I’m not talking about mum guilt.  Feeling guilty as a mum is a thing that’s been talked about so much on and off the internet so I won’t add anything more to that, at least for today.  I am talking of another kind of guilt – yup there are so many of them!  I am talking about work guilt or working at home mum guilt.  The whole working for yourself and feeling guilty that you’re not doing as much as you should.  These last couple of weeks I have not been very well at all.  I am slowly recovering but in the midst of my illness, we had to pack everything up (again) and move house to a temporary place while our builders have started with our home renovations.  On top of that there have been numerous kitchen planning appointments, extended meetings with the builders, liaising with the Council for required permissions and so much more.  If you’ve ever done a complete house renovation, you know it’s a huge project.

While I’ve continued with this blog as best I could during these last two weeks I’ve had a constant nagging feeling of guilt.  Guilt that I’m not doing enough on my business.  Guilt that I did not post for two days last week. Guilt that every waking minute should be spent planning, tweeting, pinning, replying to emails instead of having a few minutes of down time to recover from my illness.  I have had to take some time out because when you’re burning up with temperature, focusing on work is not easy or even possible.  So I have had no choice.  But that just makes me feel even more guilty. 

If a friend of mine came to me with this predicament, I would strongly give her the advice that when she is ill she needs to take some time out – guilt free.  After all, nothing is as important as your health. But I was struggling to take this advice myself.  Until I decided that a sick, exhausted, unhappy me would be no good to anyone.  Not to my family, not to my work and not to our building project.  So I have worked fewer hours this week by just focusing on the priorities and letting everything else wait.  Because of that I’ve been able to taken some much needed rest and I am actually starting to feel better and happier for it.  Those feelings of guilt won’t disappear overnight but I’m realising that sometimes it’s so important and necessary to focus on yourself.  We all put so much pressure on ourselves be it for our work, family life, parenting (often all three combined) that when we can’t do as much as we feel we should, those big, ugly feelings of guilt start to rear their heads and become difficult to shake off.  But with effort and determination we can and should shake them off.

Why am I telling you all this?  Because these feelings are so relevant to this blog and because I’m hoping that by talking about it we can help each other realise that we shouldn’t feel guilty for not working enough (or for anything in our lives).  That it’s ok to take time out or even a day off and that will actually help you feel better and most likely work better.  That if you work from home it doesn’t mean that you should feel like you need to work all the time.   And because sometimes we all need to take a step back and remember what’s really important so I hope this post will serve as a reminder to me in the future. 

Are you a mum who works from home?  Do you feel guilty when you can’t work as much as you should or could?  I’d love to hear how you deal with this guilt?

{photo via}