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12 steps away from mommy guilt
Mommy guilt — these two words go together so well, as every working mother knows.
What mom has not had tears come into her eyes as she kissed her sleeping angel goodbye in the early morning to go to work? Has not had her heart wrenched when she handed her crying bundle of joy to the yaya before walking out the front door? Or has not felt the deepest sadness when she had to board an airplane that would take her far far away to work, knowing it would be months, even years, before she would see her “baby” again?
The question then, is: How do I deal with it?
1. Quit work
I was very surprised when a quick Facebook survey to which nine friends responded showed that three of my friends quit work to stay home. Their main issue was the quality of care that their children were receiving.
Betsy, a marketing executive who was working in Indonesia, found it difficult to find the same quality of caregivers that we have available in the Philippines. She quit work to make sure that her sons “developed adequate study habits and manners, ate well and were clean.”
But even when the care was more than adequate, it still wasn't enough, as Faith, a scientist based in the U.S., said “Everyday for 2 ½ years, I called the daycare to ask how his day was going! It didn't take long for me to realize that I'll never be content with whoever was taking care of my children, as good as they may be.”
Of course not everyone is financially stable enough to quit work, so that brings us to the second tactic for dealing with mommy guilt.
2. Work from home
While the best deal would be to get your current employer to allow you to work from home, there are now also all sorts of regular employment opportunities such as writing, transcribing, being a personal assistant, etc. which are available because of the Internet. For those who feel that they don't have much to offer in terms of skill, there is Amazon Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome) which offers simple tasks that allow users to earn a little bit and get some training as well. Blessie, an editor who works from home, blogs about mommy-guilt and other mommy issues in her blog Nanay Notebook (http://nanaynotebook.blogspot.com/) which is slowly adding to her monthly work-from-home paycheck.
But for moms who really have to work out of the house, rest assured there are more things that you can do to ease your guilt.
3. Explain the situation to your child
Children are often smarter than we give them credit for, and they understand more of the adult world than we know. Elizel, an HR practitioner and single-mom, explained, “I try to explain to him (her son is 6 years old) that I have to work so that I can earn and buy him what he needs like food and stuff like toys and also we can go out together such as going to the beach or just simply playing at Time Zone.” Explaining the situation to your child in terms he can understand will let you know that he or she knows that you don't work just because you want to leave him, and emphasizes that you love him very much and will take care of him.
4. Plan your daily work schedule to maximize time with your children
Perhaps you can arrange your daily work schedule so you get off work early enough to fetch your children from school. This is what Faith did when she went back to work after her kids started going to school. Or put him in a daycare near the office so you can check on him during the day. Lisa, a fifth grade teacher in Chicago, arranged her son's schedule so the nanny would take him to her school in the middle of the day so she could spend thirty minutes with him.
5. Plan your weekly and monthly schedules too
Aside from your daily schedule, you should plan your work schedule weeks ahead if you are in a position to schedule meetings and out of town trips. Malou, a doctor, explained that she would “Plan in detail. Make sure I didn't miss any MAJOR school activities.” Of course holidays and birthdays are also important.
6. Let the office value you as both an employee and as a mom
As a valued employee, you are allowed to take care of yourself and your family. Malou makes sure that “the boss and colleagues appreciate how hard I work and try my best to deliver results when needed so that they will understand when I tell them I need time to attend to mommy duties even during work hours or days.”
7. Have quality time
After they've made sure to make time with their children, many moms make it a point to ensure the time is “quality time.”
Mel, an event organizer, said that because of her work she was “constantly out with my artists, doing gigs and working day and night shifts.” She was particularly sad that she wouldn't be there when her girls “would wake up and before they would go to sleep.” So to ease her guilt, she would sometimes wake them up purposely in the middle of the night for some quality mommy-daughter time.
8. Just be present and let them do their own thing
Not all the time you manage to carve out with your children needs to be high-intensity extremely focused time. It is also important to just be around the children as they learn to do things on their own. Anissa, a stay-at-home mom who homeschools her four children, still feels mommy guilt because she has to work from home and can't attend to their studies as well as she would like. She said “I just try to make it up to them by spending as much time with them as I can. I also try to motivate them to show initiative in their learning.”
9. Shower them with affection
Malou reiterates the need for mommy presence even when the mom and the children are doing different things. She says it is more important to shower the family with affection all the time. “I really don't believe in quality time only. Kids need their moms to be around them, more at certain periods of growth, less in others, but ALWAYS for moms to be ever present in one way or another. That means both quantity and quality.”
10. Use technology to keep in touch during the day
Whether it be a landline or cellphone, the telephone is still the easiest technology to use for keeping in touch with your children or their caregivers, and hearing a baby's coo can be a balm for a guilty mom's heart. But when you are in different time zones because you are a working mom in another country, it isn't always feasible. Stella, a professional in Dubai, follows her daughter's Facebook page to keep current with her daughter's friends, activities, and life in general. They also use the social networking site to send each other messages and chat when they happen to be online at the same time.
But beyond physical presence, there is something else we can do for our children and to lessen our mommy guilt:
11. Trust and pray
When my youngest daughter was in Junior Kindergarten, she would be sad and scared every time I would leave her in her classroom – and I was teaching at the same school then, so it wasn't like I was very far away! To make her feel more secure, I told her that she had a guardian angel watching over her when I was not beside her. Somehow, she picked up on the thought and came up with the idea of exchanging guardian angels. My guardian angel would stay with her, and her guardian angel would stay with me.
Also, Elizel does “pray hard that I'll be able to bring up my son as a responsible kid even if half the time I'm at the office.” Blessie, on the other hand, prays that she can stop working even from home and be a truly full-time mom.
And then there's also the most radical thing you can do about mommy guilt, something that I personally advise moms to do:
12. Know yourself and reject the guilt
Mabel, a banker in Minnesota, admits that she suffered from mommy guilt. “I always felt that I was not selfless enough to give up my career to raise the kids by myself instead of leaving them with babysitters or at the daycare facility.” But, she said, “I rationalized by convincing myself that I am a better person by working and that I will damage the kids more if I were a stay at home mother. I also rationalized my action by believing that since my husband's job was not stable we could not just rely on him.” Now, both her children are in college and she is the vice president of a bank. The family is financially stable despite the recession in the U.S., and they enjoy traveling and doing things together as adults.
These are real tactics from real moms, and I hope you pick up something that will help you deal with, and reject, your own mommy guilt. Stay strong.
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