It’s not guilt. It’s grief.

I had a whole rhythm here for a while.

One more reflective essay and another that shared the relevant research and tools. It was a steady cadence that made sense for the season I was in.

But then I looked up and realized I am six weeks away from launching a book called Ambitious Mother, while also living the very thing I wrote about: children needing things, work needing things, the house needing things, my body needing things, and some days, not nearly enough space for all of it.

So things are going to shift here for a bit.

For the next stretch, I’ll be writing once a week instead of twice, and I’m going to bring you a little more behind the scenes of what it looks like to launch Ambitious Mother while also being, very much, an ambitious mother.

This is me practicing the thing I keep writing about: healthy striving.

Choosing the form that fits the season.
Letting something be simpler without making that mean it matters less.

Which brings me to summer, and guilt, and the feeling I keep hearing from mothers everywhere: the one that sounds like, “I should be doing more,” when sometimes the truer sentence is, “I wish things could be different.”

This all came up for me last Friday when my kids had the day off… and I had a mountain of work that had not gotten done.

I had to prep for and do a TV news segment, record a podcast, see two clients, write a workshop. There was also the regular background complexity of family life right now, including more doctor’s appointments than usual for one of my kids, and the way those appointments take up not only time, but attention and worry.

The ironic part is that the TV segment I was preparing for was about working parents in summer and the pull so many parents feel this time of year, when we are supposed to make summer feel magical and relaxed and full of memory-making, but we still have to work. As grownups we still have goals we are pursuing and responsibilities we cannot simply set down because school is out and the sun is shining.

And while I was trying to put language around that for other parents, I was living my own very ordinary version of it in real time…

My youngest was home, and she was bored in the way kids are bored before they have put any real effort into figuring out what they want to do. I wanted to set my work aside and say, “Let’s go to the pool,” or take the beautiful day and make it a “fun summer day.” I wanted to be available in that blurry summer way, moving in and out of the house, making lunch, playing a game if someone asked, driving somewhere without watching the clock.

Instead, I told her I had to go upstairs and do some work.

She was okay. And she was bored. That was okay, but still I felt guilty. Not full shame, exactly. I didn’t go all the way to “I’m a bad mom.” But there was a quick, familiar thought: I shouldn’t be working. This is hard on her. Maybe I’m making the wrong choice.

It came fast, that thought. Faster than I wish it did, especially given the fact that I was literally preparing to speak on television about the guilt working parents feel in summer.

But there it was. Hello old friend.

I went upstairs, sat down with my notes, and tried to figure out how to say something useful in five minutes about this exact pull. The one where summer asks for looseness, and work asks for focus, and parents are somehow expected to make both happen effortlessly.

And as I sat with the feeling for a little longer, I realized guilt was not quite the right word. As I often tell my clients to do, I got curious. I noticed that I did not actually believe I was doing something wrong. I did not believe my daughter was harmed by one boring day. I did not believe that working was bad, or that my book launch was selfish, or that a good mother would have cleared the day and made herself endlessly available.

I knew, somewhere steady inside me, that this was okay.
But it still hurt. And then I realized, it was grief.

Guilt says, I am doing something wrong, but grief says, I wish I could be in two places at once.

That is the distinction. Guilt makes the feeling moral. It turns a hard moment into a verdict.

It asks us to evaluate ourselves:
Am I good?
Am I bad?
Am I selfish?
Am I failing?

And for mothers, that question is never very far away.

But grief feels different. It does not necessarily mean the choice is wrong.

It means something matters.
It means more than one thing matters.
It means I love my children and want to be with them, and I also have work to do.
It means I would have rather gone to the pool, and also the work needed to happen.

It means I wanted two things that could not happen at the same time.

That is all. It’s not a moral failing, just limits of space and time.
I want both and cannot have both at the exact same minute of the day.

So the feeling was not really telling me that I had made the wrong choice, but just that I am human and limited and cannot live every version of a day at once.

I think this is where so many mothers get caught.

We feel the ache of a limit, and because we have been trained to translate so much of motherhood through guilt, we assume the ache must mean we have done something wrong, but sometimes the ache is just the ache. It is simply the feeling of being one person in one body with one calendar and one afternoon and more than one thing we care about.

It is the feeling of loving our children and needing to work.

It is the feeling of wanting to make summer feel open and easy, while knowing that summer is still filled with deadlines, meetings, bills, appointments, and the ordinary responsibilities of adult life.

It is the feeling of having goals that matter and children who matter and no magical ability to multiply ourselves.

And when we call that guilt, we often add a second layer of suffering. Now we are not only sad that we cannot do both things. We are also blaming ourselves for not being able to do both things.

But when we call it grief, something softens. At least it did for me.

Grief is not easy, but it does not require a defense. It does not ask me to prove that my children are fine or that my work matters or that I am allowed to have ambitions. It simply lets me tell the truth: I wanted to be with her. I had to work. I was sad that I could not do both.

That is different from shame or failure or being a bad mother.

After I named it that way, I could move through the day a little more easily. Not perfectly. Not without frustration. But with less self-attack.

I worked as efficiently as I possibly could. I had promised myself, and my daughter, that I would be done at three. So I focused, was incredibly efficient, and did the work. I got through the segment, the podcast, the clients, the prep, the writing.

And at three, we went to the pool. I made dinner as easy as possible so we could stay as long as possible. I brought my youngest and my twelve-year-old. I unplugged. I watched them in the water. (Even now, with tweens and older kids, I still like to keep an eye on them in the pool.) I sat in the sun and felt the heat on my body and let myself take in their joy.

At some point, my daughter found a friend and barely spent time with me at all, which felt both completely predictable and quietly funny after all the emotion I had made around being available to her.

Later, after dinner, when I had made myself available again. I played Mancala with one of my other kids and ate ice cream.

I couldn’t do both at once, but I actually DID get both in the end. And I got the small relief of naming the feeling more honestly.

Remember, sometimes it is not guilt. Guilt is just the easy story we hand mothers for every discomfort. Sometimes it’s grief. And naming it more honestly is what lets us stay present to the life we actually have, instead of punishing ourselves for the one no human mother could ever fully manage.

I’m noticing this in real time as launch gets closer. There are things I want to give my children this summer, and there are things I want to give this book, and some days the ache is not really guilt but just the grief of being finite, of loving more than one thing and of not being able to be everywhere at once.