5 Strategies to Stop Feeling Mom Guilt
Photo by Sai De Silva on Unsplash
It may be the one universal of western motherhood: guilt. No matter how you parent, from the moment your child arrives in your life, so too does mom guilt. It’s a powerful force that can leave you feeling depressed, anxious, and unworthy. It may make you more vulnerable to abuse, more willing to accept an inegalitarian marriage or unfair division of household labor, and less willing to tend to your own basic needs.
Guilt is not an inevitable experience with motherhood. And it serves no one. Maybe you’re just realizing this. Maybe you’ve known it forever, but still can’t let go of guilt. These five strategies for managing mom guilt might be the antidote.
Understand Mom Guilt as a Tool of Oppression
Guilt serves an important purpose. It alerts us when we have done something wrong, so we can rectify our actions. Mom guilt doesn’t work this way, because when you’re a mom, every choice you make is wrong. Sleep train your child? You’re neglecting their emotions. Nurse them to sleep every night? You’re making them dependent. Breastfeed? Gross; cover up. Bottle feed? Ew. You don’t care about your child. Gentle parenting? Your child won’t be prepared for the real world. Time-outs? You’re an abusive monster who makes your child feel abandoned.
There’s no way to make the right decision because motherhood is designed to be a no-win game. So what most moms feel isn’t guilt at all. It’s shame. Shame is the nagging sense not that your actions are bad, but that you are bad. This feeling can be debilitating, making it difficult to feel confident in your decisions, proud of your parenting, or able to assert your needs.
And that is exactly the point. Mom guilt traps moms in a spiral of shame no matter what they do. As a result, they can’t and won’t take care of themselves. That means they also won’t demand better treatment or a better world. This is by design. It’s a primary tool of patriarchal oppression. Here’s how mom guilt looks in the real world:
A mother won’t demand better or different treatment from her partner because she doesn’t think she deserves it.
A mother feels guilty when she’s not able to do it all on her own. And thus, an equitable relationship feels like a privilege—one she doesn’t deserve.
Self-care becomes selfishness. Driven by guilt, mothers push themselves to keep going even when they can’t or shouldn’t. This renders them too exhausted to assert their own needs.
Guilt causes mothers to see each problem in their life as an individual failing, not a product of sexism. It renders invisible the fact that the seemingly personal is almost always political. And because mothers think they deserve their bad circumstances, they’re less likely to rally for political change.
Guilt prevents women from seeing the role men in their lives play in oppression. Rather than saying, “My husband won’t watch the kids half the time, so I can’t work during the pandemic,” mothers across the globe told themselves that the pandemic made work impossible. Rather than acknowledging that lack of support from a male partner before, during, and after childbirth left her feeling demoralized and worthless, a woman might blame her sadness on hormones.
Once you see guilt as a patriarchal tool, rather than the horrible outcome you deserve, it’s easier to see the work it’s doing in your daily life, by preventing you from reclaiming your time, your space, your body, and your right to an equitable relationship.
Judge Yourself by Male Standards
In a sexist society, we heap praise upon men for doing the bare minimum. Men who change a single diaper are heroes; those who get up once for every 12 times their wives do it are great husbands, their wives worthy of envy. Yet women who do the same things—or, more typically, two, three, or four times as much—earn no praise. The tasks women do are difficult and worthwhile only when men do them. Motherhood is easy. Why can’t you measure up?
Change your point of view. Consider how you, or society, would view your actions if you were a married heterosexual man. Then start giving yourself the praise every uninvolved lazy father views as his birthright.
Recognize There’s No Right Choice for Moms
No matter what you do as a mother, someone will happily tell you it’s wrong. And if you complain about that fact, well, that’s wrong too. God forbid you get political, and recognize mother’s rights and maternal feminism as core components of any social justice movement. You’re not allowed to ask for paid family leave or the right to publicly breastfeed because you’re raising the next generation. Oh, no. Don’t be so entitled. Don’t expect people to accommodate you just because you chose to have a kid. That’s on you.
PS: If you don’t want to have a kid, that’s wrong, too.
Mothers are doomed to failure, and it’s by design. We tell women the most important thing they can be is mothers. We pretend to worship and adore mothers, motherhood, and children. And then, when a woman actually becomes a mother, we tell her she is failing at this most important human pursuit. Being a bad mother is one of the very worst things you can be—far worse than being a bad cook or bad employee or bad gardener. It’s akin to failing at existence itself. And yet virtually every mother has been told she’s a bad mother.
Society wants you to feel terrible no matter what. Push back. Don’t let it happen. Consider how you might be judged if you did the opposite of whatever it is you currently feel guilty about. And if you’re guilty about motherhood in general, and not anything specific, then what you’re feeling is shame, not guilt. That shame is a tool of control, and it’s not going to make you a better mother.
Consider What You’d Tell Another Mom
Still can’t shake the mom guilt? Of course you can’t. Mom-guilt is the ocean we swim in and the air we breathe. It’s invisible if you’re not looking, yet omnipresent. So correctly identifying a phenomenon as what it is probably won’t reverse decades of sexist conditioning. Here’s what might: your compassion for the moms you love.
Consider what you’d tell your sister, your neighbor, or your best friend if she were feeling what you feel. Consider whether and how you would judge them. If you wouldn’t look down on another mother for whatever it is you’re currently feeling terrible about, then don’t judge yourself either.
Know that Guilt and Shame Are Liars That Destroy Relationships
Chronic shame does not inspire anything good. It won’t help you make better choices because in patriarchal motherhood, there are no right choices to make; everything you do will be wrong to someone. What guilt does accomplish is damaging your relationships, your sense of self, and even your role in your community. Your guilt may make it difficult to identify an unfair and unbalanced marriage. It will cause you to parent from a place of fear and shame, sucking the joy right out of motherhood. It will make you feel like you don’t deserve alone time, self-care, rest, good food, or a happy life. And it will model to your children that motherhood has to be a joyless, thankless slog rather than a life-affirming act of love and generativity. You don’t deserve to feel guilty. You are enough.