Diane Flacks is a performer and playwright. Her latest play is Guilt (A Love Story).
I recently heard from an expert on TikTok that parents feel guilty 23 times a day.
What do they do with the other 23 hours and 55 minutes?
In the best of times, I felt guilt as a mom. Likely, it was due to a psychic scar of my Jewish heritage. To illustrate, I’ll paraphrase a joke by American stand-up comedian Judy Gold. A daughter explains to her Jewish mother that she’s going to give up law school and become an artist. The mom responds, “I survived the Holocaust for this?” Some of my non-Jewish friends find this joke uncomfortable; I find it hilarious.
My guilt began when my sons were infants. While I was nursing, if my eldest was colicky, I agonized: “Why did I eat that Wheat Thin?” When my sons didn’t do well on a test, it was: “Why didn’t I help with math?” (I think we all know why.) I’d even dream about it. Like the dream where I left my son in the grocery store with the cabbages. Who eats cabbage? And who was I to think I could be a mother? In life, of course, we make so many mistakes that we stop dreaming of them, and dream of sleep instead.
A good friend once said to me, “Small kids, small problems.” What I didn’t realize is small problems, small guilts. Big problems, and guilt becomes a monster.
Shortly after my ex and I separated, I felt like I was walking around with a raccoon in a cage, inside my chest, at all times. The separation was my decision, and I couldn’t reconcile that these children, whom I would kill for if someone hurt them, or even if someone rolled their eyes at them at a restaurant, were now being hurt because of me.
I reached out to a smart, well-adjusted friend whose marriage had recently ended. I was looking for a tiny light at the end of a tunnel whose gaping shame-maw was swallowing me. He took me for coffee for four hours and explained that he spent about three years walking around in a daze. He described himself as a ghost.
“But it gets better, right?” I asked.
My friends were losing patience. The guilt, they said, wasn’t helping. They were right, of course, but they were missing the point. In a culture that promotes instant gratification and self-love (#youdoyou), where is the space for moral culpability? And on the other side of the continuum: Is it possible to have personal accountability without using blame and guilt as a punitive cudgel? And what about the current political moment, when we have billionaires who seem to feel no remorse, and are cheered on by millions, with their red hats and their ids hanging out?
In fact, the culture has become shame- and guilt-free. It produces delightful icons like George Santos and Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose power and wealth grow the more they spit in the face of guilt, following their leader, whose motto is to lie big and never say sorry. On the other hand, an offensive act can ignite an unforgiving viral mob, no matter how much the individual apologizes. Like so much in our lives, guilt has become polarized. As I looked around me, it seemed clear that the culture was wrestling with guilt, too – I just hadn’t noticed.
When I was pregnant, I suddenly realized that there were pregnant people everywhere! Like when you buy a Volkswagen and immediately notice hundreds on the road. When I ended my marriage, I became deeply aware of the lack of stories of women who ended marriages in the zeitgeist. Sure, there were countless movies about the other woman, or the woman scorned, or the rare and titillating stories of moms who abandon their families. But what about the mother who simply ends a marriage? And what about women who have midlife crises? Do they buy sports cars, end up with younger partners and have Hollywood glorify their redemption arcs?
So, as I am wont to do in my capacity as a writer, I dove in. I researched, looking into the etymology of guilt, the theories as to what it is and how to wrestle with it.
One thing I discovered is that guilt consumes and creates a self-focus that can serve as a shield for the real feelings, one of which is loss. Just because you are the one who called it doesn’t mean you’re not also grieving. And guilt might be easier to feel than mourning for something that you let slip away, or blew up, as the case may be.
Guilt, like grief, is a barnacle. It is not something you can muscle past, or peel off. It has its own timing – and it might even leave something beautiful in its wake. Destruction can bring renewal and, as awful as it is to go through, the way through is, well, through.
Guilt no longer consumes me; it’s more of an old companion. I have affection for it, but I don’t let it swamp me. It has a useful place, as a bringer of compassion and repair. And for that, I’m grateful.