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Last year tennis superstar Serena Williams posted a photo on Instagram and wrote in the caption that she recently felt like she “was not a good mom.” She said, “I work a lot, I train, and I’m trying to be the best athlete I can be,” she wrote. “However, that means although I have been with [Olympia] every day of her life, I’m not around as much as I would like to be.” These feelings of mom/mum guilt are familiar to us all. Sometimes we just can’t help it and the entire reason why I started writing the blog was because it was more
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natural if we talked about it than bury the feelings deep away.
Unsurprisingly, Williams’ honest Instagram post received more than 11,900 comments, many from mothers admitting they’d also missed their kids’ important milestones and were no strangers to the feelings of guilt the tennis star described. Whether it’s rooted in the time you’re not spending with your kids (at work or otherwise), the extraordinarily healthy food you’re not giving them or the picture-perfect photos of them you’re not posting on Instagram, it’s easy in our
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consumer-driven, hyper-aware culture to feel like you’re not doing a good enough job at this whole parenting thing. Additionally, US actress Hilary Duff is no stranger to feeling a bit of parenting guilt, especially when it comes to working and being away from her son.
In a similar interview with HuffPost, Hilary Duff, who often films hundreds of miles from her family, said she’s faced some tough questions from her young son. He often quizzes his mum ‘Why do you have to work so far away? Why do you have a job? Why does my other friend’s mom
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not have a job?’” she said. “It’s tough. One, I want to be like ‘Hey, you know all that stuff you have? This house that we get to live in? This is why I have a job.’ But that doesn’t mean anything to them.”
So let’s be honest.
Many of us are coming home from a busy day. We are itching to throw on our loungewear, power through the kids’ endless homework, give them beans on toast, chuck our kids in their pyjamas and we go to bed feeling tired and overwhelmed. But, when we look on Instagram, that’s not what we see and we find
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ourselves internally asking ‘why can’t I get it together?’
I was reading an interesting article online which said we think like this, we think our sentences and thoughts start with should. For example, “I should be making cakes with my kids, or I should be making a homemade a volcano for the kids’ science project or I should be doing more.” And that’s just it. Many of us constantly think and feel that we should be doing more but the reality of it is that many of us are already running on empty and we don’t have much ‘more’ to give.
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So perhaps on that basis, we should try ditching the guilt and not try to do everything perfectly when it’s impossible to do so?
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Guilty Mother - 31 May 19
Last year tennis superstar Serena Williams posted a photo on Instagram and wrote in the caption that she recently felt like she “was not a good mom.” She said, “I work a lot, I train, and I’m trying to be the best athlete I can be,” she wrote. “However, that means although I have been with [Olympia] every day of her life, I’m not around as much as I would like to be.” These feelings of mom/mum guilt are familiar to us all. Sometimes we just can’t help it and the entire reason why I started writing the blog was because it was more natural if we talked about it than bury the feelings deep away.
Unsurprisingly, Williams’ honest Instagram post received more than 11,900 comments, many from mothers admitting they’d also missed their kids’ important milestones and were no strangers to the feelings of guilt the tennis star described. Whether it’s rooted in the time you’re not spending with your kids (at work or otherwise), the extraordinarily healthy food you’re not giving them or the picture-perfect photos of them you’re not posting on Instagram, it’s easy in our consumer-driven, hyper-aware culture to feel like you’re not doing a good enough job at this whole parenting thing. Additionally, US actress Hilary Duff is no stranger to feeling a bit of parenting guilt, especially when it comes to working and being away from her son.
In a similar interview with HuffPost, Hilary Duff, who often films hundreds of miles from her family, said she’s faced some tough questions from her young son. He often quizzes his mum ‘Why do you have to work so far away? Why do you have a job? Why does my other friend’s mom not have a job?’” she said. “It’s tough. One, I want to be like ‘Hey, you know all that stuff you have? This house that we get to live in? This is why I have a job.’ But that doesn’t mean anything to them.”
So let’s be honest.
Many of us are coming home from a busy day. We are itching to throw on our loungewear, power through the kids’ endless homework, give them beans on toast, chuck our kids in their pyjamas and we go to bed feeling tired and overwhelmed. But, when we look on Instagram, that’s not what we see and we find ourselves internally asking ‘why can’t I get it together?’
I was reading an interesting article online which said we think like this, we think our sentences and thoughts start with should. For example, “I should be making cakes with my kids, or I should be making a homemade a volcano for the kids’ science project or I should be doing more.” And that’s just it. Many of us constantly think and feel that we should be doing more but the reality of it is that many of us are already running on empty and we don’t have much ‘more’ to give. So perhaps on that basis, we should try ditching the guilt and not try to do everything perfectly when it’s impossible to do so?
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Guilty Mother is an honest and (sometimes funny) blog for mums who feel guilty about juggling work, kids and home-life. Here's to feeling less guilty!