A topic on which I am very qualified to write

I hate to brag, but I will anyway. I am a world-reknowned expert on guilt. I have won the world guilt olympics 5 times. The National Association of Guilt Experts has named me "Top Guilt Performer for 2003-2009." What kind of dedication does it take to achieve such greatness?

If my house is dirty I feel guilty and clean it. Once it's clean I feel guilty that maybe it's too clean & people who have dirty houses might be uncomfortable when they see how clean my house is. I don't want them to feel uncomfortable. But then again I don't want a dirty house, so I just go back and forth between dirty and clean, filled with guilt all the while.

I am wracked with guilt when I ask David to come home from work "early" so I can go out with my friends and enjoy myself. But if I don't go I feel guilty because I didn't go & support whatever fun thing the girls had planned for us to do. If David asks if he can go to a baseball game after work, however, I work my hardest to make sure he goes & enjoys himself. I want him to do something besides work. I make a conscious effort to rid him of any guilt. It's like I want to keep all the guilt for myself.

Whenever my kids want something they cannot have I feel guilty for saying no all the time, but when I say yes I feel guilty & wonder if I should have said no. This results in a very inconsistent application of yes's & no's & a consistent feeling of guilt.

If I call a friend just to chat I feel guilty that I'm keeping them on the phone for so long. However, when I don't call them at all I, of course, feel guilty for being an inattentive friend. I call sporadically & so I alternate between feeling guilty for not calling & then feeling guilty because I called.

Guilt overcomes me when I ask a friend for a favor, like watching my children. So I often put off calling them until the last minute, and so then I add on the guilt of asking someone for a huge favor last minute, when they probably had other plans and had to change them to accomodate me. And of course if they call me for a favor, well, you know what happens, but that was another post.

When I have a responsibility I feel guilty if I don't do everything perfectly. I am so driven to perfection that it takes up more time than it probably should, so then I feel guilty because I am spending too much time on that when I could be playing with my kids or talking to David. So I go for periods where I neglect my duties to do the more important stuff, like being a good mom, but then when the guilt gets the better of me I'll go back to overachieving for a while so I can feel a different kind of guilt.

If I stay up late I feel guilty. But if I go to bed early I lay in bed feeling guilty for all the dirty dishes in the sink & unread emails in the inbox. And I end up staying awake late anyway, eventually drifting into a guilty sleep.

At parties, guilt drives me to make sure nobody gets left out. I try to talk to anyone who seems lonely. But then I feel guilty that I'm not talking to my friends. And so I go back and forth between the lonelies & the friends, feeling guilty & not enjoying myself as much as I should.

If you need any further evidence of this I would be glad to give you a call & tell you about it, but I'll probably make the call short. You probably have other things you need to be doing. I would feel guilty keeping you from your work. And I have a record to uphold after all.