The Guilt

We all carry some kind of guilt, right? I do. I carry guilt over things small and large. Some of it is easy to shake and other guilt seems like it will never go away. There are somethings we can talk about and others that we keep private.

What is amazing is the guilt that we put on ourselves. What we choose to carry around on our shoulders as if we don't already have the weight of the world already sitting there. We feel guilty about the way we treated someone 2o years ago, the shortcut we took at work yesterday and everything in between.

Has it always been this way or has culture shifted so much that now it's heavier?

There are days that I find myself guilty of the dumbest things, but in the moment they seem huge. For example, yesterday was my daughters birthday. I fell asleep on Thursday night much sooner than I intended to. I don't sleep a lot right now, so the fact that this happened was huge. All of a sudden I was wide awake at midnight because of one reason - I forgot to blow up balloons for her room. I wanted P to wake up on her birthday in the most fun way possible.

So I set my alarm clock for 5:45am so that I could get up, decorate, give all of the credit to a birthday fairy and still get dressed and ready for work. I then tossed and turned for 30 minutes worried that it wouldn't be enough time in the am so I eventually got up, blew up the balloons, decorated her doorway, wrapped the presents, strategically placed the gifts and it was time to go to sleep.

Oh but wait, the girls asked me if I could not go to work so that I could celebrate P's birthday. Feel the guilt piling up? So there wasn't an opportunity to adjust that alarm because I still needed to get up, get dressed, wake them up, take them to breakfast and go into work a little later than normal so that I could still make my 9am meeting and try to pull off mom of the year.

We made it to breakfast, we opened gifts, we ate unhealthy pancakes, put on P's new clip-on earrings and it was time for me to leave so that I could make that 9am meeting. Here comes some more guilt - I had to leave before the bill was paid and G was stuck wrangling the girls back home alone.

I go to work and after lunch the call comes in from the girls - can you come home early for P's birthday. Oh yes, I would love to, but I didn't get there until 8:30, I went out to lunch and I still haven't finished a project that was already due and we have a meeting on on Monday morning.

I did it, I flew out of there at 4ish, but oh crap I forgot to get some kind of dessert for our impromptu birthday celebration at the pool, the traffic home was murder and then when I did finally get home with brownies in hand P is crying. Now what's wrong? Those new earrings that she wore all day bruised her ears and she won't let me take them out.

So here you go parents, my guilts of the day:

birthday decorations = no sleep
bad gift = bruising
get to work for a meeting = leave breakfast early
didn't take a vacation day = no fun working mommy

The guilt, why oh why do I carry this around all of the time? Will it ever stop? Can I make it go away? What happens when I do something really really wrong, what kind of guilt am I going to carry around then? God forbid I ever do something crazy like forget a birthday.

Someone please tell me that I'm not the only one.

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