The guilt of working parents: an honest reflection

There is a work call that still comes back to me at unlikely moments: in the shower, while I wait for the water to boil. It was not a call I could have postponed, or at least that is how it seemed to me then, and my son was not yet three. That afternoon I switched on the television and left him there, on his own, for forty minutes that felt endless.

Before I had children, I was convinced I knew exactly how things would go. I had watched other mothers, read and listened, and formed a very precise idea of what I would do and what I would never do. Television before the age of three was one of my fixed rules: it was simply out of the question. Then real life arrived, with deadlines and calls that could not be moved, and that certainty crumbled during an otherwise ordinary afternoon.

I am not telling this story to describe an isolated incident. I am writing it because I believe almost every working parent has a similar scene stored away somewhere, hidden because it is not something they are proud of. The point is not the television itself, which probably did no real harm. The point is that precise feeling of having betrayed an idea of yourself, of having accepted a compromise you once swore you would never make.

And perhaps this is the hardest thing to accept: the convictions we form beforehand, when children are still only a possibility, rarely survive contact with reality. Not because they were wrong to begin with, but because they arose in a life that had not yet reckoned with work that will not wait or nights that grow shorter without permission. People without children imagine parenthood as a series of choices to get right; those who have children know that it is, above all, a series of compromises to manage, day after day, without a manual.

Guilt is a constant and rather unfair companion in all this, because it always springs from a comparison with an idea of the perfect parent who does not exist, rather than from everything we have actually done for that child across thousands of other hours and days. One afternoon in front of the television weighs more heavily in the memory than months spent building towers out of cushions or reading the same story for the tenth time in a row. It is not a matter of logic: guilt always chooses the most uncomfortable episodes to remember and lets everything else slip away.

What I have learnt, if I have learnt anything, is that time with our children is not measured by subtracting mistakes, but by the quality of what remains when we are fully present. A book read together in the evening, with all the attention that moment deserves, is worth more than ten distracted afternoons, even without a television involved. Telling a child a story, with the right voice and at the right pace, is one of the few moments no work call can interrupt: for those ten minutes, you are there, and nowhere else.

I do not know whether I will one day tell my son about that afternoon in front of the television. Perhaps I will, when he is old enough to understand that parents, even those who write children's books, are still people who make mistakes and who come back the next evening to read a story with all the attention they had promised.