Coulda woulda shoulda. The modern woman’s mournful cry!
Perhaps nobody feels this more profoundly than women in their 30s and 40s, the guilt generation of working moms. The themes we express are all too familiar. There’s the guilt of disappointing others. (“I have hours of hand-wringing after I say ‘no’ to someone,” reported one of many women I polled about their feelings of guilt.) Then there’s leaving the office at 4:59 p.m. sharp for a daycare pickup. (“Every afternoon, I feel that mounting stress about it. Will anyone see me leave? Will they say I’m not a team player? It’s exhausting.”) On the flip side of thinking that you don’t spend enough time working, there’s a geyser of remorse that involves not spending every waking minute with family. One woman even makes a weekly date with her mother-in-law out of a sense of guilt-fuelled obligation. “Not that I have anything in common with her,” she says. “In fact, she has treated me very poorly in the past.”
Sometimes the guilt is insanely comical: The other day I obsessed over the fact that I didn’t get out of the car in a store parking lot to talk to a friend who was passing by. (I just rolled the window down and said “Hi.”)
“I think I was rude,” I told my husband when I got home.
“Forget about it,” he said.
“But that was really rude.” And five minutes later, “I’m gonna call her and apologize. Should I call her?”
“Just forget about it!” he said and threw up his hands.
Another friend, Melanie Morassutti, an editor and the mother of a toddler, puts it this way: “My pathology isn’t guilt; it’s overextension. I do way more than my share and overextend constantly, but my mouth often blurts out half-lies like ‘I’d love to do it!’ while a little voice in my head says ‘Oh, no, don’t take it on.’ The more I riddle the overextension business, I can see that it’s fuelled by a great and highly organized desire to cut guilt off at the pass. I do too much so I don’t have to feel guilty about not doing enough, but the end result is still a state of imbalance.”
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