"A good daughter would do more"

The standard is the part of the guilt that never says what it wants.

Andrés Losada and colleagues built a questionnaire in 2010 to measure guilt in family carers, interviewing 288 people caring for a relative with dementia. The guilt sorted itself into five kinds. Guilt about doing wrong by the person cared for. Guilt about not rising to the occasion as a carer. Guilt about looking after yourself. Guilt about neglecting other relatives. And guilt about having negative feelings towards other people. Carers who scored high on the questionnaire scored higher on depression and anxiety and lower on satisfaction with their leisure and their support. Two things predicted higher guilt. Being a woman. And caring for a parent rather than anyone else.

Look at that list. If you feel guilty about your parent and guilty about looking after yourself and guilty about neglecting your children and guilty about resenting your brother, there's no arrangement of your week that satisfies all five. Time spent on any one of them is a failure on another. That's the standard. It isn't a measure you're falling short of. It's a set of measures that can't all be met, so it produces a fail whatever you do.

Ask what the good daughter's week looks like. Not in general. In hours. She visits how often, and rings how often, and works how much, and sees her own children how much, and sleeps when. If you try to write it down, one of two things happens. Either you describe your own week with the guilt removed, in which case you're already her. Or you describe a week with more hours in it than the one you have, in which case she doesn't exist and you've been comparing yourself with a ghost.

I think this is the honest reading of Losada's five guilts and Gonyea's finding together. The standard isn't set by your parent, who usually wants less than the standard demands. It's set by the guilt, and guilt doesn't set standards to be met. It sets them to be failed, so that it stays employed.