Guilt-Ridden Aunt - The Great Potato Incident of 2011 - by Laura Bateman

Guilt-Ridden Aunt - The Great Potato Incident of 2011

I will admit, until very recently, I have been reading about “Mommy Guilt” with great sympathy, but not much empathy.
I read about moms measuring every gram sugar (organic, of course), obsessing over every minute of television (educational, bi-lingual, and less than 60 minutes a day), plotting to control the uncontrollable (through sheer force of will) from their first thought of the morning through their stress dreams at night . . . and I thought, Oh, these poor guilty moms . . . inventing an unattainable a perfect standard, imagining an all-parent competition league . . . why are they self-imposing all of this pressure and guilt?
I had been reading with interest, but all the while shaking my head and knowing that could never be me.
It seemed obvious to this non-parent that the perfect-parenting target is always moving, and it’s too small to hit anyway, so parents should just do their best and not worry about it. I would simply maintain this objective, reasoned perspective and refuse to participate in the culture of and guilt and competition.
Shoot, most of my best childhood memories were born of something that my parents “screwed up” by today’s standards. And I turned out fine. Injuries are a childhood rite of passage and necessary character-building experiences. Surely these guilty moms didn’t have perfect parents themselves- have they forgotten that they were able to persevere, survive, and procreate despite their own parents’ “failings.” Where is the desire and need to be perfect coming from? “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” right?
I was very smugly satisfied with my own self-awareness and resolve, until I was brought down hard by a two-year-old nephew with a twice-baked potato.
My new husband and I were having Christmas dinner with his brother’s family (my in-laws) at their house. As the seating arrangements took shape at the table, I was very happy to be positioned next to my two-year-old nephew while his parents were several chairs away. The duties of entertaining him and cutting his food would fall to me, and I could display my amazing developing maternal skills to my new husband and mother-in-law. Awesome.
Everything started out well. My nephew was smiling, sitting patiently in his seat. As each serving dish made its way around the table, I arranged a small helping into a manageable kid’s portion on his plate. I spread out a half-dozen cut cooked carrots so that he could pick them up easily. I sliced his honey-baked ham into kid-friendly strips. I buttered each individual bite of bread for him.
His plate looked great, he was happy, and I was pleased with how well I was doing.
Then, a plate of twice-baked potatoes came around the table. Since they were already whipped, they didn’t need any special slicing or dicing. I dropped a serving on my nephew’s plate and turned my attention to my own. Having done such an amazing job of surrogate parenting over the past 2 minutes, I had worked up quite an appetite.
Despite my outstanding food preparation efforts, within a split second, my nephew was screaming and crying, with huge crocodile tears falling from his face into his lap. The twice-baked potato was still hot. It hadn’t occurred to me to check the temperature. He hadn’t just touched it; he had jammed his sensitive little hand into it. And he was now very upset.
I tried dabbing his hand with ice water, making goofy faces, and kissing his fingers. Nothing I could do would calm him in the least. Finally, his mother (my sister-in-law) had to retrieve him from his tear-soaked chair next to me. He finished the meal on her lap. His pre-cut plate of food sat uneaten next to me throughout the meal, a monument to my failure.
Nobody at the table seemed fazed by the incident, but I knew I had done a terrible, unforgivable thing. Sure, his hand looked fine, and his crying quickly subsided once Mommy-kisses were deployed, but what if that potato had been hotter? What if it had been boiling soup? I might not have thought of the temperature then, either. What if it had been a flaming dessert and my nephew had burned his eyebrows off with it? My own guilty hot tears were burning in my eyes.
I could never be trusted to watch a child again, not even right in front of their own parents . Certainly I was unfit to have one of my own. Only an incompetent fool could allow a tragedy of this proportion to occur during a family holiday. I was a danger to children.
My brother and sister-in-law seemed unconcerned, but each time they dismissed my apologies I became more convinced that they would ask my husband to keep me away from their kids in the future. They were probably going to hold a family meeting about it the next time I excused myself from the table. Maybe Child Services would be called.
My nephew was giggling and playing with his Christmas toys by the time we started clearing the table, but how long would it be until we could be sure that there would be no permanent damage from the potato? I watched him like a hawk to determine whether he was favoring the potato-hand. I couldn’t detect an anomaly, but I’m no doctor. Maybe it should be evaluated by a specialist?
Over the next two hours, I asked my husband if his brother was mad at me about the potato a thousand times. He placated me with reassurances the first nine-hundred and ninety-nine times, and then told me he would dose me with Nyquil if I didn’t let it go. I secreted myself to the guestroom to google “child skin food burn” on my ipad.
After closely observing my nephew using his hands for several more hours, and having detected no resentment or passive-aggressiveness from my in-laws during that time, I came around to believing that maybe everything was going be alright, despite my failure with the potato that basically ruined Christmas.
Now, two days later, I can type out this story with my chest only tightening a little bit. Even though I clearly know I blew it out of proportion – that’s the whole point of the story. It still feels horrible.
I can only imagine that Mommy guilt is more intense and frequent than Potato-Headed-Aunt guilt. It’s apparently a guilt that really is impervious to intellect and objective reasoning. I’ll be reading this blog from a different perspective now . . . and I’m desperately hoping that ya’ll do find the Mommy-guilt cure before my husband and I have our first kid (and I do something truly terrible, like get baby shampoo in its eye).