Guilty As Charged

Pam: Sometimes I feel guilty for not feeling guilty. I see other people wringing their hands over stuff that just doesn’t bother me.

Ann: Yeah, I know I’d feel better if you felt worse. What’d ya do now?

Pam: I told a white lie about why I missed my coworker’s wedding. The truth is I just couldn’t stand to watch him exchange “lifetime vows” for the fourth time.

Ann: Consider yourself lucky. I would have gone to the wedding and spent the entire ceremony feeling guilty about my silent predictions for their future…or lack thereof.

Pam: Heck, I don’t feel guilty about things I actually do and you feel guilty about things you merely think.

Ann: Obviously we went to different Catholic schools.

Pam: I think it’s not different schools, it’s different mothers. My mother taught all of us kids not to let people manipulate us with guilt. My sister called it a guilt-ectomy. Boy was my mother frustrated when we became adults and she realized she’d disarmed a mother’s most powerful weapon.


Ann: Well my mother always had a full arsenal and to this day I still feel as if I have a target painted on my back. I think I feel that way because my mother used to punish us for things she thought we might do while she wasn’t looking.

Pam: That goes to show you how different we are. When I got punished for something I didn’t do, I considered it a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. If I got away with something later, I figured we were square.

Ann: So that guilt-ectomy…do ya think it’s covered by my health insurance?