Day 21 - Multitudes (21 days of rage)

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

When I’m honest about my own parenting challenges, people are sometimes surprised and say things like “but you always seem so calm!” or make some other comment about confidence or clarity or having it together. Sometimes I feel glad to be able to be seen as real in that moment and I know I am giving others permission to embrace their realness too. At other times I almost feel defensive, protecting the parts of myself that ARE calm, collected, clear, together. I am that too, I sometimes say. We are all so many things.

When I’m out in my local area, I often bump into people I’ve taught, or I vaguely recognise a toddler in the playground and realise it’s the baby whose mum brought her to postnatal yoga. There’s been more than one occasion, on a day when my child is having a meltdown or when I am especially tired or hormonal or going through something, when I wonder if me being shouty mum in a park is risking my professional reputation as well as my self-image as a good mother. I really hope no one has seen or heard me acting in a way I didn’t want to be known for, forgetting that it could be helpful for someone to hear another not-perfect mother failing to hold it together, in that moment.

I partly chose to write about rage because, having gone through a difficult time recently, I could feel my own anger and rage surfacing again. When I first started writing it was so hard to avoid caveat-ing, everything, as us mothers often feel we must - it’s not that I don’t love my kids …. I’ve never hit them … It’s not that bad … It doesn’t happen all the time … I’ve been through all this stress and I’m tired and I don’t have much time to myself and and and

The ultimate discomfort was feeling the gap between the person I wanted to be, had thought I was, am much of the time - calm, patient, caring - and the person I turned into sometimes. I was afraid of people thinking I was a bad mother, as all mothers are fear on some level. I was afraid that it was true, and there will inevitably be moments where I feel that is true again. 

I think I’ve been trying to tell myself, even though I feel and show rage sometimes, I still have a good relationship with my children, I am still a good mother. If you’re a mother reading this, it’s profoundly likely that you are too. I suspect you know that on some level, but as I end this series, I want to encourage you to take a moment to sit and hold that in your hands for a while. To feel it in your belly and your heart and deep within your bones. 

Did you do it? Did you feel it? Can you hold it there permanently, as a knowing of something that’s true in your brain and your body?

Sometimes there is a moment of great purity with my children, either when we are really laughing about something, or a moment of repair after challenge, or I’m watching them clown around. Maybe we’re talking and it feels like we see each other, in our uniqueness as individuals or in our humanity, as someone with weaknesses. It’s tempting to leave it there, to only find ourselves in those moments where the afternoon sun is rippling on the wall as the noises of the world pass by in the background. But we are in all the places, the dark ones too, the ugly ones. The story is true and the counter story is true. How much kindness can we bring to the self in those hard moments? An abundance, I hope. An invitation to come back in and connect to everything else inside us. A moment to hold things together, all the disparate, different threads.