DAY 1 - Howl (21 DAYS OF RAGE)

This is the 1st instalment of a 21 day writing series about maternal rage and anger.

Before I became a mother I knew what it was to feel enraged. Things that had made me feel this way: bitter, violent men who honked their horn at my unintentional failure to observe a particular rule of the road; an especially unpleasant customer baiting me in my Saturday job as a teenager; a guy who owned most of an English county at party at university, purposely trying to wind me up with his views on the inner lives of all women everywhere.

In my mind, rage had a foundation of responsibility: one person did x and the other felt or did y in response. I did not know that a tiny baby with the softest skin, whose fault it was not, whose darting eyes I watched in awe, whose small body I had clutched while I prayed

please god let nothing happen never never please god take care of them please let me keep this precious please please god

could make me feel white hot rods of rage behind my eyeballs, in every blood vessel, running down roots into the ground and in the electric cables flashing through the walls around me. There was something monstrous about the idea. But there it was, maybe some time around 4 or 5 or 6 months, after months of broken sleep and a few days and nights when I hadn't slept at all because of a paralysing insomnia and an anxiety that also had hold in my body, an alarm that went off over and over.

When we talk about babies not sleeping well we usually mean they wake up frequently, or wake up when we put them down or when they are somehow separated from our warm bodies. Because I didn't know how normal this was, because of a sensitive baby, because of my inability to let the baby cry while someone else held them, because of my understanding that babies were supposed to sleep in cots like people had suggested to me, my basic needs - to hydrate, sleep, urinate, eat - were continuously not being met while I tried to escape from the baby and the baby tried to cling to me.

One night I had tried to put her down over and over as the early evening ticked into late. I wanted to get to the dinner that was in the room next to me, then to the shower in the room on the other side then to my bed, just to rest, even for a moment, but every time I tried she woke, a squawk or a squeak, and the whole process of getting her to sleep to try and put her down must begin again.

It came out of me before I had realised it, a combination of a roar and a howl and a scream and the words I think were go to fucking sleep go to fucking sleep go to fucking sleep

and the worst thing about it was that I shouted it at her, in her tiny face which crumpled as she moved towards me - to the safe place - then away again, from the awful noise from the alarm going off and off. Where do you go when the safe place turns into an apparent source of danger?

In the crushing feeling of shame afterwards I wondered if I had broken something irreconcilably but also who was I exactly? In that moment I didn't recognise myself. What kind of person acted like this? What kind of mother?

Lots of baby advice manuals say, if you're feeling angry, put the baby down somewhere safe and leave the room to take some slow breaths, even if it means they're crying for a few minutes. I get it now. A passage from Kate Figes' Life After Birth references the author’s disbelief that more babies aren’t thrown from the windows of high rise flats. It was a sentence which shocked me and would have done so even more before I had a baby. But desperation explains terrible things, which is not the same as justifying them, when certain conditions come together.

In the years since the howl I have often felt the inevitability of the fact that I will lose my shit with my kids, that however much better I try to make myself, at times I will be deeply triggered and shout and storm and bang doors. Nothing that would land me a social services referral. But feelings acted out that make me feel horribly out of control.

 Equally just shrugging it off without hope of growing up and moving on seems unsatisfactory too. There must be a place between giving up and self-flagellating, a kind place that also recognises the possibility of change. I want to find this place and live there, at least for a little bit.