Vachon Imagined

I hadn’t known guilt until I became a mother.

Which is ironic, considering guilt arrived on the heels of the most extraordinary thing I’d ever done: becoming a mother. The most unselfish act of my entire life.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times when I got the call from the doctor telling me I was pregnant.

It was the best of times because, well, a baby.

It was the worst of times because, well, pregnancy.

All the things they don’t tell you—or maybe they do tell you, but you don’t really hear them. It’s a bit like joining the Army. People can explain it to you all day long, but you don’t know until you do it. You can’t know until you’re standing in it, wondering why your ankles have disappeared and why a smell from three rooms away suddenly feels like a personal attack.

Motherhood is much the same. Some women charge toward it. Others stay far, far away from it.

Honestly, smart choice.

Somewhere along the way, guilt becomes a kind of signal. A flare shot into the sky every time you’re convinced you’ve completely messed it up. Only a God in heaven—gullible, patient, and blissfully removed from this particular drama—could understand it.

I look down at my child having his one-hundred-thousandth meltdown of the day and think, I can’t do this. I am genuinely not built for this.

And yet, somehow, I do it.

Guilt, like anything else, can be a resource. It can wash over you like a wave, showing you where you’ve fallen short. But it can also become the thing that quietly runs your entire life.

The reason some people eat their mother’s spaghetti sauce when it tastes like a culinary cry for help isn’t because they enjoy it. They eat it because they don’t want to hurt her feelings. They eat it because disappointing someone feels more dangerous than disappointing themselves.

That’s the strange power of guilt.

It can teach compassion, accountability, and care. But it can also teach self-abandonment. It can convince us that keeping everyone else comfortable is a virtue, even when it comes at our own expense.

Motherhood seems especially vulnerable to this bargain. The guilt arrives, and suddenly every decision feels like a referendum on whether you’re a good mother, a good wife, a good person. Before long, you’re not asking what is true, necessary, or healthy. You’re asking what will make the guilt stop.

The problem is that guilt is never satisfied. Feed it once, and it returns hungry.

And yet, guilt lives with us because it’s part of consciousness. Part of the human condition. It’s the uncomfortable gift of seeing things as they are and trying to work with them the best we can.

Freedom comes when you can look guilt in the face, taste it, survive it, and somehow reach your arm straight through it toward something on the other side.

Not the absence of guilt.

Not perfection.

Freedom.

The freedom to know when guilt is telling the truth and when it’s simply demanding another sacrifice.

I think that’s where mothers are made.

Or maybe built.

As for me, I was definitely made.

Because none of this came naturally. Motherhood didn’t arrive wrapped in instinct and grace. It just arrived. And when it did, it split me wide open—physically, emotionally, spiritually, and in a thousand other ways I still cannot count and cannot name.

The strange thing is that the splitting wasn’t the end of me.

It was the beginning.