My boss says don’t worry about the near misses. He wasn’t referring to work when he said it – it had more to do with parenthood, life, the big stuff. My co-worker’s wife had left her two little kids in the car while running inside a friend’s house to pick up her third child. In the short time she was away from the car, a stranger opened the front door, grabbed her purse from the seat and ran off with it. The two kids in the car were unharmed but freaked. Three days later, when my co-worker was telling this story, his wife was still freaked by the ‘what ifs.’ That’s when my boss said you can’t worry about the near misses.

I keep thinking about that today, now that I, too, have experienced a near miss. My eight-year-old son has asthma. I didn’t know that last weekend when he was coughing that shallow, nonstop cough. I didn’t know when he was panting like a dog in the middle of the night that I should have taken him to the emergency room. I didn’t know when he kept vomiting the next day – Easter Sunday – it was because he couldn’t breathe. I thought he had the flu. When I took him to the pediatrician that Monday she gave me the big eye, the look that says – you should have taken him to the emergency room. This is some serious shit. I knew something was wrong wrong wrong when I held him in my lap on Sunday and felt his breath on my face. Something wrong in the core of him. But I put him in the car, hauled him to church, let him run at the Easter egg hunt til he almost collapsed.

So this is a near miss and I should let it go. But that’s what this blog is all about. The things we can’t let go. The things that eat at us because of the what ifs. It’s also about the fact that this is not our mother’s motherhood. That is to say, the person who trained me for this job didn’t do it the way I do it. She didn’t get up at 5:30 a.m. every morning and take the bus to downtown Houston and work in a high-rise and then come home at the end of the day and try to soothe all ruffled feathers and dole out big gobs of mom time even when she was feeling so thin and tired. She got up at 5:30 every morning, put the coffee on, made a great breakfast for my dad, and then some more for us, and then she padded down the hallway in her slippers and woke us gently and turned on the Popeye cartoons and let my little brother curl up on the couch until the very last second. And then we walked to school, which was so close to our house we could see her station wagon from our classroom windows, following her comings and goings all day, until it was time to go home and tell her every single minute detail of the day. I’m still trying to be that kind of mom. It’s not really working out that well. Because actually my husband is doing that job. I’m doing my dad’s job, hauling ass to Houston everyday, workin’ for the man (whoever he is).

So that’s what this blog is about. I call it Guilt because I used to be Catholic and now I’m Methodist but it doesn’t seem to matter diddly squat. I still have that good ole’ thick, sticky Catholic guilt – a sort of spiritual molasses — and it don’t wash off too easy. In Catholicism, you’re supposed to go to Confession when you feel guilty, but so far I can’t find the Protestant equivalent. I thought about making this blog sort of public confessional, and let the readers prescribe the penance.

If you’re not Catholic, this is how it goes: the person comes into the confessional booth, kneels down on a hard little board and says “Bless me Father for I have sinned, it’s been x since my last confession. These are my sins.” And then you tick them off like a grocery list. The priest gives you a blessing, which I can’t remember right now, and then he gives you a penance, which is usually one Our Father and three Hail Marys. At least, it was when I was little. They may have upped the ante since then, I really can’t say.

For you Protestants, the Our Fathers are pretty much the same, except shorter. Catholic Our Fathers stop on the word ‘evil.” I prefer the Protestant version, which stops on a much more positive note, the word ‘forever.’ A Hail Mary is not actually a football term, it’s a prayer to Jesus’ mother, whom Catholics seem to like much more than Protestants do, and I’m a little sad about that. I still like Mary a lot and miss singing those beautiful songs about her that they used to sing at Shrine of the True Cross when they crowned her statue with flowers. I can’t remember why they did this, and I’m sure my mother will call me up and tell me exactly why if she ever reads this blog. She has been pretty cool about my Methodism. Which is to say we don’t talk about it.

Anyhow, I was going to use this blog to post my sins and then let the readers vote on my penance. I was even going to post photos of my sins. Like my disgusting bathtub. That’s the sin of sloth. Or my bitchy handwritten note to my son’s teacher, who rides his ass way too much in my opinion. That’s the sin of bitchiness. You get the gist. Then I decided that being a Protestant now instead of a Catholic, I probably just wouldn’t do the penance. That’s what’s so great about being a Protestant. You can protest things like that. It’s actually encouraged.

I feel a lot better now, sort of like going to confession, but without the sore knees.