Dealing with mummy guilt at the school gate

Us mothers are like magnets to guilt. It is so all-consuming that when we do experience a rare hour or two guilt-free, we feel guilty for not feeling guilty. It can’t be good for our health, can it?

 

There is never any real let up and the list of why we feel bad, usually house and parenting related, is never ending: the house is a mess, we haven’t spent enough time with the kids, we gave them sweets, we didn’t kiss them goodbye, or we let them watch something that definitely was not suitable. 

 

Or when we leave them at school. Yes, it has even come to that. 

 

Waving my little girl into the building at the steps, I linger a little longer, you know just in case she turns around and sees that I’m not there. I just couldn’t live with myself if this happened - a tad ridiculous and dramatic I know.

 

My daughter knows that I love her. In fact, I say it so often that she sighs in impatience now when I declare my love for her. In her seven-going-on-seventeen whine, she states: “I knew you were going to say that, mum”.

 

But after today, I’ll definitely be saying it even more.

 

Today she waved at me from the window of her classroom and then disappeared – I presumed she went over to her friends, so I left. Yes, I did the unthinkable.

 

It was only when I was half way to work that thoughts and visions of her standing there holding a piece of artwork that she wanted to show me, wondering where I was, came to mind. Oh God, even thinking about it now, makes me feel awful.

 

That image slowly grew bigger and bigger until I was visualising totally made up scenarios of her standing in the rain looking for me, wondering why I had left her. Oh the guilt.

 

And while I sit here and worry about it, she probably never even batted an eyelid. That's if it even happened. 

 

This whole mummy guilt thing is not new and I'm definitely not the first one to experience it, but seriously it is not good for my stress levels. 

 

Mary Byrne is a staff writer at MummyPages and mum to a horse-crazy, sports-mad, seven-year-old girl.