It has been at least two weeks since I finished Glennon Doyle’s new memoir Untamed, and I keep going back to this quote:

Mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time. We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist.

Untamed, pg. 128

And then this quote, further down on the same page (I literally highlighted all but the first sentence of page 128):

What if a responsible mother is not one who shows her children how to slowly die but how to stay wildly alive until the day she dies?

Untamed, pg. 128 (apparently my favorite page of the memoir!)

Here we are on Day “Who The Fuck Can Keep Track Anymore” of sheltering at home, and I want to show my kids how to stay wildly alive, but I have so much guilt about taking time for myself.

Guilt that they are bored and I should entertain them.

Guilt that they are not at school, and I suck at homeschooling.

Guilt that I just want to write for two hours without being interrupted by constant demands for snacks, drinks, and boo boo kisses.

This is what I need: two hours, every day, to write. Not so long ago, I got that time when my kids went to school and camp. During vacations, I suffered because they would not leave me alone to write for even twenty minutes, let alone two hours. But I figured I could handle those vacations because eventually, they would go back to school or camp.

Now. Wow. Who the eff knows? After two months of non-stop parenting, I see that I feel like I am only allowed to write when my kids are otherwise occupied with school and camp. If they are home, then I must be available to cater to their every whim and demand. (Elaborate messy and time consuming art project? Of course!) The current situation is forcing me to reckon with the fact that I do not have healthy boundaries with my kids. I do not let myself exist as a woman with a passion for writing when they want me to do the fucking farm puzzle again. (To clarify: I have been writing but feeling guilty about wanting that time.)

When I had postpartum depression, I often felt guilty that I was somehow failing Pippa. I felt guilty when she had jaundice and we needed to supplement breastfeeding with formula. I felt guilty when I set her down to play by herself so I could make myself a sandwich for lunch. I felt guilty when she woke up and started crying while I was in the shower.

Guilt, guilt, guilt.

After I was diagnosed with postpartum depression, I read a lot of books about maternal mood disorders, and those books often listed “guilt” as a symptom of postpartum depression. Postpartum depression is a spectrum illness, which means there are many symptoms, and different moms experience different constellations of those symptoms. It’s like a Vegas buffet except instead of gelato and prime rib, you get anxiety and insomnia.

During my recovery, I told my therapist that I often felt guilty about asking Nathan to help with Pippa, even though he adored her and adored me and liked being helpful. My psychologist had me bring Nathan in for a session, and I admitted that I often thought Nathan was mad at me. I regularly asked Nathan if he was mad at me and he would laugh and say that he wasn’t. This was a compulsion on my part, a seeking of reassurance that backfired and made me feel worse. For homework, my psychologist forbid me from asking Nathan if he was mad at me. After a few weeks, the guilt I felt in regards to having Nathan help with Pippa faded and disappeared. I told myself that the rest of the guilt I felt faded and disappeared as well.

I think I was lying to myself.

I am starting to see that I may have resolved the guilt I felt toward having Nathan help with Pippa, but the rest of my guilt went underground.

Or, maybe it stayed above ground. Maybe I just tolerated guilt as a necessary part of motherhood. Maybe the degree of guilt I regularly felt did not seem worthy of notice in comparison to the hell that had been my postpartum depression.

Sheltering at home during the Covid-19 crisis has been forcing me to acknowledge some issues that I had previously been able to ignore. And I might as well write it here, so I can finally admit this to myself: I still feel guilty for wanting to stay wildly alive.

Despite all the work I did to recover from postpartum depression, holy shit, I still feel guilty if I am anything less than a martyr to my children’s wants and needs.

When I first read the quote that I cannot stop quoting — What if a responsible mother is not one who shows her children how to slowly die but how to stay wildly alive until the day she dies? — I remember thinking, “I suppose I have to stay wildly alive and bear the guilt, and maybe someday, Pippa will be able to stay wildly alive without the guilt.”

But I don’t want to be a mother who feels guilty just for wanting two hours to write. I don’t want to be a mother who feels guilty for wanting to do the work she was born to do.

Somewhere along the line, some experts decided that “guilt” was a symptom of postpartum depression, and I think that calling “guilt” a symptom did a disservice to mothers everywhere. Because it was a symptom, I just assumed it would go away with my recovery, just like you stop vomiting when you recover from the flu or stop coughing once the cold passes.

But I am starting to see that the guilt I feel as a mother is much, much more than a symptom of an illness I once had. (And deeper, but beyond the scope of this post, I am starting to see that the illness I once had was so much more than an illness, and my postpartum experience was diminished because the insurance company needed a diagnosis before covering my Zoloft.)

A couple of years ago, I was reading Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins. About midway through, Robbins wrote about the meaning behind different feelings. I have to paraphrase, but Robbins wrote that we feel guilty because we did something wrong.

I remember sitting at my kitchen table and feeling like I had just been punched in the stomach.

I had felt guilty many times as a mother, and I knew that in all those instances, I had done nothing wrong. How could Robbins say that guilty = wrong?

Shortly thereafter, I chucked the book into the trash. (Hence, the paraphrasing above.)

Ok, wow, this is a long post! But here is where I am at:

• I believe Glennon Doyle is right. I should show my children how to stay wildly alive, instead of slowly martyring myself on the altar of motherhood.
• I feel guilty when I assert my right to feel wildly alive.
• But even though I feel guilty, I am not doing anything wrong.
• So the guilt must be arising from some toxic beliefs I have about motherhood.

Whew. That is my Covid-19 homework. As we continue to live with the uncertainty of sheltering at home, I have to reconsider my beliefs about motherhood.

I have to stay wildly alive.

Without the damn guilt.