Guilty Thoughts

I was raised Catholic and I learned early on that guilt is not such a bad thing. Guilt is good. Guilt is natural. Guilt builds character. This view of guilt was reinforced when I became a wife and mother. It is a proven fact that all mothers feel guilty about a huge variety of things. In fact, to encounter the sources of most of my guilty feelings, I don't even have to leave the house. I feel guilty about spending time at work and not with my family, I feel guilty about spending time with my family and taking a day off from work, I feel guilty about housework, about dialing 411 and not looking up the number, about sleeping, not sleeping, throwing that water bottle into the trash instead of recycling, about calling a certain pizza chain known to contribute to the anti-choice movement instead of cooking a healthy, politically correct pizza at home. On a good day, I can get a lot of character built before I even have my second cup of coffee. I feel guilty about having that second cup of coffee.
Now, I don't think I've cornered the market on guilt and its accompanying angst by any means. We have Woody Allen for that. However, I've learned that the joy of motherhood is usually and rather quickly tempered by a load of guilt. Sometimes the guilt even arrives before the baby, as in "Could that second strawberry margarita I drank the night he was conceived cause him to crave alcohol later in life"? But most often, guilt arrives and grows along with one's child.
Furthermore, mother-guilt can cover a multitude of sins. If we slap junior's hands for playing with the stove, are we creating a future axe murderer? Are we thwarting the creative desires of a sensitive child who was destined to become a master chef? Yes, rationally we know that we're probably only saving little fingers from being burnt. But one always wonders - did Jeffrey Dahmer's mother deny him access to the kitchen?
And what about buying things for our children? We want our children to grow up to be content individuals. We want them to understand that richness is not what we have but what we are. However, if everyone else in the third grade has a Hannah Montana backpack and your daughter is telling you that her entire future happiness depends upon the purchase of this item, how many of you could say no?
Another interesting characteristic of mother-guilt is its longevity. My son, Scott, is 35 years old. I remember as if it were yesterday, a winter morning when he was two. I was getting ready for work. He was whining, and had been all morning.Toddling to the foot of the stairs, he began to cry and I snapped "Oh, be quiet Scott!" A few minutes later, I picked him up and discovered he had a fever and a slight cough. By the next day, he was in the hospital with croup. The memory of that little red bunny-suited figure at the bottom of the stairs is burned into my psyche. My son swears he doesn't remember it, but I do. Oh, I do.
I'm not alone in this. Most mothers seem to have these moments, even my own mother. My brother Peter was on the Deans List in college, was president of a company, was, and is, the type of son a mother can be proud of, the type of son that should cause a mother to pat herself on the back and say "Well, I did a good job with this one." Our mother looked at it a little differently though. Like a lot of kids, Peter went through a period in the eighth grade of talking back to his teachers, throwing spitballs and generally being an adolescent boy. After receiving another phone call from his teacher, our mother looked at him and declaimed, "Peter, you are the plague of my life!" Our mother could never tell this story without getting tears in her eyes. Peter insists he doesn't remember it, but that didn't matter to our mother. She felt that her son became a successful, happy adult in spite of that flaw in her mothering.
So, it seems, we'll always be carrying that emotional baggage. But I submit to you, that this maybe makes us better parents, and if not, at least we can experience the pleasure of passing guilt on to our children. A mother's legacy, if you will.