At 3:00am, I heard a rustling outside our bedroom door. All of a sudden Magoo’s face appeared, and she said her tummy hurt. I told her to go down to the bathroom and we would be right there. TJ woke up and went in with her. She threw up twice.
He got everything cleaned up and sent her back upstairs. He decided he was up for the day, so he ran to the store to buy something for the car.
A few minutes later, I heard her running downstairs. I followed her down and she had begun throwing up again.
I sat behind her and rubbed her back, telling her it was okay.
When she was done, I got her settled on the couch with a blanket, pillow, and throw up bucket, and then I got Goosie set on the floor on a makeshift bed because she refused to sleep in her room alone, and reluctantly, I got myself set up on the other couch and opened Mae’s doors, so I could hear her if she cried.
And then I spent the next two hours trying to decide what to do.
Goosie was supposed to be snack kid at preschool today. It probably doesn’t sound like a big deal and to a grown up it’s not, but to a 3 year old, it’s a really big deal. It meant she would get to be line leader and help with the weather chart. It only happens one every two months.
So what did I do? Did I keep Goosie home from her 3 hours of preschool because it’s just preschool and it’s best not to make Magoo drive around in the car for twenty minutes? Or is that cheating Goosie out of her fun experience? And to top it all off, the wind chill is -30 today, and Mae has a nasty little habit of taking off her boots and mittens in our car where our heater had been acting up sporadically.
Every five minutes I would check my email, praying for a notice from school saying that classes would be cancelled today. The notice never came. But morning did, and I had to make a decisions.
I heard Mae talking upstairs, and I sent Goosie to go play with her in her crib for a moment while I thought of my options. I decided that I should take Goosie to school. It wasn’t fair for her to miss her big day, and Magoo hadn’t thrown up in six hours, so I was pretty sure she would be okay. Plus, how many times have her sisters driven in the car sick to get her to school?
That’s all the external narrative. In and of itself, it’s frustrating (stomach flu is never fun,) but it is what it is. It is parenting. It happens to all of us.
But that’s not what the problem was.
The problem was the guilt. The total and all encompassing guilt.
The guilt that had me shaking last night as I was trying to make a decision. The guilt that came before the decision even did because no matter which choice I made, there was going to be someone to feel guilty about.
And there was the guilt about Magoo and TJ. I asked him to go help Magoo. That made me a bad mom. A more nurturing mom would have gone herself to her sick daughter. A more sympathetic wife would have looked at the clock and then gone down herself so her husband could sleep a bit more.
And then when I did go down and she was throwing up. I rubbed her back. But my whole body was in a bit of a panic. If I get stomach flu, it’s not like if a normal person gets stomach flu. It will rip my stomach to shreds. I won’t be able to function for days. My sodium will drop and I will barely be able to walk or see straight.
So all of that was going through my mind along with all the responsibilities I have, and then I looked down and I saw her, and I knew she needed comforting. But all I did was rub her back. Shouldn’t I have hugged her? Shouldn’t I have gotten in closer? Isn’t that what moms do?
And of course there is television. Because whenever either I or my kids are sick, I let them watch television. But that means Mae is watching a lot of television as well. I keep reminding myself that she is almost always well underneath the 2 hour cap of screen time the AMA recommends, but still, I feel like I can feel her little brain being sacrificed.
And all of this went through my mind all night as I was in and out of dreams of Mae drowning and me not getting to her in time, and I found myself sitting in my car, warming it up before I got the kids in it, and I was practically numb.
For me, at least, I think the endless searching for the correct path, the path that won’t lead me to guilt, is a way to ward off the actual guilt. I think there’s a part of me that believes there is a path I can take in every situation that will lead me to the “good mom” label. That will take away the guilt. That will make me feel okay. All I need to do is obsess about it enough, and I will find it.
But the more I distance myself, the more I wonder if that is actually true. If it’s actually true for any of us.
We can have the best of intentions. We can plan to put our kids first in everything. We can do absolutely everything in our power to make good choices…
But then life happens.
And the choices we have put us between two pretty poor options. A place where either choice will lead to guilt.
And so then I’m left wondering whether guilt, itself, is the problem.
If I had hugged Magoo while she was throwing up, would that have made me a good mom? Had I made the choice to keep Goosie home so Magoo wouldn’t have to go out, would that have made me a good mom? Would running downstairs with Magoo the first time instead of letting her very capable father do it have made me a good wife or a good mom?
Or are all of those just details? A few details in the thousands a single day creates?
I guess what I’m getting at is that I wonder if the decisions we make that make us feel like failures at mothering actually have that power.
Is mothering really about single instances? Even in those instances when we really do fail?
Or is mothering about a whole lot more?
And if it’s about a whole lot more, how do we find the clarity to focus on that big picture instead of getting trapped into the cycle of guilt?
I don’t have any answers. All I have are questions. And guilt. And a really long day ahead of me.