mom guilt – Rebecca Cuneo Keenan

Hello, my name is Rebecca, and I suffer from “seasonal-affective, indoor mom guilt.”

I know my kids don’t get enough outdoor winter play — or at least some of them don’t, some of the time. I guess Colum gets recess at school, which is plenty on a cold day. But Irene is in half days and doesn’t always get recess and then I tend to think the one and a half year old gets plenty of exercise just running around the house. Between naptime restrictions, school, extra curriculars, early sundown and the fact that it is just so damn hard bundling up three kids for 20 minutes of outdoor play, I know we’re not outside as much as we should be.

Compound that with the “I need to cook more from scratch,” “my house is a pig sty,” and “I need to work more to make ends meet” flavours of mom guilt and taking the time and energy to go outside in February feels like an impossible task. So when nature dumps a boatload of pure white, fluffy snow on our fair city and then follows it up with the most glorious, sunny and mild day, I know I have to take advantage.

“Okay, guys. Why don’t we just pick up the toys and books off the living room and dining room floors and then we can go tobogganing!”

“Nnno!”

“I’m too TIIIRRRED. I don’t know hooooowww to clean up!”

“Buh, buh, buh.” Eats playdoh, picks nose.

I pretty much lost it, replete with threats and yelling and hair pulling. Where have I gone wrong?! How are these my children?! Then Ed kind of lost it on me with the classic, “Maybe we need to teach them how to clean up,” line. Because I’ve never tried that. I ended up slamming the door to my bedroom like some emo tweenager (PMS much?) and picking laundry up off the floor and hurling into the hamper until the rage settled. (That is the best and most efficient way to tidy a room, by the way. Highly recommended.)

At least we all got a good cry out early in the day? We did eventually make it out of the house.

That’s the way, baby girl. Nice and slow on your bum. Isn’t that fun?

Oh no. Please don’t take the baby down on the toboggan. Really, I mean it. Don’t do it. Really.

I command so much respect and authority. She LOVED IT, by the way.

See you, suckers!

We all had a blast and the only person who got remotely injured was me when I wiped out freaking walking down the hill on the way to the car. I’m fine.

So I’m good now until March Break, right? Are we supposed to do this every day?

Skipping Lunch Never Looked So Good

Mom guilt for me usually revolves around two things: diet and TV. I’ve gotten a lot better with the guilt thing as my kids have gotten older and I’ve clocked more years of motherhood. You start to realize that one McDonald’s lunch in front of the TV is pretty small potatoes in the long run. And that there is more to parenting than breastfeeding, I’m afraid. It’s not that simple.

Still, I’m not immune. Since Colum has started school, lunch has become a rushed and harried experience. We have to be at the school bus stop (a 5 – 10 minute walk with kids) at noon which means we should really be sitting down to eat lunch at 11am. Which means … we should be eating breakfast at what time? Earlier than we do, that’s for sure. I also try to do some work in the mornings while the kids play together (I said “try”), so I’m usually running up to get lunch on around 11 and then we sit down between 11:15 and 11:30 and then my kids proceed to go for the world record for longest time ever to eat a cheese sandwich and some veggie sticks. It’s crazy. Finally we finish eating and it’s off to the bathroom for precautionary pre-school pees. Added bonus: Irene’s toilet training now, so she needs to go, too! Then it’s the mayhem of trying to get two kids suited up for the winter, one of whom is two and therefore throwing a tantrum at the bottom of the stairs because I only let her turn the lights on and off three times. The other is a fairly co-operative four year old, but also the most distractable person on the face of the earth. So I wind up putting his snow suit on for him because we have to go even though he should be doing it himself by now.

This all amounts to an extremely stressful lunch and a mad dash to the school bus peppered with much yelling and tears. I told another mom at the bus stop that’s it’s just so hard to squeeze lunch in that early; how does she do it? Her answer: she doesn’t. “I stopped trying,” she said. Instead, they eat a big breakfast a little later, have a snack before school, and she packs a more substantial school snack. Ah.

There have been days when getting dressed took so long, we did brunch instead of lunch, but I worried it wasn’t enough. They don’t get much time to eat their snack at school and I worried Colum wouldn’t get through much more than the cereal bar or muffin I usually pack him. I worried that I needed to provide a typical meal structure even though it wasn’t working for us. I guilted myself into it.

So as of tomorrow we’re trying something new. It will be fresh fruit first thing in the morning and then a big brunch meal around 10:30. I’ll pack a standard snack and also have something ready to go for after school. That should keep them fed and take the edge off our mid-day rush. (I hope!)

Now I just need to wake up before them to get some work done.