There's a pile of paper on my dining room table — art projects and connect-the-dots and math worksheets and snowflake puzzles and holiday quizzes and lots of pages that, on first glance, appear to be blank, faint marks visible only upon microscopic examination.

These papers, all 200,000 of them, belong to my sons, sent home by teachers who think parents treasure any item on which their child has scribbled, doodled, drawn or written during the school day. To be honest, the teachers probably send them home because they don't want piles of junk in their classroom, either. But I have no idea what to do with the stuff.

If my kids catch a glimpse of one in the trash, just the peek of a crayoned whirl at the bottom of the can, their lamentations shake the rafters.

For a little while, I was using the papers — God help me — as kindling in my fire pit. They were perfect, like newspaper but a bit sturdier. Eventually, though, I stopped. I was getting visions of my children walking outside, only to see me burning their treasured artwork, a sight surely to be later recounted on some psychiatrist's couch (or, more likely, over Zoom).

So the papers sit on my table, silently, judging me for being too meek to discard them and too unsentimental to treasure them. They, like everything else, induce guilt.

But one of the many warnings you don't get when you're pregnant is about how your brain will soon become a guilt-manufacturing machine.

You'll feel guilty for feeding them too much of the wrong food or too little of the right food, for not getting them out of the house enough or for getting them out of the house too much. You'll feel guilty for just about every other decision you make.

Some of it's cultural — the judgments and criticisms (spoken and otherwise) fall like rain on the heads of new parents:

"You aren't breastfeeding?"

"You're staying home for how long?"

"Don't you think she needs more socialization?" "A sibling?" "Doesn't he need swimming lessons?" "Homemade baby food?" "Lower fat milk?" "Higher fat milk?" "Soy milk?" "Almond milk?" "No milk?"

Those messages arrive, for sure, but the guilt isn't just because of them. There's a part of you, dormant before having children, and that part wants, desperately, to believe you have some control over how safe and happy and healthy your children are.

But that responsibility cuts both ways. If you can help, you can also hurt, and when you fail, whether it be a major or a minor shortcoming, your brain will remind you.

Case in point: The other night, I had a dream. It was Christmas in my dream, and my kids were opening presents. One, from my husband, was a giant bowl of fish and turtles. Another, from a cousin of mine, was a box filled with various domesticated rodents, including gerbils, hamsters and a particularly large black rat.

My kids squealed in delight, and though I mumbled some curses under my breath, they were happy and so I was at least tolerant of the menagerie. I went into the kitchen to make lunch, only to arrive back in the living room to find the bowl of water and fish overturned, fish wiggling around on the soggy rug and rodents trying to eat them.

I rushed to get the fish into a bowl, trying to keep away the hungry gerbils. As I put the fish into a container of water, I knocked it accidentally, scattering the fish and half-drowning the rodents. Back and forth I went, trying to save all the pets while using my body to block the carnage from my kids' sightline.

As I was having this stress dream — more of a nightmare, really — my husband lay beside me, also dreaming.

"I was playing baseball, and no one could get me out!" he announced triumphantly when he awoke. As he had rounded the bases, the opposing fielders had bobbled and dropped the balls at every turn.

"Typical," I grumbled.

What I'm trying to say is that the guilt will find you, even in sleep. And whether it's minor failures like overturned fishbowls or major failures like a car accident you couldn't avoid, you'll feel like it's your fault, even if it isn't.

The truth, that they're almost all minor failures, occasionally intrudes, and you remind yourself that you didn't choose the major failures, either, but we're unreasonable when it comes to our children.

We must keep making decisions, though, even when they're the wrong ones. Creating that pile on my dinner table is, itself, a decision. And one day, I'll either sweep those papers into the trash, en masse, or I'll use them to make a raging bonfire, full of the colors of the Crayola rainbow.

I just gotta find a day when the kids are at school to do it.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

Photo credit: roya ann miller at Unsplash