What violation causes this mommy guilt?

Mommies often feel guilty. It is interesting how much more guilty I felt after becoming a mother. There was this internal feeling of whatever I did wasn’t enough. Now my guilty feelings were not just associated with my son. When at work, I felt I was not with my son and when I was with my son I felt I was not working as productively as I used to.

I did have the understanding that the feeling of guilt was useless. It was not giving any positive results in my life. But how could I eliminate it? When I didn’t want something in my life, I usually started with understanding it. So I went to the definition of guilt and was surprised.

This is how dictionary.com defines guilt.

the fact or state of having committed an offense, crime, violation, or wrong, especially against moral or penal law; culpability.

a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime, wrong,etc., whether real or imagined.

conduct involving the commission of such crimes, wrongs, etc.:

So I know as a mother I was not really committing any crime. So my feelings of guilt were imaginary. That was a good point to start.

Now consider cognitive explanation for guilt according to psychology today.(Source –https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201208/the-definitive-guide-guilt)

The gist of the article is that guilt arises from “thinking” you have caused harm to someone else. So maybe we feel our actions are affecting our children negatively. Another interesting point in the article was the fact that guilt arises from thoughts. Aha, now I was getting somewhere.

Here is my hypothesis –

Now even before I became a mother, people around me were giving me advice and information. And one thing I have realized woman want to do is to appear as perfect mothers and in their quest to do so, sometimes provide really perfect version of themselves (hint – they lie).

This information gets stored in our head and acts as a sort of benchmark for whatever we do. Say for example your husband helps you a couple of times in changing your baby’s diaper or feeding him. Immediately your mind goes to the celebrity mentioning she was on baby duty 24*7 herself despite having the luxury of probably hiring someone to take care of the baby. This acts as a reference and in your mind, you are thinking she did that but I let my husband help out a couple times. The feeling of guilt arises.

I don’t want to fill pages giving you advice on how to get rid of the mommy guilt. But I want you to try two things

When someone gives you advice or tells this is how they did it. I want you to consider that they are lying. Because we do, we want to appear perfect before our friends.

Always give yourself the credit that you are doing the best with whatever resources you have. It is ABSOLUTELY TRUE. We all do what we can do and just keep doing what we can.

It is amazing just having these two thoughts in our mind helps us get rid a huge part of mommy guilt. Try it and let me know.