DAY 12 - Only Connect (21 DAYS OF RAGE)

This is the 12th instalment of a 21 day writing series about maternal rage and anger.

Recently I was having some challenges with my nearly eight year old. She was speaking to me in a way I found very frustrating, what some people would call “answering back” (which is a weird phrase and idea isn’t it - that we adults should expect the last word?), rolling her eyes, shouting at me, demanding things that made me feel like a servant at the beck and call of a particularly charmless master.

In her eyes I was always being unfair to her and not giving her enough attention. Her little brother was getting it all and he never got in trouble where she constantly did.

Small children believe they are at the centre of the universe; from what I understand this is as it should be, it’s how their brains work until they get older and they start to realise that there are other people out there who have feelings and needs too. So many times adults expect more than children are capable of in a neurological sense. But it gets to a point where you wonder whether they are capable of more, and whether you’re encouraging and enabling them to be selfish or rude.

This fear is at the heart of so many of our parent-child interactions, I think. It made me frequently compelled to point out to my daughter how she sounded to my ears and how it made me feel.

After her dad was away for four days and nights, during which we’d had mostly positive but also some difficult interactions, I shared with him one of my fears - maybe my primary fear - that she would act like this with other people and other people would not like her and reject her. I felt awful saying it because the heart of the matter was that I was acknowledging her unlikeability in those moments.

My husband said he worried about that sometimes too. After we shared this I felt a burden lifted. I didn’t feel I changed anything about how I acted with my daughter, but something shifted inmediately, as it had began to do when I spoke my fear out loud. Things stopped being so difficult. We were connecting more and having fun. When things got funky I kept my mouth shut and remembered the easy thing: my profound unconditional love for her.

In general we tend to and nurture our children in a way we cannot do for ourselves. We misunderstand love so when someone suggests that we love ourselves, it feels very confronting. But compassion for ourselves is innately about us as relational beings, as people who understand in their bones what it means to live in relationship with others. If we can notice others suffering, if we can empathise with them then we have the capacity to turn this on ourselves.

It’s not about seeing ourselves as better or worse than anyone. There’s a neutrality here. My daughter is fundamentally loveable, as we all are (If we need proof of this, just show me a mother).

Anger and rage makes us feel monstrous, worse than others and fundamentally separated from them. Maternal rage is a deeply lonely and lonely-making experience. It’s through connection with others that we can connect to our own needs, our own histories and our own capacity for forgiving ourselves. 

There’s lots that I’ve learned about maternal rage in general and as applied to me that has helped me. But it’s what I feel about myself, not what I know in an intellectual sense, that makes the real difference. What I feel about myself cannot happen away from other people, else it becomes all introversion and over-thinking, worry and over-identification and individualistic commitment to self-improvement.

Self-compassion comes from talking, connecting, hearing and reflecting our human experiences with others. We remember our common humanity and we find a path through. Our bodies must feel safe to do this too, knowing they are in constant relationship with their environment. We reach out and hopefully there’s someone to catch or hold us. 

I want my kids to always innately know my unconditional love, or positive regard for them. Imagine if we could give this to ourselves consistently and profoundly? Remembering what we know and how we feel about others can help us get there.