Mom Rage and What To Do About It

OK, so: the other day, the algorithm looked deep into my soul and horked up this article:

The Rage Mothers Don’t Talk About

An excerpt:

Mother rage is not “appropriate.” Mothers are supposed to be martyr-like in our patience. We are not supposed to want to hit our kids or to tear out our hair. We hide these urges, because we are afraid to be labeled “bad moms.” We feel the need to qualify our frustration with “I love my child to the moon and back, but….” As if mother rage equals a lack of love. As if rage has never shared a border with love. Fearing judgment, we say nothing. The rage festers and we are left under a pile of loneliness and debilitating shame.

Go on, I thought. And also: please come sit next to me.

I’ve been struggling with mom rage lately. Mine is multifactorial:

• I’m almost certainly in perimenopause, and everything pisses me off. I almost had to fight myself this morning for leaving the crockpot in the sink instead of washing it out last night.

• Princess Beast is 4, very determined, and experiencing lots of frustrations of her own. She would like to be in charge of bedtime, mealtime, the daily schedule. She’s competent and strong, but she can’t tell time or read. She’s dependent on us to help her understand the world and frankly, after two years of pandemic life, it’s possible that we’re not always up to scratch.

• And finally: *gestures broadly at the news, the world, and everything*

My mom rage came out at the zoo last week. PB had to use the bathroom, and I have a whole thing about germs. I’ll do almost anything to avoid using a public restroom. I have peed in every highway-adjacent wooded area from here to Maine. But try to find a good wooded area at the National Zoo that isn’t part of the tiger exhibit. You can’t do it. So, PB and I went into the bathroom together, with me already gritting my teeth.

“OK,” I said, as we entered the restroom. “This is a public bathroom, and we know what that means. Don’t touch anything.”

“Yah, we don’t touch anyfing,” PB said dutifully.

“Not the walls.” I steered her through the crowd. “Not the doors—I’ll get those.” I opened a stall door. “Not the toilet paper dispenser.” I tore long strips of toilet paper off the roll. “Nothing.” I mummified the toilet seat. “And especially, do not hold onto this toilet seat. I know you do that in school, but the toilet seat here is too germy. So just hold onto my hands.”

“OK,” said PB, as I lifted her onto the seat. Then she looked right into my eye and said, “Whoops.”

And this is key: she said it right before she lowered her hands to hold onto the seat.

I felt lava fill up my body, starting at my feet and shooting straight up into my head. It was like the old Popeye cartoons, and I was Bluto. I almost literally saw red. I grabbed her hands and held them, forcing myself not to squeeze too hard. “Do. Not. Touch. That. TOILET SEAT.”

“I want to!” PB cried.

“I know you do, but I told you why not. Just pee.”

“I don’t wike you anymore!” she wept.

“That’s fine. You don’t have to like me. But you do have to do what I say.”

“I don’t wike you! You are bad! You are bad, bad, bad!”

“OK, listen,” I said. “You don’t have to like me. But you’re not allowed to say that I’m bad. I am not bad. I am objectively awesome.”

In the next stall, I heard another mom snort and felt solidarity radiating through the metal wall.

We managed to get out of the zoo without winding up on the news, which was no small victory. But I seethed the whole way home, simmering in my anger and guilt and fear. There’s something horrible about being so angry with the person you love most in the all the world. Even if you are relatively controlled, it feels like you did something awful. Surely your anger is so toxic, it will burn the person it’s directed at. It must mutate both your DNA, melt your love for one another. It must mean that you are bad, bad, bad.

The other problem, of course, is that PB is learning how to deal with the world by watching us, and maybe especially me. If I can’t get a grip on my rage, I can’t teach her how to deal with her own. That’s especially important in this moment when she’s experiencing so much frustration.

Minna Dubin, who wrote the article on mom rage that I referenced above, took an anger-management class for mothers in her quest to cope better. In that class, she learned to add “tools” to her “toolbox.”

“I have not yet found the golden ticket to serenity, but I have noticed that when I manage to exercise, make art and eat healthy food, I have a longer fuse,” Dubin wrote. “In toolbox lingo: These things fill up my patience cup.”

The facilitator’s toolbox lingo might make me wince—I love therapy but have a kneejerk reaction against the earnestness of the language—but the image of a patience cup really struck me. For me, the things that fill that cup are getting enough sleep, doing yoga, and gardening. That day at the zoo, I’d been neglecting most of those cup-fillers for a while. Hopefully, this realization will help me make time for them.

I’d also like to figure out something like this for PB. I know she does better when she’s not overtired or overstimulated, when she eats more green things than sugary treats, and when she gets outside every day. As she gets older, she can figure out what helps her to be at her best, too.

Here’s hoping you’re having a good week, full of the things that fill your cup and don’t drain it.

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What I’m Reading This Week

I just started The People We Meet on Vacation, by Emily Henry. I’m only a few pages in but so far, so good. I never used to read romance novels because of my own snobbery and internalized sexism, but there are so many really good ones out there. Henry is one of my favorite writers in the genre right now. Her characters feel like people you know. If you need a break from the news, give any of her books a try.