A short list of things I’ve felt guilty about as a mother

An abridged list of things I’ve felt guilty about as a mother, in no particular order:

• Hurting my kid while clipping his or her nails
• Letting my kid have a lollipop
• Taking away my kid’s lollipop so she wouldn’t choke on it
• Not potty training my almost-three-year-old
• Not saying prayers before bedtime
• Not saying prayers before mealtime
• Not saying prayers ever
• Letting my kid have the cheap plastic toy she asked for at the grocery store checkout
• Throwing away said plastic toy a few weeks later while picturing the desiccated landfill it will likely inhabit
• Giving up on cloth diapers with my second kid and going through approximately 75 diapers/day, plus approximately 4800 wipes/day, and once again, picturing that landfill
• Letting my kid sit in a poopy diaper for longer than half an hour
• Putting chocolate syrup into my kid’s medicine dropper
• Letting my kids drink out of the same cup
• Not talking to other moms at the park
• Not talking to other moms at preschool pickup and dropoff
• Not enrolling my kids in activities, lessons, or teams
• Working
• Not working
• Letting my kid roll off a bed onto his head not once but TWICE
• Having a toddler who hates vegetables, is obsessed with bread products, and loves grape Tylenol
• Weaning my second kid at ten months when I breastfed the older one for over a year
• Not ever learning how to wear a baby
• Ignoring one kid while dealing with the other
• Leaving my kids with my parents for the weekend
• Skipping events because I’d have to bring the kids and I just don’t want to
• Letting my kids “cry it out” during sleep training
• Wasting money on cute but overpriced baby clothes
• Not ever wanting to paint or do PlayDoh with my kid; I’d seriously sooner be waterboarded
• Letting my runny-nosed kid go to school because she’s not THAT sick and I need this
• Not washing my kids’ hands before every meal
• Hiding my kids’ books that I hate
• Not reading as much to my second kid as I did with my first
• Not teaching my kids a second language
• Wishing for time to speed up sometimes so that we could skip the chaos and go straight to the calmness

The end.

JUST KIDDING THERE ARE LIKE A MILLION MORE THINGS.