I truly believe that there is no place in this world for mum guilt or ‘mam’ guilt as I like to say and let me tell you, the quicker you can eradicate any mum guilt from your life, the better off you’re going to be for it!
Trust me, I know you’re probably sitting there thinking ‘well I bet that’s easy for her to say’ but I am one of those people who has suffered with mum guilt, especially when my kids were a lot younger, but over time I realised that it is not contributing anything to my life whatsoever so why do I give it the air space?
I can tell you the turning point in my life that made me sit up and ask myself ‘why am I doing this to myself’.
If I think back to before the pandemic, I used to fly out to America every three or four weeks (which actually does seem really crazy if I look back) to do a big US TV shopping show. I did a 6am flight on a Sunday morning, this was Newcastle to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Atlanta, then Atlanta to Tampa. It was an 18 hour door-to-door journey and I used to leave the house at about 4 o’clock in the morning.
Now, we had a little routine. On the Saturday night, I would put the kids to bed and while they would be really sad that I was going away, we could talk about it and say ‘you know mammy’s got to go away tomorrow to work for a couple of days, I’ll be back home on Thursday’. They would be a bit down about it but at least we could talk about it and they knew what to expect. I used to cuddle them to sleep and then they would wake up the next morning knowing that I wasn’t going to be there and they kind of coped with that.
However, I remember this one time, Delta had introduced a direct flight from Amsterdam to Tampa, which meant that instead of getting the 6 o’clock flight from Newcastle, I had to get the 9 o’clock instead. Because of the later start, I didn’t leave the house until 7.30am on the Sunday morning and the kids were awake.
Now let me tell you, it was so much more difficult leaving the house that little bit later when the kids were up and awake, rather than 4 in the morning when they were fast asleep. And, to make matters worse, they were at that age when they were very clingy and they were saying to me ‘don’t go mammy we don’t want you to go’.
I was trying to explain that mummy has to go and earn the pennies but they just said ‘we don’t want pennies we just want our mammy’. It was the most awful thing that I have had to deal with and I got in the car and cried all the way to the airport. I felt absolutely terrible and I remember getting on the plane and feeling so sorry for myself. I was wallowing in self pity, facetiming them when I got to Amsterdam, sitting looking through photos of the kids.
Now, here’s the bit I didn’t tell you…
Yes, I mentioned that this trip was once a month and as I said it was for a big US shopping channel but I used to do around 10 hours of preparation for it and I used to do this work on the plane instead of taking more family time up. It was an 18 hour journey so I definitely had the time!
However, the day that I did the direct flight, I got on the plane and I felt so sorry for myself that the last thing that I wanted to do was get my laptop and my notebook out and start doing all of my work.
I got on the flight still feeling so sorry for myself and upset that I ended up watching a couple of romcoms to try and cheer myself up. I ended up landing in Tampa that night and getting to the hotel at like 7 or 8 o clock in the evening, having not done my prep work for the TV show. This meant that I had to stay up until the early hours of the morning doing work when I was already exhausted and jet lagged.
And, instead of the 10 hours I usually had, I tried to condense this work into three or four hours and didn’t do a very good job of it. The knock on effect of that was that I didn’t do a very good job of my show the next day. I presented the shows but I knew that it wasn’t the best that I could have done because I wasn’t as thoroughly prepared.
I am one of those people who likes to prepare for every eventuality in order to do a brilliant job and it’s all about the hours and hours of preparation.
Consequently, I went on air and in my eyes didn’t do a good enough job so what happened? I felt rubbish about myself because now I was telling myself I was a terrible mam who was going and leaving these poor kids at home but now I was also a terrible business woman who was letting my company down and letting my staff down because I hadn’t done a very good job of my job.
I got on the plane to come home feeling like utter rubbish and I remember getting back home and landing home on Thursday just feeling like my life was a failure because I was failing as a mother, failing as a businesswoman and it was all a disaster.
All of these feelings came from letting that mum guilt seep in…
Because the reality of the situation was, as my husband told me, by the time I had got to the airport, the kids didn’t really care that I had gone. They were having a great day with their dad, going to nana and grandad’s for Sunday dinner, doing everything that they would normally do when I was away in America every month.
I let my mum guilt have a knock on effect and essentially ruin my whole week by letting it creep in and the truth of the matter is my kids were no better or worse off. I know deep down that my kids have a great life. I’m a fantastic mother, I do brilliant stuff with them, I might not spend as much time with them as other mothers get to but I make the time that I do get to spend with them absolutely count. And, at the same time, I know that I am a great business person.
I try to maintain a good balance between the business and being a mum but I know that I do both well and I think that the key thing is always focusing on what you do well and never letting mum guilt creep in because it doesn’t serve anyone. I can tell you that I have never taken that later flight ever again! I have never given myself the opportunity for mum guilt to take over. I’ve really focused on the fact that I am a great mother, this is what I have done and I have done it well. Let’s not focus on the negatives, let’s focus on the positives!