The guilt that shouldn’t kill anybody



It was her love for a healthy body that got her out of bed as early as 5:30 am every day. Well, honestly, what she craved was the fresh morning air, the sun rising as she biked around town all by herself, the sweat streaming down her back and the glorious feeling of accomplishment as the health app kept counting kilometres covered.

Usually, she’d start the morning with a short meditation, but laziness often got the better of her and she would run straight out of the house without the effort to connect with her higher self. After all didn’t the adage say that a healthy body harboured a healthy mind and not the other way around?

Once she stepped back into her house, motherhood duties took over and wouldn’t let go of her until lunch was all done, leaving everyone else pleasantly full and her, heavy and groggy. Despite repeated assertions to herself about how ‘fresh as dew' she felt and how ready she was to dive into the new book she desperately wanted to read, she would inadvertently creep back into the couch and doze off. It was usually a dream where her kids' school bus was honking away to glory or the mixer jar churning away a smoothie without a lid on it that yanked her out of her blissful slumber. It was time to serve her kid’s after-school snacks.

Without fail, she’d always wake up with a guilty feeling. Guilt at having lost about an hour of her day (and life) to sleep. Guilt at not having baked something fresh for the kids to snack on after school. Guilt at not reading her book some more. Guilt at not trying to stay up in the afternoon so that she could get an undisturbed 7-8 hours of sleep at night. Guilt at not trying to do better. Guilt and some more guilt.

Although guilt washed all over her, through the afternoon, when things settled down she would ask herself if she ever utilised the remaining twenty-three hours of the day available to her, fruitfully. Why was it that this one hour of the day seemed to be the most productive? Wouldn’t she be a better parent and a better person all evening if she was well-rested and ready to go, after a snooze?

After beating herself up over these naps for several years she decided that she needed to stop see-sawing between the debilitating guilt and reasonable justification of afternoon naps. I am better because of my naps. I am preparing for a better evening when I take a nap. I will utilise the other 23 hours of the day as well as I did this one hour of nap!

With this encouraging self-talk, she championed her guilt for good.