The Guilt We Were Born With (And The Guilt We've Gained)

Last week, my three-year-old got sick.

Not "a bit poorly” sick,or "Calpol and an early night will fix it” (my go-to strategy). It was forty-degree fever sick, A+E sick, three nights of no sleep, sitting in the dark, watching breathing like a hawk and obsessively checking his temperature 24/7.

For every one of those hours, I was back to September last year - when our little man was ill for 3 weeks with what turned out to be meningitis. It was a grueling rollercoaster of blood tests, convulsions, IV’s, pacing hospital corridors under the fluorescent lights of a children's ward at 3am. And the weeks it took afterwards for him to recover, and my nervous system to de-frazzle really took their toll. 

This time, thankfully, he turned a corner - by Friday he was (literally) bouncing off the walls again. Back to normal, to chaos, crashing about, cuddles at sunrise, crumbs on the sofa and telling me he definitely DID NOT WANT his banana peeled in  the exact way he had just requested it to be done. 

But for those few days while he was ill, something hardwired in me took over. It  didn’t feel like just worry and not even quite like fear, like your heart being in your throat….more like my heart leapt out of my chest entirely, landed on the floor, and sat there pulsating, exposed and wild, while I knelt beside it holding the hand of this tiny, precious, hot little human being.

It was primal, cellular and took charge of my very being again for those few days. 

And here's what I kept thinking about, in those sleepless early hours.

We talk about mum guilt like it's one thing - a monolithic force sitting on our chests, this voice in our heads that says you should be doing more, being more, giving more. And we treat it like something to manage, to push back against, to work through in therapy or journalling or a conversation with a good friend. I treat in in my client sessions very much like this - a topic to be talked through, with tools and techniques to manage it. 

But I realise now, I think we've conflated two very different things.

There is the guilt we were born with. And there is the guilt we were given.

The guilt we were born with is what I felt last week -primal, non-negotiable, overwhelming and it is, I would argue, not really guilt at all - it is ferocious, unmediated love doing its thing in extreme circumstances.

These moments, I realised more than ever, that underneath it all - modern motherhood, ‘having it all’, social media portrayals of what mothering is - we are actually all just cave women. We are animals who grew another animal inside our bodies and have been biologically wired ever since to track their breathing, notice their temperature, scan the room for danger and fight the sabre-tooth tiger if we need to. To stay close. To not leave the baby unattended. To protect, fiercely and never stray. 

This force is not something we chose - and it does not switch off when we close the nursery door. It does not take a lunch break. It hums beneath everything we do, at a low, constant frequency - a vigilance that is simply part of being the person who made them.

So yes - of course it's hard to hand them over at the nursery door. Of course it's hard to sleep when they're ill. Of course it's hard to book the flight and pack the bag and wave goodbye on your much needed, overdue, cup filling girls weekend. 

And this difficulty isn’t because we’re doing something fundamentally wrong by being apart from our offspring - it’s because we are mammals who love our young with a force that has nothing to do with the school run or screen time or making organic dinners or how much quality time we clocked with them this week. This is not guilt - it is devotion. It just wears guilt's clothes. (I’ve talked before about guilt being a sneaky mistress!)

But then comes…the guilt that we gain. And that we have been given.

This is the layer on top the conditioning (of what a ‘good/devoted mum is’does), the cultural noise (you should go to work! You should stay home!), the voice inside (‘you're not doing enough, not present enough, not sacrificing enough’) - even as you sit there on three nights of no sleep, holding your child's hot little hand in A+E.

This is the guilt that makes us apologise for taking an hour for ourselves and that whispers selfish when we book a yoga class, a weekend away, a ten-minute bath with the door locked. The guilt that turns legitimate, necessary self-prioritisation into something that needs to be earned, justified, deserved.

This guilt was handed to us by a culture that has confused martyrdom with motherhood and a system that built very little infrastructure for mothers and very extensive social messaging about what good ones look like, and by a thousand tiny moments of implied expectation that we internalised before we even knew we were doing it.

Here's what I want to say, and I want to say it clearly: We are already carrying so much.

We are walking around with a constant, low-level hum of primal devotion that means our children are never entirely out of our thoughts, never fully off our radar. That is not weakness or failure: it is the deal we signed up for, written somewhere deep in our biology long before we filled in the forms.

And I strongly believe, we do not need to carry the other stuff on top of it.

We do not need the layer that says we're bad mothers for needing space. 

We do not need the voice that calls it abandonment when we take a holiday. 

We do not need the conditioning that makes rest feel irresponsible and boundaries feel selfish and asking for help feel like a personal failing.

That layer is optional. That layer was installed. And that layer - unlike the fierce, bone-deep love - can actually be put down. We have a choice in this (even though it might not feel like that). 

Btw, my son is now fine. He's currently refusing to wear pants, demanding an icecream for breakfast and trying to grab the dog with a litter picker. So I’ll take that as ‘recovered’.

So I'm sitting here thinking about all the mums who spent this half term quietly white-knuckling through worry, through exhaustion, through the ordinary terror of loving someone this small and this vulnerable.

You're not guilty, you’re just woven through with a  fierce love -and those two are not the same. Once we start to see the difference, and encourage a little healthy separation between the two, maybe  we can stop apologising for the wrong one.