I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to tell you this. Lines from a favorite Franz Wright poem come to me,

 

 

When I speak to groups, which I have done hundreds of times over the years, there is always one topic that resonates more than any other. The topic that brings the gasps. The tears. The eyes pointed down to avoid being seen, accompanied just so by trembling shoulders.

 

Have you guessed which topic it is yet?

 

Motherhood. 

 

But not just motherhood.  

 

Motherhood guilt.

 

And guilt. 

 

But not just guilt. 

 

The guilt of motherhood.

At my last public speaking event, one woman sitting near the front began to ask a question on motherhood guilt, but was soon interrupted by her own sobbing. She leaned forward, head down, as the weeping took her. The sounds she made were guttural. Almost frightening. No one knew what to say or do. Including me. Except for to witness. 

 

I could tell a true catharsis was taking place. As if within the pool of this woman’s tears was collected the primordial struggle that is a mother trying to love her children without losing herself. And trying not to lose herself while still qualifying for the badge of love society sticks to “good,” mothers.

 

Maybe we didn’t know what to do because within us, inside the wombs that carried both babies and dreams, we knew the balance was impossible to strike.

Let me back up.

 

In the beginning I didn’t choose motherhood. I felt it chose me. After semi rebellious adolescence, where I vocally rejected the cultural script my faith tradition handed to me; that I would marry young. That I would forego a career to raise children. That I would become a homemaker. I surprised myself and everyone who knew me by getting married at 21. I was pregnant a year later. 

 

Despite my soul’s certainty that this role was not mine, I mysteriously found myself playing my assigned part anyway. How had I, so sure that a long life of wandering and art making lay ahead of me, let that happen?

 

My soul would not remain quiet on the matter. What was more, not a single skill I possessed seem suited to nurturing and making a home. I was bad at it, and I didn’t like being bad at things. Especially not the things I had never envisioned myself doing in the first place.

 

Despite feeling foreign and inept at the role of mother. Despite secretly dreading the endless, aimless hours at home with small children- I loved my babies with a ferocity I had never felt before. I feared I might be consumed by it.

 

On Sunday nights, the crying guilt would take me. I would look at my sweet babies, feeling utterly inadequate, up to my eyeballs in self doubt, insecurity, unmet needs (theirs and my own) and wail to my children’s father about how bad I was. How much it hurt to hurt them because I didn’t know how to not. Learning as I went, seeing their small selves bare the impact of every mistake I made, pretending to want the life I had was too much to bear.

 

I grew empty. And emptier still. 

 

Eight years later the emptiness was so hollow and harrowing, I knew I had to fill it with something. I knew that something had to be myself. Some instinct, not the one we usually attribute to a mother’s, told me I would never be able to parent with true presence and desire, until I honored the self at the center of that parenting.

 

Do you know what the hardest part of my divorce was other than losing my family as I had known it? The grief + guilt combo. Like a fast food menu number no one would want to order. The way it looked to the family I once was close to cut deep. Do you want judgment with that grief? Would you like to supersize the guilt that was  already consuming you inside the marriage?

 

I kept my budding truth within an outward story. The outward story was that I left to save my life. The inner bud was that I also left to save theirs. Whether or not anyone would understand that, my gut sensed how for me, the one had to come before the other.  

 

I called the year following my divorce the no guilt project. The only real rule was that I would not allow myself to drown for a second longer in the guilt that had plagued my entire marriage—and much of my life before that. It was an albatross and a self fulfilling prophecy. I had to let it go, and find out which parts of my true self that guilt was blocking from coming into being. 

 

My life got wilder. My art got free-er. My own mother got worried and told me so. But on a soul level, I was more alive and sure of my dive into the dark unknown than I'd been if anything else in my life. Because for the first time in 30 years, I was living my truth. Not my mother’s, not my culture's, not anyone else’s truth for me. 

 

I didn't want to be good. I wanted to be true. 

I’ve spent a solid decade reorienting my life around being true. It changed everything. It changed me. Again and again, it changed me. Whereas guilt made me blind. My true self had sight. Whereas guilt froze me in shame and secrecy, stepping into truth made me bold and brave. My true self was far from perfect, but being honest about this imperfection set me free. From this place, I could love. From this place, after years of practice, I got the greatest shock of my life:

 

13 years into the job, I found I loved being a mother. I loved it more than any other role in my life. 

 

 

What was it I said I wanted to tell you? That thing I’m writing with both hands day and night? It's what I tried to tell the woman who broke down sobbing at that speaking event:

 

Do most emotions serve a purpose at some point? Sure.

 

However.

 

Your guilt -

If it has you frozen.

If you can’t look yourself in the eye.

If you feel like a prisoner in your life.

If you feel so far from yourself you’ve forgotten  what your own voice sounds like.

If you don't think you can ever change. 

If you don’t think things will ever get better. 

 

Then your guilt is not helping you. You can put it down. In fact, please put it down right now.  It may find you again tomorrow. Then you’ll have to put it down again, because you’re gonna need both hands. You have the work of your life to do.

 

Xx,

Yan

 

 

 

 

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