A Study of Guilt

I have heard it said that guilt is a woman's affliction. That thought has been weighing on my mind recently because I have become more and more aware that I feel guilty most of the time, and often for no reason at all.

I remember when I was a teenager and my mother would never want to go anywhere recreational, and when she did, she did not have any fun. When I asked her why she would say that she could not enjoy herself when she had things at home (housework) that needed to be done. At that time, I realized that there is always housework to be done and if you let it bother you all the time, you will never have any fun, but now I find myself feeling guilty if I participate in something recreational when there is housework to be done. Does anybody else have this problem?

Another problem my mother had was magical thinking. The best example of it that I can think of is one rare day my mom, sister, friend Therese and I managed to drag Mom to an amusement park called Darien Lake (before it became a Six Flags). Mom was there because none of us girls had our drivers licenses yet. If we could have driven ourselves, I don't think Mom would have gone with us, but I digress.... We had a great time at Darien Lake, but there was a band playing there that night called Echo and the Bunnymen. This band attracted a bunch of people dressed in punk style with their hair spiked or shaved into Mohawks, etc... and my mom believed these people were, for lack of a better word, "evil." The problem is that we lived in a small community and were Jehovah's Witnesses, we had never seen the likes of these concert goers before. Well, that day, my mother found a dollar on the ground, and since there was way to find the person it belonged to, and she did not believe anybody would ask loss and found about a single dollar, she kept it. That night the house of one of our close friends' caught fire, and two people died in it. My mother actually thought that it happend because she had picked up that dollar at the amusement park, and it must have been dropped by one of the concert goers, whome she equated with Devil worshippers.

Now, I know that does not make any sense at all, after all, why would God burn down someone else's home instead of ours if he were going to punish us for taking a dollar that belonged to a Devil worshipper? But that is the kind of example I had while I was growing up. There are so many more examples I could relay, but I think you get the picture.

My goal with this blog is to give women a place where they can talk about the feelings of guilt they are experiencing, explore whether it is something they should feel guilty about, and hopefully discover ways of coping with guilt. Please share your thoughts, feelings, ideas and stories.