Category: Eve

So, I’ve been playing around with YouTube (now there’s a site that can seriously eat your time!) and decided to put a video of my own up. Now, I ask you…does this look like a child with chicken pox to you?

Here’s the YouTube link to it if it’s not loading: Link

I am realising that parenting and guilt go hand in hand. You make decisions and hope they’re the right ones but none of them seem to work perfectly. Right now the set-up at our place is I work in my little office upstairs from 10am to 5pm, Matt, my husband stays at home and takes care of Eve while I work. We take turns getting up in the morning since Eve wakes up at around 6am and neither of us likes to get up while it’s still dark. I usually bathe her and put her to bed in the evening. It’s a pretty even split most of the time and yet I still feel guilty. I can’t get over the feeling that the split shouldn’t be even, rather it feels like I should be the one that’s with Eve for the majority of the time.

Eve will often position herself at the bottom of the stairs wailing up at me “Mooommmeeeee” or I’ll hear her wandering around and asking for me. Talk about tugging at the heart strings. At those times that feeling creeps up on me…I should be down there with her full-time. We tell ourselves that we live in such a progressive society now, it’s the height of modern thinking to say that it’s just as good to have a daddy stay at home with the kids while the mommy brings home the bacon and yet I can’t get over the niggling guilt. Do men ever feel guilty as they head off to catch the DART to work in the morning? Do they wonder whether they shouldn’t really give up their job to stay at home? Where is this guilt coming from and should I be listening to it?

On a sort of related note, there was a news story circulating yesterday about complaints of abuse and neglect in Irish creches. I noticed that on television it was only TV3 that reported on it (the main RTE news didn’t mention it at all) and the only paper I saw that had it as front page news was The Evening Herald. Other papers may have had the story but it wasn’t on any of the other covers that I scanned in the newsagents. This makes me think that it might be yet another “Scare The Parents!” story. Right up there with “Formula Feeding: Will Your Child Hate You?” and “The Internet Abducted My Baby!”

You see it’s that guilt thing again. Maybe it’s my cynical side showing through but I can’t help but think that news editors know we parents are wracked with the stuff and those kinds of stories are like bait on a hook to us. They’re tapping into our feelings of fear and inadequacy and telling us: “Yes, you’re dead right, you’re messing your child up for life and putting them in mortal danger.”

Well, I’m determined not to buy into it. I can think up far scarier scenarios in my head anyway.

Update: I see Omani has been thinking along similar lines as he has a funny post about the shocking state of affairs at his own *ahem* creche.