that there is a pay gap between men and women. While women without children are catching up with men, mothers still trail behind and risk poverty when they are old, because their pension is too meagre to support them. In fact, when a woman has a baby her career stalls, or even dwindles. A man, on the other hand, becoming a father is most likely to experience a career boost.
Of course, we are now starting more to take precautions, that we won’t fall short in pensions later on. But we are still a long way from equality when it comes to combining parenthood and paid labor. It also means that the pressure is on women to catch up in their career, or to push harder for that promotion when our plates are already full with most of the mental load, if not all the care-work in many instances. More pressure is likely to also create more mum guilt for the times when we feel overwhelmed. When we feel we don’t get enough done. When we are not in line with our values when dealing with the kids.
Modern parenting for a future society
And let’s not forget: Having children and raising them is not nearly as private as everyone makes it out to be. No, we are raising the next generation of our societies. We are doing so mindfully in an ever more complex world.
We now understand better that raising children does not work with reward and punishment. Kids need connection and nurture. They need a secure space to be their own person, making their own mistakes… As parents we are here to hold them, to offer advice, to allow them to try and fail on their own terms. We set age and individually appropriate boundaries negotiated between child and parents over and over again. These are recurring discussions and negotiations, reflections and questioning of standards and how things ‘should’ be done.
Working against deeply rooted patterns
Even trying our best (and that is true even in moments where we fail to meet our own standards) we will forever doubt whether or not, we made the right decision in that exact moment. With perfectionist ideals in mind it seems a Sisyphean task. Let’s not forget that most of us probably never enjoyed the kind of upbringing we want for our children. Thus we have to constantly analyze and go against what was deeply engrained in us during our own childhood.
Unsurprisingly, what remains when our child goes through a hard time is the guilt, the worry:
‘Could I have done anything differently?’
‘Did I work too much and did not spend enough time with them?’
‘If only I had done…’
And we all know that we will probably never get an answer to these questions either. Mum guilt waits for us at every turn our life and that of our children takes.
Mum Guilt and the body
This is but one perspective on guilt and where it is coming from. It will differ for each of us when it comes to other reasons we feel guilty. Guilt can be influenced, for example, by how we were raised, where exactly we grew up and if our family lived according to rules of a particular faith. Peer relationships we have had, if we were bullied and so much more can also play a role. Regardless of the reasons, guilt is an emotion hugely relevant to maintain human groups in their functioning.1 As a result guilt comes along with strong physical cues, like stomach aches, nausea, tension, sleeplessness to just name a few. These will all be reactions that you will want to get rid of quickly as they are so incredibly uncomfortable. They are also an opportunity to reconnect and notice the signals of your body.
Doing right by our children…
So, what can we do about it? Are we just doomed to suffer through this worry over and over again? How to change a system, a culture that has its roots so far in the past? It takes several generations to change something established such a long time ago. And still I believe that we do not have to suffer silently (and smile doing so, of course).
So, yes to a degree, we will always worry that we are getting things wrong, or that we got things wrong in the past. We are only humans after all and bound to fail. The key is to acknowledge failure, accept and learn from it to do better next time. ‘Better’ is not a scientifically defined concept, but is the continuous striving to do right by our children.
…means doing right by ourselves
Lastly, but not least importantly, it also means to strive and do right by ourselves:
- to know our own worth and
- to define motherhood on our own terms
- to reconnect to ourselves and realign physically as well as mentally.
The latter really is the basis for the other two. Only once we reconnect to ourselves on a physical level, taking all our own needs seriously, we realize our own worth. Our worth that was there all along buried under expectations and cultural practices. It also means that we’ll be able to have more self-compassion when we feel guilty. We can strengthen our resilience. Self-compassion and resilience will help us to be there for our children when they need us most. It will help us to apologize without holding a grudge, to be a good and healthy example to them in what it means to be human. We will set them up to be more resilient, because they see us fail and get up again. And we allow them to fail and try again.
Your inner strength professionally
By reconnecting to yourself, you’ll also be able to
- set healthier boundaries at work with the confidence that
- your performance and focus are at their best while
- recognizing when they are not and
- how to remedy from a place of strength and trust that you are worthy everyday regardless of your performance.
Re-connecting to yourself through your body will allow you to choose your own career path. It will help you focus your professional life how it suits and serves you best without sacrificing motherhood or ambition. You can make more intentional choices and prioritize the way that is best for your family and yourself.
Breaking the guilt cycle together
As mentioned above guilt has a strong physical manifestation. Therefore it is probably not the ideal place to start practicing to reconnect with your body. In order to break the cycle of mum guilt and its effects on our children eventually, we need to become mothers that are connected to ourselves even in moments of guilt. We need to feel mentally and physically grounded most of the time and notice as well as acknowledge when we are not. It is not a matter of just waiting and pulling it together until the kids are older and it gets easier (because what if it doesn’t?). We are risking too much by waiting, we are risking not being the mum that we always thought we’d be, the (professional) person we’d become.
We are in this together! It is a constant practice that I am here for with you. The blog is and will be a great resource for your, but if you want to ensure that you get all the news and resources first, please consider subscribing to my newsletter.
- Guilt ensures adherence to rules. Also note the connection here as motherhood is inextricably linked to maintaining a group, i.e. a family firstly, but secondly a society. ↩︎