I’ve always been wracked with guilt over the slightest transgressions. I cut my toenails too short. I’m always late. I don’t call my relatives enough. I sleep in. You name it, I feel guilty about it.

I married a Catholic 32 years ago, and we raised our family with his religious traditions. However, I’m the only one in our family who hasn’t confessed to a priest. I feel guilty about that, too.

When our youngest daughter, Lilly, went to confession during her confirmation class retreat at age 15, I grilled her afterward over lunch at a diner, “So what did you tell Father Kris?” The sacrament is shrouded with a veil of secrecy, but I pressed Lilly anyway.

“I said, ‘Bless me father for I have sinned, it has been eight years since my last confession …’”

“Yeah, yeah, I know that part, I want to know what you confessed to?”

“I told him that I’d been disrespectful to you guys a lot since my first confession.”

Relieved that Lilly’s sins were minor, I plopped another puddle of ketchup alongside my fries, and thought back to Lilly’s first confession eight years prior.

Second grade was a dicey year for Lilly. Emerging from the shadow of her dominant older siblings, Lilly was making her mark at Fairfield Elementary School. However, it still wasn’t clear whether Lilly’s “mark” would be top grades, or graffiti on the bathroom wall.

My Navy husband was deployed for a year, and I was doing my best to hold it all together. Between the exterminator bills, scout meetings, dog walks, dryer lint, piano lessons, sinus infections and football practices, there wasn’t much time left for mother-daughter chats about right and wrong.

As the third child, Lilly often got the short end of the stick, but she never once stopped to ask, “What about me?” With a smile full of awkward teeth and a carefree attitude, Lilly was easy to love. But as a happy-go-lucky kid, Lilly was also easy to overlook.

Until one day when I got a call from the school.

“We think Lilly has forged your signature. Can you come in?” Principal Stubblefield said on the call. Apparently, Lilly was told to have a parent sign an Incident Report written about Lilly bossing a boy on the playground. Lilly decided to sign it for me.

Unable to write cursive, she conned her older brother into showing her “how Mommy signs her name,” then cut out his best attempt (white paper), and taped it onto the Incident Report (green paper).

Not exactly foolproof, but pretty sneaky for a 6-year old.

I blamed myself, of course. Thanks to my parental neglect, Lilly was now destined to rotate through dangerous county jails, maximum security facilities and sketchy halfway houses on her way to a life of hard crime. My dreams for her future were suddenly reduced to hoping she’d get her GED while serving out a sentence for Grand Theft Auto.

In an attempt to set things right, I asked Principal Stubblefield to rough Lilly up. Not physically, but rather, the principal would call Lilly to the office (every kid’s worst nightmare), sit her down across from the big desk and open the gigantic rulebook to the page that says dishonest kids get expelled from school.

In case that didn’t scare her straight, I took Lilly to her first confession a few days later. I stood in the back of the church while Lilly sat in a pew with Father Jim, telling him a long story. He listened intently and murmured back to her in solemn tones. Seeing Lilly confess, I felt guilty for not paying more attention to my little girl.

At the diner, I took the last bite of my tuna melt and asked Lilly what she was given as a penance. Rolling her eyes, Lilly reported, “For a few months, I’m supposed to perform acts of respect toward my parents.”

Despite my parenting transgressions, Lilly turned out to be an honest young woman of whom I am very proud. I realize that those moments of contrition over the years have made us both better people.

As for those “acts of respect,” I confess, I’m still waiting.

Read more at themeatandpotatoesoflife.com and in Lisa’s book, “The Meat and Potatoes of Life: My True Lit Com.” Email: meatandpotatoesoflife@gmail.com