Nobody wants to openly say they are a ragey mother.
Nobody wants to be an angry parent.
I remember doing a story on IG years ago, without thinking about it much, where I basically said I was going to the gym to burn off the mum rage, and someone (another mother, in fact), commenting this: “that’s interesting.”
Perhaps she really did mean it was interesting, but I sensed no relatedness in her comment. No like, “oh yeah, I’m with you. I experience that too.” But much more of “oh, how bizarre. I’ve literally never been angry a day in my life.”
That one comment, was yet another piece of evidence that mothers were not supposed to be angry, and certainly not supposed to admit to feeling rage.
Because how can you be peacefully making sourdough bread with little hands, and running barefoot through fields with daisies in your hair, twirling your beige dress while keeping an eye on your many children, if you are actually raging inside?
Ha! You can’t. And yet - we have so many reasons for rage. The systems we live in, the lack of choices for our kids, the virtual death of support for families, the undervalued work we do, day in day out, rampant capitalism, the gradual destruction of the earth - you get the picture.
And yet, when I posted that, I’d been angry for years. Anger was my secret – because I grew up believing I had nothing to be angry about, that anger was un-feminine and scary and bad. So I kept it buried. Except even a dormant volcano will sometimes erupt. And so I did. Not often, but often enough. And when I let it out, it scared me. It felt destructive for everyone around me, but also deliciously liberating for me.
I was terrified by how what I felt was more than anger, it was full-on rage. I felt rage when things didn’t go a certain way, I felt rage when my child didn’t listen, I felt rage when my husband left his dirty clothes on the floor. I felt rage at myself when I said I would go running in the morning and then didn’t. When I continued to set myself unrealistic expectations, and inevitably fell short of them. When my children didn’t become the people I wanted them to be. When I didn’t become the person I thought I should be, the person I told myself I wanted to be.