I’ll never forget when my son’s grades dropped.
He went from straight A’s to C’s and D’s in one quarter. I was extremely angry when I saw his report card. I marched into his room and demanded an explanation. He blamed everything but himself. The teachers, the subjects, the homework.
Ugh, I couldn’t take another second of his excuses or his lack of responsibility. So, I snapped. I belittled him. I ridiculed him. I yelled in his face. I was forceful and loud. I went on and on about how he was messing up his life, how he was never going to make it in high school, and how he was making my life SO much harder.
He got my message. Loud and clear.
His grades sucked. And so did he.
After the rampage, I laid in bed, sobbing, racked with guilt. Guilt because I was a terrible mom.
A mom that could NOT control herself.
A mom that puts grades before everything else.
A mom that yells at the son she loves.
I spun out on endless internal blaming.
My mind was SO good at beating me down.
It knew just what to say and exactly how to say it.
It pulled me deeper into the bottomless pit of never-ending mom guilt.
My parenting sucked. And so did I.
These rampages were awful and often –
I repeated them over and over for the next year+.
They became seared into me and created a gaping void between me and my only son.
Things got WAY worse before they got better.
Eventually, I tapped out and sought help.
I hired coaches that taught me new truths. Truths that changed me and helped me acquire skills. Skills that made mom-guilt a thing of the past … for good.
The truth is: Guilt of any flavor …mom or otherwise… is a feeling. Feelings come from your thoughts, not from what you do. Guilt doesn’t show up because you yell at your teen. Guilt shows up because you think you shouldn’t yell at your teen. The difference is almost imperceptible and yet it’s everything.
When it came to grades and my son, my rampages didn’t create guilt. The belittling, the ridiculing, the yelling – all the words I said did NOT create guilt. It wasn’t even the angry stance I stood in, the way I moved my arms when I yelled, or the door I ferociously slammed as I stomped out of his room. NONE of these things – not the words I said or the things I did – created the guilt I felt.
What created the guilt were the thoughts I had about the rampage … both during and after it occurred.
‘He doesn’t get it. He’ll never make it. He’s a failure. I’m not doing well. I can’t control myself. I’m a failure. We’ll never figure this out. Everything’s a mess.’
These thoughts and many more created my personal flavor of mom-guilt. It was my judgments of myself and my son that made me feel guilty. Guilt that often felt necessary and helpful. And yet, guilt NEVER once made me a better mom. In fact, guilt always drove me to repeat my habitual cycle of rampage followed by a personal beat down.
Once I recognized this, I changed it.
I would no longer feel guilty.
I stopped judging myself.
I stopped beating myself up.
I stopped being hyper-critical.
Instead, I started looking at everything as data.
Information to observe and learn from.
Just like in a science experiment.
And you know what, it took time to change the well-worn thought patterns, but it seemed to be working.
Soon I’d made room for thoughts like:
My son is not his grades.
I love my son MORE than I love grades.
Grades don’t determine a human’s success in life.
Grades don’t determine a human’s worth. (Mind blown over this one – remember, I’m a university valedictorian and I believed with every ounce of me that grades made me WHO I was. Simply not true.)
These new thoughts came from less judging. Less judging meant more curiosity. More curiosity meant more understanding and love. More understanding and love meant less yelling for my son and less guilt for me.
I was slowly becoming the mom I’d only dreamed of being before.
And then the test came. It was Mother’s Day 2018.
I was asked to speak in church about ‘The Influence of Righteous Women In the World’. As I sat in front of the congregation, waiting for the meeting to begin, I noticed my son wasn’t in the pew with our family. I went to them and learned my son had run away in his car only minutes before they’d left for church.
I looked into my husband’s eyes with a stalwart glance of, “It will be ok.” I made my way back to the stand.
As I sat, staring at my family minus my son, I took a deep breath. I was calm. I was present. I was ready to speak. And you know what?
There was no guilt. No mom-guilt at all. Not even a drop.
Why? Because I’d become a mother that knew — not just hoped or believed but knew — she was doing her best. A mother that knew she’d ALWAYS been doing her best. Yes, even on those days when she’d been on a rampage and yelled and screamed so loud her body shook – she was doing her best. If she’d been capable of more, she would have given more. She would have done more. But she didn’t. She gave what she had and what she had was OF COURSE her best.
Yes, her best. Her very, very best.
The best that she was capable of at the time.
The best that she could give in that moment.
It was 100% true. And with it, there was NO mom-guilt. Not past or present. It was gone.
Mom-guilt could no longer remain once I willingly embraced being the mom that I was. Accepting myself as is. Observing and perceiving, but never judging. Just learning and taking it in so tomorrow could AND would be different than today. And that’s exactly what I did and I’ve been doing it ever since. I’m a mom with absolutely no mom-guilt.
My son finally returned home late in the evening on Mother’s Day 2018. He walked in with a small flowering plant he’d bought at the grocery store and placed it carefully in front of me on the kitchen table. He kindly said, “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I love you!” and then went to his room.
Earlier that day I gave a powerful talk in church that changed people’s lives. But more importantly, it changed my life. That was the day I stepped into myself. That was the day I began to trust my brilliance as a mother. That was the day I said goodbye to mom-guilt for good because what I was doing worked. It worked for me and it worked for my kids.
You too can live without the heaviness of mom-guilt. It’s tearing you down, sucking the life out of you, and keeping you from loving being a mom. If you can’t kick it to the curb on your own, I’ll gladly teach you how.
You deserve to LOVE yourself, my friend. Completely guilt-free.
