Why did I automatically assume that when the babysitter couldn’t make it, I had to step in? Had my poisonous guilt, my desire to be the perfect mother, the blind panic not to disappoint my children or have them miss out because I wasn’t home all the time so clouded my vision that I couldn’t even see how insane that decision was? But more important, what was I teaching her? Beyond giving her a working mother role model of an angry, cursing, crazy harpy, I was teaching her that she was at the center of the universe. Far from the lesson I thought I was teaching her—to stick with something and not
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