You were more distracted than you meant to be. It was a rougher day than you hoped. You were away longer than you were supposed to be. Plans went very differently than intended.

This is the life of a parent. Stuff goes wrong. You screw up. Events screw with your plans.

Recently, we interviewed happiness expert Dr. Laurie Santos—her class on happiness at Yale is the most popular in the school’s history—for the Daily Stoic podcast (watch here; listen here). During our conversation, she told us the story of the second arrow. It comes from the Buddha and it’s pretty simple: Life hits you with an arrow. The problem is that we hit ourselves with a second arrow right after—when we ruminate on our suffering, when we blame ourselves, when we tell ourselves we’ll never recover, when we choose to feel singled out.

And nobody does this more than parents, right? The guilt. The fear that we’ve done irreparable damage. The anxiety. The turning it into a whole thing with our kids. Acceptance would be so much better! We don’t need to respond to their tantrum with a tantrum of our own. We don’t need to beat ourselves up just because we messed up.

Things happen. Mistakes get made. Let’s focus on getting better, let’s focus on learning from what happened—not feeling guilty and awful and like the worst parent in the world because of what happened. The first arrow we don’t get to choose. The second one? That’s on us.