Ok so I am now doing my usual morning thing which revolves around guilt and which actually could be my real indulgence and which certainly seems to impact on just about everyone.

I feel guilty if I don’t go to the beach (you know, appreciate and use the beauty that surrounds you), I feel guilty if I lapse from my morning exercises (it’s a question of the flabby), I feel guilty if I don’t get my hubby’s brekky ( because often if I don’t he doesn’t and I can’t tell if today is one of those days), I feel guilty when I cannot get to walk the dog early enough or if I don’t have enough time to give him a big walk…and so it goes on, making my morning somewhat a touchy, irritating time and then I feel guilty due to the fact that my idea of a smiley happy nurturing mother and wife has gone ta ta. Sound a little peculiar…maybe…but lets face it guilty is not a new word in the female dictionary…we seem born to quite an art of it! And our culture doesn’t help…sorry is almost a forgone inclusion in most sentences ‘so sorry to be a nuisance but can you pass the salt please….I’m sorry but you seem to have missed the bus….sorry but I’m all out of coffee…’ like any one of these examples requires a sorry…lets face it how much control do you have over the bus or the salt or the coffee! (maybe over ingesting coffee…)

My son says (quite frequently)…’Sorry I didn’t do my jobs Mum, I was just real busy”……why bother with sorry, really!! Sorry definitely doesn’t make my life easier; it just won’t sweep the verandah or take out the rubbish will it?

It seems to me that this identity guilt stems from an attachment to an ideal of self and an ideal of circumstance and behaviour. Let’s face it if I was just happy to be and get on with it as best I could then I would not be guilty, instead I would be happy to just be…and do as I do…perhaps I am afraid to be me and I believe many of us are!
No one is perfect, perfection is an idealized state…. but what if we should all be perfect at being who we are….the best of ourselves as we are, not as we think we should be or someone else would like us to be…scary thought hey…what would the producers of ‘ super model’ think? Or the manufacturers of makeup and wrinkle cream….or the people who conduct workshops on becoming a successful and outgoing individual in a competitive world?…are these things promoting better selves or different selves…food for thought hey? And in the end if I didn’t spend so much time worrying about doing hair and makeup before going out or keeping the house clean in case someone visits or getting brekky for someone who really doesn’t care, so I can fulfill some imposed idea of what a good wife should be, then I’d probably have more time to be at the beach or walk the dog or be generally nice to the hubby and kids…yeh, I’m going to try and listen to me for once!

Bye bye