You are a Better Mom Than You Realize: Letting Go of Mom Guilt

Striving to complete an impossible to-do list and trying to be this ideal ‘perfect mom’ I’d created needed to change. Instead, I needed to focus on what was happening in front of me. I needed to choose to be present.

When I was working from home, I was distracted by the things that needed doing like the shopping, or laundry. When I was playing with the kids, I was thinking about the cleaning, what we should have for tea, or checking emails and planning what I needed to do once they’d gone to bed. My to-do list was never-ending and it was always weighing on my mind. It felt like trying to juggle 100 balls all at once. Even in real life, the most anyone has every managed to juggle is 11 balls. I checked!

When I tried to be my idea of a perfect mom, I didn’t feel fully present in any part of my life. I was exhausted – and I felt guilty all the time. Something had to change.

First I decided to write a list of what was expected of a perfect mom so I knew what I was dealing with.

This is what I came up with: 

• Get enough sleep and look after your body.
• Look after everyone’s health.
• Keep track of the family calendar.
• Make meal-plans and ensure everyone eats healthily. 
• Clothe everyone. 
• Know where everything is for everyone.
• Do nursery and school drop-offs and get to work on time remembering your notebook, laptop etc.
• Focus 100% on your kids as ‘they’re only young once’ but also progress in your career.
• Keep on top of the laundry.
• Make homemade fancy-dress costumes.
• Keep the house tidy.
• Be thrifty and save money but also spoil your children. 
• Do Pinterest worthy educational activities. 
• Teach your kids to use the potty, in fact teach them all life skills.
• Date your husband and invest in your marriage. 
• Enjoy your kids, after all, ‘they’re only young once…’ 

I could go on.

Once I started to write my list, I realised how ridiculous it was. Previously I’d wondered, perhaps I’m just not very good at this, or, maybe I just don’t manage to do as much as other people. But when I looked at the list, there was no denying that even the most energetic super-mom might find it hard to put 100% into all the things I thought I needed to do. 

Sometimes we just need to reflect where our expectations come from, maybe by writing them down, or chatting to a partner or friend about them. For me, writing them down meant I could move them from the voice in my head to a list I could look at objectively.

Striving to complete an impossible to-do list and trying to be this ideal ‘perfect mom’ I’d created needed to change.Instead, I needed to focus on what was happening in front of me. I needed to choose to be present.

I started to ask myself questions like: is it more important that I hold my kids and comfort them for as long as they need or that my washing is put away? Does it matter if we’re a few minutes late for nursery because I stopped to play ‘swords’ with my eldest, or because we spent that little bit longer chatting over breakfast? Is it OK that some moving boxes aren’t unpacked yet because we’ve chosen to spend more time resting and enjoying our new space? 

On paper, the answers seem obvious but I needed to re-learn those answers. I needed to remind myself to stop, to be present, to focus on my family, and to be in the moment. 

Sometimes I write down the thing that’s distracting me from being present, so I can come back to it later. Or admit to myself that spending quality time with my kid now means that I won’t finish the job I just started – and being OK with that. 

As we go through different seasons of parenthood, our priorities will change. We’ll have some things which remain a constant priority, but others will come and go. Some seasons, I have new priorities and expectations so I put down some existing ones and pick up these new ones; like accepting that more meals will be coming from the freezer while I focus on the new job I’ve just started, or choosing not to serve on a the welcome team at church for a season because my kid needs me with them during the start of the service. It’s helpful to reflect on what’s important for you in your current season. The juggling balls don’t all need to be in the air at once.

Choosing not to give everything 100% can be a challenge, but cutting corners and ditching the mom guilt can be so incredibly freeing.

Whether we’re choosing to give our kids whatever we can find in the cupboard for tea rather than cooking or we’re buying a heated airer to dry our laundry, there are lots of choices we can make our lives much easier! It might sound dramatic but allowing myself to cut corners, and choosing not to feel guilty about it, has transformed my experience of motherhood. 

We really do have the power to lower our expectations for ourselves and to ditch the mom guilt. It’s not necessarily a quick and easy process but it’s one that is so worthwhile for our mental and physical health because constantly trying to achieve an impossible list of expectations is quite frankly, exhausting.

We can be so focused on our own high expectations, keeping all the juggling balls in the air, that it stops us from being able to see what a truly fantastic job we are already doing. You really are a much better mom than you realize.

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