mothering by guilt?

The post I wrote a couple of weeks ago "mothering by ear" has struck a chord with many of you. I wrote it after reading Erica Jong’s piece "Mother Madness" in the Wall St Journal. Reading that piece got me thinking about my own parenting, and how I’ve ended up parenting more by instinct than by any one philosophy. As I read I found myself realising how easy it is for us to judge other mothers who are parenting differently from us. Yet the only true judges of our mothering, as I went on to write, are our children. I’m so glad you were encouraged by reading that post. Encouragement does a lot to allay the encroaching “mother guilt” we all feel from time to time. But it doesn’t answer the obvious question; why are we feeling guilty in the first place?

Guilt seems to come to mothers all too easily. A friend of mine who works with families tells me that most of the mothers she's worked with have identified themselves as feeling guilty about their parenting at least some of the time. Guilt was a clear theme running through the comments made on last week's post. One mum was told by a friend that when you become a mother "guilt becomes your best friend." Another mother wrote about the "periodic mother's guilt and doubt I feel on a daily basis."

In the past, mothers didn't have time to feel guilty. Monday was for washing, Tuesday for ironing, Wednesday sewing, Thursday was market day, Friday was cleaning day, Saturday baking, and Sunday for rest. When you've spent all day up to your elbows in scalding hot water, navel-gazing is a luxury. Mothers back then spent far more energy on preparing food for their large families than on self-doubt. They didn't need a role description or a how-to-guide. The voice of necessity rang loud and clear, and her demands were simple. Food on the table, clean clothes, clean house, and orderly children.

Today most modern mothers would go faint at the thought of washing an entire household's laundry by hand. We can't imagine life without a vacuum cleaner. Presented with the challenge of cooking a full meal without electricity, we'd probably all fail miserably. The thought of spending every waking moment engaged in the physical labour that keeping house back then entailed, fills most of us with dread. Yet for many of those mothers, life was physically exhausting but actually far simpler than it is for us in the modern, western world.

We have something in abundance that they had very little of, and that something is choice. Once upon a time, a woman's role was carved in stone. She was expected to marry, have children, and then provide for the needs of her family. If she didn't marry she would serve her elderly parents, perhaps find employment as a governess or as a servant, depending on her social status, or, less likely, join a religious order. There, summed up in a few sentences, are the choices available to women in times gone by. Look back even further into the past and the options were narrower still. Today? I couldn't come close to describing all the choices the modern western woman can make. Not in one post. A book might just do it, but a few paragraphs would barely scrape the surface. And then there's the myriad of choices specifically related to parenting. In short, so many options that the choice is overwhelming and can be doubt-inducing.

It's no wonder that some women have a hankering for the olden days. You don't have to look very far on the internet to find women who revel in bread making and consider homemaking an art. Many mothers are finding that going back to the simple old-fashioned ways of preparing food and keeping house meaningful and comforting. Taking this idea to an extreme are the religious groups such as the Quiverfull Movement who see women's roles exactly as and no more than what they were in the past.

Personally, I consider my choices to be a privilege, and I relish in them. To choose to be educated, to have had a teaching career, to be pursuing my dream to write, and also to be the main care-giver and educator of my children are all choices I have been privileged to make. These choices have formed me as a person and given me a huge amount of freedom. I watch other women around me taking advantage of the same and similar freedoms, and I celebrate with them.

Yet with all of these options it is easy to get lost. Many of us come to the decision regarding working or staying at home and don't have a clear sense of which we really want. We look one way and see a huge expectation on women to have a career and to keep our families living at a certain standard of material comfort. We look the other way and imagine crowds of stay at home mums, all blissfully happy, judging us as "bad mothers" if we work outside the home. It's the same with every other aspect of parenting. One week we might read an article advising us to parent one way, and the next week we can read one espousing exactly the opposite principles.

I read in the Sunday Star this weekend about a survey that revealed that mothers feel “pressure to compete with other mothers.” The survey asked 398 mothers of all ages if they had ever lied to “talk up how well their children were going.” Apparently, these mothers had done plenty of lying. They had lied about a whole range of topics, including whether their babies were sleeping through the night, how their children were doing at school, and their children’s behaviour. Clinical Psychologist Rebecca Daly-Peoples was quoted in the article as saying that mothers feel extreme pressure to live up to celebrities, their parents and their peers, and are also under a huge “information overload” from all the books available, many of which “completely oppose each other.”

But for all the pressure and expectations we are under, at some point we have to make the necessary decisions and get on with our lives. If you’ve decided to stay at home, result being that you can't afford to send your kids to swimming lessons, then why feel guilty about it? If you work because it's your sanity and you love it, yet have a nagging worry that you are failing your children, then take a good look at your children. Are they content and healthy? Then why feel guilty? If you are at home because you believe it's the right thing for you and your family, yet you struggle with boredom and isolation, then do something to make being at home work for you. It could be as simple as joining a playgroup, or as wild as working from home on that business idea you've had in the back of your mind and never done anything about. Why feel guilty because you’re not enjoying yourself?

Sometimes, though, underneath the clumsy and condemning roar of guilt lies the whisper of our conscience. If we stop long enough to listen, we may just hear it telling us that our children need more time with us, or that they need us to be more present in the time we are with them. We may hear our conscience telling us that we are listening too intently to the opinions of others, and not to the children who matter most. We may hear it telling us we need to do something to look after ourselves so that we can do more than just survive, and so that our children can benefit from a healthy and fulfilled mother. We may even hear our conscience telling us to question some of our assumptions, to reflect on the way we ourselves were parented, and find some new ideas about mothering. Sometimes we need a clean break from the past to do the present justice.

Mothering is so much about listening. Our children need us to listen to them. A child's need to be heard and understood is enormous, and nobody knows our kids like we do. We are their chief interpreters, their filter on the world. We protect them, speak up for them, explain to them, and support them in their growing independence.

This week we went on a bush walk with Isobella's Scouts group. The walk went up and down steep hills and stairways and I noticed one of the younger girls going slowly, her eyes wide. I held back and talked to her, and then I offered her my hand. She took it, and then after a while she let go. We re-grouped and stopped for instructions, and then walked on. Suddenly I felt a hand grab mine. She had searched me out in the group. It was a privilege to walk with her. I was a safe place for her in her vulnerability. All children need this, and most importantly they need it from us.

Mothering is a hard job. It requires long hours, sleepless nights, and years of self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice is the bread and butter of mothering, and we do it, most of the time, without even thinking. But self-sacrifice isn’t everything. Our children need to be mothered by us, not a hollow, worn-out version of us. What is it that makes you feel like you are doing what you were born to do? When do you absolutely, unreservedly love being you? The person on those moments is you – and that’s who your children deserve to be mothered by.

I know that feeling on the good days at home. I feel it when I’m watching the girls play the violin, and I felt it the other day when Greer looked up at me with the sweetest smile and said, completely out of the blue, “I want to be a home mama like you one day!” But I’m also feeling it right now, in this empty, quiet house. I’m feeling it because I’m writing. If I subjugated every one of my personal needs for the endless needs of my children, what would I be teaching them about being a person? What would I be teaching them about how to know themselves, how to find their dreams, or how to discover what they love to do? I live my life in full view of them. I live it with them, and I live it for them. And in amongst the craziness it so often is, and despite the daily struggle to balance my needs with theirs, I’m fulfilled, and happier than I’ve ever been. Why would I feel guilty about that?