A guilty mum is a normal mum apparently..

My three-year-old son was unwell last week. He toddled into the kitchen on Sunday evening as I was burning pasta, looked at me and promptly vomited all over his sister’s school bag.

Swooping forward and rushing to the bathroom with him, I thought to myself: “Oh God, not this week.” And then I almost buckled at the knees with guilt.

My son was clearly unwell, he was puking like his father after Christmas drinks and my first concern was my hectic week in work.

Not my second, not my third, but my first.

No matter how many times I accidentally put work concerns first, I’m still shocked (and of course guilt-ridden) that I’ve done it.

Tending to my little boy, I gently wiped his face with a cloth, checked his temperature and cooed in his ear.

Feeling him relax against my chest brought me some relief. He knows I’m taking care of him, I thought; he has no idea what my first worry was.

Ten minutes later my husband found me sitting on the closed toilet seat with our now more upbeat son cradled in my arms. Having smelt the unmistakeable smell of vomit and witnessed our daughter’s meltdown at the destruction of her beloved Frozen schoolbag, he knew where to find us.

Leaning against the door frame, he said: “Don’t worry, I’ll stay off work tomorrow if needs be. I know you have a proposal due.” Stung by his words, I hissed: “I’m not worried about work! I’m worried about him.”

Having endured more than one of these conversations since we became parents six years ago, my husband knew when to stay silent. Taking the shower hose in one hand and the schoolbag in the other, he began slowly cleaning his daughter’s pride and joy.

“He doesn’t have a temperature, he asked to get up and play and he hasn’t gotten sick again, so maybe it was just something he ate,” I said after a few minutes.

 

“I’m sure it was, he replied. “You cooked dinner after all.”

Marvelling at his ability to make me laugh despite my mood, I admitted what my first concern had been. He told me that if it hadn’t been a work concern, it would have been something else, like our daughter’s play or my husband’s business meeting or the time I worried about my son missing a haircut because our daughter fell off her bike and scraped her knee ten minutes before.

Apparently I try to juggle so much that my brain just immediately clicks into gear when something goes wrong and I desperately try to envision how this new catastrophe will affect the other things going on in our lives.

“The biggest thing happening in our house this week is your work presentation; next week it will be Grace's swimming gala. It’s ok to take these things into account. It doesn’t make you a bad mum, it just makes you normal.”

Every house needs one of him, right?