Anger management

Navigating the red mist

Welcome to Mother’s Gonna Work it Out – a newsletter not just for mothers with children, but for everyone who cares for anyone.

I bumped into a neighbour this week who was picking bits of pancake from her cleavage as we stood chatting on the pavement. With a sigh, she told me she’d been solo parenting her two young children for the past four days and, this morning, had just about managed to get them both to their respective childcare providers after working on a paid job since 4am and then making everyone pancakes.

‘You seem remarkably calm…’ I joked, responding to the angry flash in her eyes.

I lost my temper last week and it wasn’t pretty. It’s been a very long time since I succumbed to that creeping, pernicious, suffocating heat. This time, to my surprise, I wasn’t able to pour cold water over the fire. This rage tasted different and, after the heat had dissipated and I’d just about stopped feeling unhinged, I decided to try and figure out what was going on.

I searched through the chat on a parenting WhatsApp group I’m on and found a reference to something called maternal rage – ‘one of the hardest parts of parenting,’ one of the cohort had replied to another who’d sought advice about the rage she felt about her partner being able to sleep through the night and ignore their baby’s cries. 

Another linked us through to this piece, where the writer describes maternal rage as, ‘a real condition that we often mistake for just anger, and is a result of extreme burnout and lack of self-care’. 

This description chimed with the particular flavour of my fury last week. The chat on the group changed course after that but, as I tunnelled deeper into the internet, I realised that maternal rage is a state far more common than many would care to admit. ‘Moms get very mad; and they also get bored. This is a closely guarded secret, as if the myth of maternal bliss is so sacrosanct that we can't even admit these feelings to ourselves,’ writes Ann Lamott in a searingly honest piece about the tumultuous anger her son has provoked in her. 

So why the dirty little secret? According to writer Elian Glaser, it’s because we’re continually urged to be our ‘best’. She writes in a piece about why the cult of the perfect mother has to end, that, ‘losing your temper, to which no human being is immune, is universally frowned-upon’ but ‘the scraps of honesty that escape the school-gates stiff upper lip have always brought me huge relief. Realism is a political act: it builds solidarity and better conditions.’

Taking care of other human beings is seriously hard work, especially in a culture where assumptions are made about gender roles and responsibilities, and in a system that’s stacked against parents taking on paid work, along with the full-time job of looking after children. It’s infuriating. And, for writer Molly Caro May, author of the book Body Full of Stars: Female Rage and My Passage into Motherhood, it’s about learning that it’s OK to be angry. In fact, it’s better to feel the rage and let it pass through your body than try and suppress it and pretend everything’s fine, because that’s never going to end well.

For some, working through the fury means signing up for anger-management classes, like this mother did, or meeting up with friends to shout it out together. I also found a workshop that’s designed specifically for Mum Rage.

My neighbour and I decided to start Babysitting Club, where we take it in turns to look after each other’s children so we can have a night out once a month. I’m writing this in her lounge while she’s out for dinner with her husband, her two children are sleep upstairs, my partner is at home having an evening to himself, and our son is fast asleep. She’s left me a pina colada to have in the bath. We’re all being cared for. We can all exhale, even just for a moment.