~Guilt~

I had a dream recently.  I can’t get it out of my head.

Basically, I was going to be late for work, and I couldn’t get my children away from a perfect looking, motherly angel of a woman who gave them cake on a yacht, and looked at me as if I were a monster as I tried to get my children off of said yacht and into the car so that I could get to the hospital on time.

Five minutes after I woke, I knew this was a mommy guilt dream.  I am a (very) single parent, and I am often leaving my children.  Most of the time, I am leaving them for my job, or to run errands.  But sometimes, I leave them just so I can go and have fun.  Be assured, that my children are old enough to be left alone, in fact my oldest at home just turned eighteen, but sometimes, the guilt pokes and pokes at me.  My mother stayed at home and had babies, and made bread, and always put on makeup right before my father came home.  (She also told me once, that I should always smile at my father, so that he wouldn’t yell at me so much.  True story.)

Today, when my kids were getting ready to leave for their first day of school, we were out of milk causing two of them to eat ramen noodles for breakfast, I hadn’t bought all the school supplies on the endless list, one of them left without saying goodbye, and I didn’t take any pictures to be proudly displayed on that pesky social networking site that starts with an “f”.  After they had left the house, and all was quiet, I sat with my coffee, and wrote.  I didn’t do dishes, I didn’t fold laundry.

It was glorious.