Balancing on guilt

Today’s guest post is quite timely as I spent yesterday afternoon listening to a radio show where parents discuss how work/life stress affects kids and how that stress is somewhat self-imposed and how guilt plays into it.  It was quite a lively discussion with Ellen Galinsky, Lisa Belkin and Joshua Coleman and is definitely worth a listen.  My take is that parenting is wonderful and also very hard and also simply boring.  I try very hard not to do guilt as a parent…it’s unproductive.  And I’m lucky to have very supportive friends who understand and know the realities of parenting and are happy to be honest about it.  And I’m brutally honest about it…to the point that some would prefer I sugarcoat it.  But that only perpetuates the myth that fuels the guilt.

Now yesterday’s parents were all talking about very mundane work/life issues.  Hiring babysitters, whether to choose to work or to stay home, who does more around the house moms or dads.  Knowing today’s author personally, I’m guessing she would have welcomed those kind of mundane issues in her first year as a mother.  And I’m also guessing there are plenty of parents out there today that are away from their children as they go about their jobs in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Japan, Germany and more…that struggle with guilt.  Here’s hoping they can all learn to let go of it as Tammy Colson did:

Managing work and home are difficult for anyone. This is the story about how I learned to manage work and home while leaving the guilt behind.

I was an active duty Marine for six years. When my daughter was 3 months old, I was deployed overseas. I had signed a contract and had a job to do. It was painful, but I had no choice but to give temporary custody of my beautiful daughter to my mother for a year because my husband was also active duty, and was constantly gone. I missed a lot of things I wish I hadn’t. This was before flip cams, and the internet, which make long distance communication so easy. Not shortly thereafter, I divorced, and I was on a path to raise my daughter solo. Along the way,  I discovered some things about myself and my daughter, things that got me through the next 16 years of parenting.

I found that we could survive. It might not be pretty, it might not be easy, but babies are resilient creatures. I had to learn that I could rely on other people to protect my daughter. Just as I had to learn later that she needed to learn to protect herself. I discovered that you build networks that help create balance in your life. Friends become family, and you ask for help. The decisions I made weren’t always easy, but that year away made me realize that I was doing what needed to be done, and the best thing I could do was not feel guilty. Guilt wasn’t going to change the situation.

Raising her, there were times I wished I could have been there more. But I’m told by her, that I was there for the important things. I made mistakes, there is no manual, and you make best choice in the moment. I got babysitters so that I could go out, and I felt guilty about that, making up excuses about work to the sitter. Then it dawned on me, occasionally going out was good for me, and good for my daughter. Again, that guilt wasn’t doing us any good.

The lesson I learned that year, was that sometimes duty comes before family. And that’s okay. If you put the support in place, if you stop yourself from feeling guilty, just get the job done, and enjoy the time you have when you are done, if you realize that you don’t have to be perfect, that you just need to be present in the moment when you are there, amazingly, the kids will love you anyway.

My daughter is almost 19 years old, and she’s a good kid, despite my mistakes. I don’t feel guilty for doing what needed to be done, because the guilt never changed a thing. It just made me feel guilty.

Tammy Colson is an HR Consultant with 15 years of experience in all facets of human resources as a solo practitioner. She is available for consulting and speaking in the areas of HR and Social Media. She can be found on Twitter at @TLColson and writes at http://www.junkyardhr.com,  – Where old HR goes to Die. When not in the HR space, she is the proprietor of Southern Wine Trails, a wine and hiking experience in NC and VA http://southernwinetrails.blogspot.com/ – where she shares the beauty of the southern mountains and their wines with her clients.