I used to have the opinion that mom guilt was not real. My thought was that moms were just being too hard on themselves. We are all doing the best we can and need to give ourselves just as much grace as we give our children. Partially I was right and yet I was still very wrong. I have come to realize the mom guilt can come in many different forms for many different mothers. Some moms have guilt for dropping their kids off at daycare. Some moms have guilt for heating up chicken nuggets for lunch for the fifth day in a row. Some moms have guilt for too much screen time. All of these reasons for mom guilt seemed silly to me. That was until my own mom guilt punched me in the face.
When my second little lady was a newborn baby she had the fastest growing hair and fingernails I have ever seen. I would file her nails and by the end of the day they were cutting her little face again. I thought maybe I am not filing them low enough so I decided to go a little lower. I ended up filing off of the top of some of her tiny newborn fingers. When I saw the littlest fingers I have ever seen start bleeding I began sobbing. In my attempt to help this precious tiny human that I love, I ended up physically harming her. The baby was crying, I was crying, and her 2 year old sister was crying. We were all a mess. My first thought was that someone else should be taking care of this baby because I am clearly not able to do it correctly. Crazy hormones will cause any person to turn to strange thoughts.
Those initial thoughts sound ridiculous, I know that now. Obviously the last thing I wanted to do was hurt my baby. The first problem was I was trying to stop her from creating another boo boo and unintentionally caused one of my own. The second problem was I had just had a baby and was actually unaware that I was suffering from some postpartum anxiety. I had extreme anxiety every time this new baby was away from me. Even if I was upstairs and she was downstairs my heart would start pounding in my ears until I was holding her in my arms again. We were only sleeping in 45 minute intervals because of her high metabolism and her insatiable need to eat 6 ounces every 45 minutes.
Many times as a mom I have the best of intentions and still hurt my little ones. Sometimes I hurt their feelings and sometimes I accidentally hurt them physically. Never is this done out of malice or ill content. Hormones, exhaustion, stress, mental fatigue, are just a few things that all moms are constantly dealing with on a daily basis. Also these kids are small and get stepped on quite often. Sometimes it takes a small accident like filing your newborn finger to realize that we are only human. We make mistakes just like everybody else does. So why do we have such mom guilt? Why is it such a plague that there is an actual term for it? Why can we forgive everyone else except ourselves? Every time my husband drops one of our kids on their heads accidentally while playing I never think that he is a horrible parent or father. However, if I turn around and accidentally poke one of my girls in the eye I am riddled with mom guilt. If that eye gets infected I will be a sobbing mess in my bed until the amoxicillin is out of the refrigerator.
Logically I know that I did not hurt my child intentionally. Logically I know that it was an accident. Logically I know that they will be fine. I think that the reason we feel so much pressure is because our main job on this earth is to protect those sweet little babies we were given. Therefore to know that their protector is the one that caused them any kind of pain turns our world upside down. Letting go of that elephant sized mom guilt is like trying to push a boulder up a hill. Each time I feel relieved from the pressure some tiny accident will add extra weight to that mom guilt rock. It is a constant struggle to forgive myself. Forgiving everyone else is the easy part. Moms are always asking themselves "Am I doing a good job?" "Is this the thing that is going to scar them forever?" "Will they grow up to be serial killers because I threw away that toy as a punishment?" The one thing I know is that I will eventually forgive myself and no matter how bad I feel my little ladies will always know that their momma loves them intensely.
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