DAY 4 - Speak (21 DAYS OF RAGE)

This is the 4th instalment of a 21 day writing series about maternal rage and anger.

When I returned to work after a year of maternity leave, a colleague asked me to tell her what the experience was really like. I mumbled something about it being good as well as hard, and she asked in what way was it hard, because it didn't necessarily look it.

She wasn't being mean, she was genuinely curious as to how this thing that looked only pleasurable from the outside - cuddling a cute baby, sitting in coffee shops and chatting to other mums, walking around parks with a buggy, not having to be on the clock, like you did at work - could be difficult.

In her book What Mothers Do (Especially When It Looks Look Like Nothing), Naomi Stadlen talks about how hard it is to find a language to describe motherhood. I think it's something to do with the experiences being so materially different to everything else in our life, and with the nuances and contradictions it holds - both the grandest most effortless joy and the graft and sacrifice of it. So often, motherhood is both. 

And perhaps we fail to speak accurately because of the difference between the reality and what we think we should we be feeling.

The shame around negative feelings in motherhood means honest conversations around rage, anger and frustration have been few and far between in my life. There have been some notable whispered confidences - the friend telling me that she’d got so angry with her toddler that she'd had to lock herself in the bathroom while he pounded on the door, another friend who’d let out a giant primal scream, prompting all the children to start screaming too and the neighbours to knock to see if “everything was alright”. In my workshop about rage, we talked about the moment when you feel yourself lose control. No one said they had ever hit their child, but as well as the shouting, we talked about the physicality and the force of rage - how it might look like stuffing two arms crossly into a coat, picking up a child up roughly, plonking them into down into a buggy or a cot a little too forcefully. And afterwards, the shame, the shame.

I judged shouty mothers in the supermarket a million times before I had my own children. In parenthood, I think it’s the relentlessness and lack of people to help; the sleep deprivation and the abnegation of our own needs - physical, emotional, creative; the stress of normal life added to the challenge of caring for small children; the sensory overwhelm and the complexity of your own childhood triggers being pulled by your child that result in overwhelming feelings and their expression through the body.

It’s so understandable, but we cannot find the words to share what’s happened. So instead, there is nothing and no one. It gets buried, we move on, or we think we do. The moments when we lose it get sandwiched between layers of shame. I suspect they hang around, and they help our overwhelm to build more quickly next time, that they can be responsible for anger becoming patterned. I suspect we only heal when we speak and move, that these are redemptive acts, that real change is infinitely possible.