Guilt's Quiet Knife

I cradle my failures in the dark,
each one a cold stone pressed against my chest,
weighting down the promise I made at dawn to be enough.

It steals into my nights on silent feet,
whispering in the spaces between my heartbeat:
“You forgot her lunch.”
“You snapped at her again.”
“You’re too tired to matter.”

Mom guilt is a fog that blinds,
turns smiles into regrets,
little hands into reminders of everything I’m not doing right.

It’s the echo of “should have,”
the ghost of missed moments—
the bedtime story unread,
the hug delayed by deadlines,
the quiet tears I hide behind the microwave’s hum.

Some days it claws at my confidence
like a silent auction of my worth,
each regret sold to the highest doubt,
leaving me bankrupt of grace.

When morning comes,
guilt coils around my spine,
an invisible leash that yanks me into the relentless
“what if.”

It is the weight of other people’s eyes
and the ache of my own judgment,
a constant metronome of “not enough”—
not enough love,
not enough time, not enough mother.

But listen:
guilt trembles in the light.
It cracks when named,
loses its grip on tired shoulders.
I stand in the hollow it carved,
find my own voice echoing back:

I am trying.
I am loving.
I am learning.

And so I breathe through the fog,
untangle the knife it pressed to my ribs,
forge a new promise—
to forgive the stumbles,
to collect my fragments like stars,
to tell myself,
in every sunrise:

I am enough.
I am here.
I will love anyway.