Season 3 Ep 3: Guilt

In this episode I reflect on parental guilt and how our need to be perfect parents gets in our way.

Podcast artwork: Photo by Kumaran Pondicherry Photography; Styling by Become

Transcript

Fungisai: Welcome to Reclaim Your Power inspiration and Reflections for Pregnancy, Birth and beyond season three Reflections on Parenthood and Parenting.

In my introduction to this season, I spoke a little about how difficult it was for me to get going with this topic of parenthood and parenting and how much I struggled to start recording it. The main reason for this was or is the topic I'm going to COVID in this episode guilt and even a sense of shame. A sense of being afraid. Fear of being exposed, of being judged, of being seen as less than perfect. I'm so much in my own head it's crazy. I'm sure no one sees me or expects me to be perfect, but when we get caught up in our own thinking, we lose perspective and get caught up in our own storytelling and mythmaking. One deal or promise I made to myself when I started this podcast was that I was going to be as honest and transparent as possible. Otherwise, there was no point in doing this. My aim in going on this podcast journey was to share my experience with no expectation, but with the thought that if what I say resonates or makes some sense to someone else, if one person finds my reflections helpful, useful, or just thought provoking, if one person feels less alone with whatever they're facing, then sharing my journey is worthwhile. If not, it's still worth it. Because by sharing with you, I myself am learning to be more open and to be courageous. 

So guilt, not a nice emotion, feeling sensation or whatever we may choose to call it. I think most of us have experienced guilt at some time or another because we are socialized that way. We are often told while we're growing up of what we're doing wrong, why we're doing it wrong, how we're failing to meet society's expectations, etc. We internalize this and learn to do it to ourselves, and we learned to do this pretty early on in life. It seems that guilt shipping serves a social function to regulate and control our behavior, because there's a fear that will all turn into self-centred sociopaths if no one points out or teaches us how to behave. It's all about control. Again, like I reflected on in my last episode, guilt as a parent is what I'll reflect on in this episode. 

We go through life feeling guilty about this and that, and then we become parents and the level of guilt hits a new time high. We ask ourselves, am I doing this right? And occasionally the answer is yes, but mostly it's no. We go around second guessing ourselves and comparing ourselves, usually negatively, with other people. We try to be the type of parents our parents were or not. If we had unhappy childhoods and we still don't measure up, that's because we can never measure up that image of perfection in our heads. We may remember our childhood, this idyllic, or perfect our parents as being in control, calm, happy, and yet this is rarely the case. They had their own struggles, had to make sacrifices, and probably struggled with decisions and worried about us the way we worry about our own children. They were no better or no worse than we are in most cases. Of course, there are always exceptions. They just did the best they could with what they had. And some may have had very little to draw upon and therefore struggled more than others. When I look back at my childhood, and especially at my mother and the kind of mother she is, I can't measure up because in my eyes she's a great mother, loving, patient, giving and selfless in so many ways. I look at my parenting and fall short. I'm loving but not often patient, sometimes giving, but not at all selfless. So I fall short. My mother had a career like me and worked 100% until retirement. And yet she seemed to manage to juggle so much more and do it so much better than I do. So I have lived with that guilt of being a below average parent, of constantly judging myself and focusing on what I'm doing wrong and not what I'm doing or getting right. And this guilt, this constant self-judging, has of course, affected my ability to just be with my children, to let them just be. This feeling of guilt has led me to try and guide my children to be a certain way. The guilt has led to a need to control. Nothing to do with who my children are, but who I am and what I am struggling with. It all begins with me. 

My biggest or largest sense of guilt is to do with my eldest child because I had him when I was young and I was a single parent. There's a mountain of guilt there that I am working through and trying to let go of because it neither serves him nor me. I grew up in a nice nuclear family with mom, dad and three children. Then what do I do? I go and bring a child into the world with one parent who is truly present for the first part of his life and then into a situation of having a stepparent. Neither situation was perfect. The need to compensate for these shortcomings, to make up for not providing a perfect nuclear family for my son, has taken up a lot of space and energy in my life and had a huge effect on our relationship. It has caused me untold anxiety and led me to be a critical and controlling parent. Luckily, my son has managed to resist most of my controlling ways and challenge me at every step, especially since adolescence. This has hurt me and confused me, but that is because most of my parenting has been based on my guilt and what I think is best. I'm very grateful that despite this guilt filled controlling parenting, we still have a close, open and loving relationship. We're good friends. That is more about him than me. Something in him must have seen that underneath all the struggling and attempts to control was pure love, care and concern was about wanting the best for him. But lately I've come to realize that I cannot change the past. I cannot tie myself up in not trying to fix all the things I did wrong. As a parent I can only learn, forgive myself, be kind to myself and move forward. To continue to build relationships with all my children based on trust, on allowing them to be who they want to be, to explore, make their own mistakes, knowing all the while they are loved unconditionally, no expectations when I make mistakes and demanding or controlling to let that go, accept that I can do and will get things wrong and that's okay. As long as I can learn to see my mistakes and learn from them, as long as I can learn to say sorry to my children, then the path to communication will always be open. I can learn to just be a parent and see them for who they are and be at peace with that. And they can hopefully live their lives with less guilt. Not easy, I know, but I can only try and keep on working at it. And I know when I mess things up, they will let me know. And that, in my opinion, is success. 

My next episode will be on boundaries because I'm sure some of you are thinking this is all very well and good, this parenthood and being business, telling our children be who they want to be, not controlling, etc. But does that mean we let them run wild, especially when they're little? I will reflect on my experiences, setting boundaries and how that's worked or not, depending on what I have done and how I've done it. I hope you will join me. 

If you have found this podcast helpful, interesting, thought provoking, or even challenging, please share as well as Spotify. My podcast can be found on Apple podcasts where you can leave a review. I would love to hear from you. Thank you for being here, for listening. This is Fungisai reminding you to reclaim your power.