My feeling of guilt as a father

BarcelonaWhen you look at it from a more focused perspective, feeling guilty as a parent isn't as bad as it may seem. It means reflecting on what you do and don't do, and evaluating your actions and inactions. I highly doubt that people who don't feel guilty about parenthood are perfect parents; they simply don't engage in this self-assessment exercise. Out of a sense of self-worth or survival, I don't know.

I consider myself part of the first team, and I try to deal with that feeling of not always being the perfect parent as best I can. I'm from the generation of fathers who only had 15 days of paternity leave. One of the last before the law changed (my children were born in 2009 and 2012). And I made up for the guilt of not being able to help my partner more in the first months of Oriol and Jan's lives by adding 30 days of vacation time and spending a month and a half at his side. Hurray!

When Oriol was born in 2009, I was working as a sports journalist for a newspaper. This meant working almost every weekend, with afternoon/evening/night shifts. I took Oriol to daycare every day, yes, but by the time I got home around 11 p.m. he'd already had a bath, eaten dinner, and been sleeping for hours, and my partner had been asleep on the couch from sheer exhaustion. This tortured me until Oriol was born, and it became clear to me that I couldn't continue the same way. I didn't want to miss out on the moments I'd missed with Oriol with Jan. The schedule at a newspaper is what it is, but I asked to stop doing sports so I wouldn't have to work every weekend. I gave up the dream that drove me to study journalism out of guilt, but I did it out of conviction.

But there came a day when this wasn't enough anymore. I wanted to be able to spend more time with my children. I no longer worked every weekend and could make plans with my children, friends, and family. However, Monday through Friday I was still incredibly late to work and didn't exist for my wife and the kids, except to pick them up and take them to school. I was excited at work, but I wanted to spend more time with them... Damn guilt.

The constant comparison.

After seventeen years of working the schedules of a paper newspaper, I've had enough. Some job changes were voluntary, others weren't, but I've finally made it. I've had a job as a journalist for a few years now, with a "personal" schedule that allows for the famous work-life balance. But sometimes, just sometimes, when the current job is a mountain of work, the feeling of guilt returns, but in the opposite direction. Having given up jobs that made me tremble professionally so I could spend more time with my children. I don't regret it. Not at all. However, the feeling of guilt is nasty. It's always there, ready to rear its head.

But this feeling doesn't just arise from whether or not you're there. We humans are always comparing ourselves with others, and when we get together as a group of parents, we always consider whether our parenting method is better or worse than others'. Do you set enough limits? Is the family menu nutritionally balanced enough? And when it comes to secondary school... Shouldn't I have bought them a cell phone? Shouldn't I not let them use social media? Is Family Link useless? Are my children hacking it? I always think that maybe I'm not doing as well as others. A constant feeling of guilt. But a blessed feeling because it means I care about parenting and I work and strive to do it better every day.