6 Enemies of Career Moms and Mompreneurs: Mom Guilt

Mom Enemy #1: MOM GUILT 

What is mom guilt?

Imagine yourself standing in a courtroom. You are the defendant. You don’t have a lawyer, an advocate, so you defend yourself. Among the jurors are your spouse, your children, your family and your closest friends. The judge (ie. your conscience) asks the jurors to read their verdicts. Your spouse stands and says, “On the count of not having 3 hot meals prepared, laundry folded and put away, I find the defendant – guilty.” The next juror, your child, stands and says, “On the count of not remembering to give me lunch money so I was forced to have PB & J for lunch, I find the defendant – guilty.” The next juror, your friend, stands and says, “On the count of cancelling our movie date because she didn’t check her schedule and overcommitted, I find the defendant – guilty.”

Welcome to my life.

So goes the life of ANY mom, but particularly moms who have chosen to divide our time between our family life and our working life. We, seemingly, have been sentenced to feel guilty about all the ways we don’t seem to measure up as a mom. We are labeled by others or sentenced in our own minds as “a bad mother.”

I realize that other moms reading this may have much more serious guilt issues to contend with than my example from my life (at the beginning of this post). Maybe you are feeling guilty about how you parented your now adult children. Maybe you have guilt because of poor financial choices you made and you feel that you and your family could have had a better life. Maybe you feel guilty because you feel you could have cultivated stronger relationships with the people that matter most in your life.

How do we overcome that overwhelming sense that we aren’t doing enough right now or that we’ve done too much in our past to ever not feel guilty about it?

KNOW THIS:

• Guilt is a unproductive emotion. It’s unproductive because it doesn’t produce change. It only produces more guilt.
• Consider the situations in your life that bring the most feelings of guilt. With the time and resources available in your life right now are you doing the best that you can do each day? What adjustments do you need to make in your schedule, your parenting, your attitude, the handling of your finances, whatever is, to get the results you want?  When you make the adjustments, drop the guilt.
• If the situations that cause you guilt happened in your past, does it involve another person?  Ask their forgiveness, forgive yourself, hold your head up and keep moving forward. Your guilt doesn’t help and it doesn’t change anything.

This month’s Diva Spotlight is on Tina Bunton, the owner of Priorities 1st, a bookkeeping and accounting services business. The primary thing she talked about was the guilt she sometimes feel trying to do it all. You won’t want to miss this video. Check back this week to watch it!

Can you relate to the courtroom scene at the beginning of this post? What would you be guilty of in a jury? What adjustments can you make in your life to rid yourself of this useless emotion? Please, share with other moms by leaving a comment.