21 DAYS OF RAGE
This is an introduction to the month-long writing challenge I’m taking part in, lead by Megan Macedo . I’ve chosen to write about rage, particularly as it intersects with motherhood. The principles of the challenge are to write and share every weekday for 21 days, and to aim for improvisation over perfection. I hope you enjoy these posts.
Before the pandemic I ran an online webinar about rage and motherhood. I didn’t charge for it so I expected numbers to be relatively high, but still, an extremely high number of women signed up. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Losing your cool, your temper, your shit as a mother is a taboo. With this lack of discourse comes shame.
My audience are interested in self-development, they would want to “be better”, to fix this thing inside them that spills out occasionally or frequently, in shades of bright blood red. My workshop addressed that desire and questioned whether things always need to be fixed. It attempted to locate some of the social and physiological reasons for feeling and showing rage when you have children, to remove some of the shame from a “normal” level of anger and rage and to bring some more self-kindness, as well as some practical ways to deal somatically with these feelings as they root and rise through the body.
As a teacher I have certainly been guilty of teaching things before I was ready, and maybe this is a good example. I’ve tried to explain wisdom or “solutions” before I was really embodying them. It’s kind of a saviour complex - I’ll help you then I’ll feel useful! It’s also true that, if you waited until you’d solved every problem in your life and understood something inside out, you’d be dead before you ever taught or shared anything. I think it’s ok to share things as part of your process, especially if you acknowledge that you are still in process.
Recent events have increased my own feelings and displays of rage in front of my children. Whenever it happens it feels horrendous, it leaves me shaky and ashamed. It often catches me unaware when I would have said I feel “fine”, and I like to think of myself as a pretty self aware person. Am I fine? Am I not fine? What does it mean to be fine, or not fine? How much should we try and solve rage and how much should we sit with it? I want to understand it, its origins and its expressions. It comes from my own fear about my anger damaging my children, or my relationship with them. I want to know if children seeing their mothers angry is ever useful, or at least ok.
It would be a lie to say that I am not a little bit attached to reducing its explosive pattern. But more comprehension would be something at least. I suspect anger is trying to tell me something. I would like to listen.