Motherly Guilt Quotes

On my daughter's first day of kindergarten, another mom said something that made me realize I had become my own Greek, suffocating mother. She said, 'Just think, in 13 years they'll leave us and go to college!' And I went, 'Gulp.'

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine

Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education. She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.

She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.

As a woman and as a mother, as a young mother, I felt guilty about being successful.

Sometimes you think you aren't a good mama; you always feel a bit guilty when you're a mom. You want to be everywhere.

I'm glad to say my father never felt ashamed of me, but my mother probably did.

Guilt management can be just as important as time management for mothers.

I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.

I am an average mother in almost every way, so yes, much to my regret, I do yell at my children.

I always feel guilty when I want to go get my nails done or hair done because it takes time away, but I know moms need that alone time, too.

I am really bad at being a mom. I think it's hard for me to be a mom. I do my best. I am not the poster child for being a mother, I will say that. I wish I was.

I think while all mothers deal with feelings of guilt, working mothers are plagued by guilt on steroids!

I have to be very careful, however, because I have no intention of providing an excuse for this behavior. It's an attempt to explain how so many women come from backgrounds where the pressure to be a good mother is so severe that if they can't do it, something really snaps.

There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.