Kate Middleton has spoken candidly about her very relatable struggle with 'mum guilt'. Photo / Getty Images
OPINION:
Ah, obscenely rich aristocrats ... they're just like us, aren't they? Okay, they're not, at all. But I have somehow gone through the unsettling experience of finding that Kate Middleton and I have one very important thing in common.
In an interview with the Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast, the duchess was asked if she ever felt mum guilt.
"Yes, absolutely. I think anyone who doesn't as a mother is actually lying. Yes, all the time," she said. "Even this morning before I went on the nursery visit, George and Charlotte said, 'Mummy, how can you possibly not drop us off at school this morning?' No, it's a constant challenge."
Kate was actually on the podcast two years ago but her comments have resurfaced again - just as mum guilt does.
My immediate reaction was to dismiss them - "Pfft, like a woman with a bunch of servants knows anything about mum guilt."
But something didn't feel quite right. Why was I so ready to dismiss her admission?
Sure, she has an army of helpers, financial security, an incredible head of hair, and the knowledge she will one day be the Queen of England. But despite living completely different lives, the duchess and I share this mum guilt thing - that's no small thing to have in common.
I realised that by dismissing her guilt I was opening myself to invalidating my own feelings of guilt - which I often do. It's a dangerous slippery slope when we try to determine what makes someone's feelings more or less legitimate.
I feel guilty every time my child asks me to play with her and I have to say no. If she catches a sniffle, I feel guilty I wasn't more forceful about making her zip up her jacket. When I don't give her her 37th snack of the day, I feel guilty for not allowing her such small pleasures. When I do eventually give her that 37th snack, I feel guilty that her snacks aren't healthier. When I see mumfluencers doing arts and crafts with their kids, I feel guilty that I cannot for the life of me fake any interest in that stuff. I feel guilty when I don't take her to the playground, I feel guilty when I do take her and she complains we didn't stay there long enough (WE DID). I even had one of the original forms of mum guilt - the formula-feeding mum guilt - so you'd think that, with this kind of CV, I'd be amazing at it by now. And yet, I suck at it. I wrestle with guilt all the time and I give myself zero time for self-compassion.
The actual-honest-to-goodness reality is that my child has a very good life. I spend more time with her than my working parents were ever able to spend with me. I am able to afford things for her my working parents never could for me. Yet, somehow, like the duchess herself, here I am, riddled with guilt over every parenting decision. What the hell and also why the hell?
Because mum guilt is universal and does not discriminate. It has no correlation to how much money there is in our bank accounts or even how many children we have. The metrics of mum guilt are not numerical, they are purely emotional. You feel it if you're poor, you feel it if you're outrageously rich (I assume). As long as you care, you are conditioned to feel guilty.
This kind of guilt has been made only worse by social media, where everyone looks like they're acing it while you're shoving fish fingers in the oven as your kid watches another episode of Bluey. It has also, I believe, been widely exacerbated by the consequences of the pandemic, with so many more of us working from home, with children out of school, with all the added stress of trying to survive a once-in-a-lifetime deadly pandemic. It's all ... a lot. And yet, instead of cutting ourselves the slack we deserve, we carry on collecting bursts of guilt like they're stamps we can exchange for Smeg knives.
Thinking about how judgmental I was, made me think mum guilt stems from a ridiculous ideal of the perfect mum, that we're all conditioned to aim for but that doesn't exist (because if it did, surely Kate, an actual duchess who gave birth to actual royal children, would tick all the boxes, right?).
For me to judge her comments would be playing the suffering Olympics, a crappy version of the real-life Olympics where no one ever wins.
She probably said that to seem extra relatable to us commoners - but, in a society that keeps pushing us to do more, aim higher and other equally exhausting slogans, I am here for public comments that make parents feel like cutting themselves a bit of slack.