Guest Post : Moms the Word

Thanks to my friend Dierdre* for today’s post, I appreciate her take on things and find this hits home for me extremely well!  Enjoy.

As a mother I am tortured by guilt, I am crushed by responsibility and feelings of failure and incompetence. The problem is if tomorrow I suddenly didn’t have kids anymore there would be a silence and a void as large as the abyss. I can’t quit but I can’t succeed at this job. No matter how perfect I try to be, I will fail somehow, sometime and repeatedly against my will and better judgment. I will inflict emotional pain upon my kids and I will feel guilt, anger and fear and break down into tears over and over again. Most moms will not let me say this without sympathetic looks and knowing smiles that say, “It is just a bad day, its not always this way. We all have our days.” The truth is it is not just a day it is many days and no words can ease the pain of feeling like you are failing at the most important job in the world. It isn’t really a job now that I think of it, it is really a quest, a quest to give ourselves the best start possible again, to not repeat what was done to us and to do better than they did, to move forward somehow less blind. The truth is I am haunted by the failure, I see the guilt in their eyes and now in mine. Could I not do better than this, could I not make it all better this time?

God bless my kids and give them what I have not. Heal the wounds that I have inflicted upon them and nourish their souls with the perfect love that you are, Father to all of us in our imperfection.

*Not her real name, she prefers anonymity.