Sucker punched by mom guilt

I consider myself  to be a very supportive and active parent in my children's extra curricular activities.  Both my kiddos play soccer, year round and I make it a point to go to ALL their games and almost always, their practices as well.

You gotta remember, I work from home and spend my days with the most amazing daycare children anyone could ever ask for, but I work alone.  I crave other adult interaction, badly!  And getting out of the house a couple nights a week and schmoozing with other parents during practice helps keep me sane.  I really enjoy it.

When it comes to juggling schedules, the coach and I are pretty good about coordinating days and times, and with only 2 children we don't have too many conflicts with their schedules.  However, every once in a while something will come up and we each have to take a child to his or her game separately.

This past weekend the princess had her last indoor game of the season at 4:15 in the the afternoon, but the coach had scheduled a private baseball lesson for the the athlete at the same time, not knowing about the soccer game.  Since he is the assistant coach for her team, he had to be there which left me either cancelling the athlete's baseball lesson or missing her game.  We decided to keep the lesson and I made the trek to Leominster while the coach and the princess took off in the opposite direction for her game.

An hour or so later, I'm driving home in the car when my cell phone rings.  It's the coach and he is on cloud nine.  He proceeds to tell me how I missed the most amazing game that our daughter has ever played.  Not only that are you ready for this?  SHE SCORED HER FIRST GOAL EVER!!!

"Are you kidding me?????  And where the hell was I?  Not where I should have been!"

I sat there in the car driving home, listening to the princess tell me all about it, and me screaming like a lunatic for her, telling her how proud of her I was, when she dropped the bomb.

"I really wish you could have been there mom."

Just like that, I was hit in the gut with that awful mom guilt.  All the shoulda, coulda, woulda's  flashed through my mind, and all I could tell her was I was so sorry I missed it.  That was a sucky feeling,  one that I pride myself on not letting happen around here.  Sure there will be more great games, more great plays by each of my children and I'm sure more goals, but I will never get "that" goal, "that" moment back, and I hate that!

In typical princess fashion, she didn't hold it against me.  In fact the only time she ever brought it up was from a prompt from her obnoxious father, who thought it was funny to keep taunting me!!  (The stinker that he is!)

So I guess I gotta just let it go.  There's no use crying over spilled milk.  I'm sure there will be plenty more moments in their lives that no matter how hard I try and plan, I'm not always going to be there to see it with my own eyes.  As they continue to grow, they're probably not gonna want me around to witness all their "firsts" anyway.  (God help me, I'm cringing just thinking about this!!!!)  But for the time being, while they still care, I'm going to be their number one cheerleader.  And in the future too, even when they DON"T want me to be.  That 's just part of being a mom.