I’ve been losing my shit lately. A lot.
Last week was especially hard since Kai was home sick from his usual three days of childcare and my writing time was cut short. After three days of caring for a sick kid and my typical “Mommy Day” on Thursday where I’m with both kids, I blew it. The minute Jim came up from work I stormed out of the house, slammed the door behind me, and erupted into a heap of sobs in the Tahoe. When the snot started running, I went in search of the tissue box which I couldn’t find and resorted to picking up a gently used one from the floor mat below Loren’s carseat. Then I drove across town to the Kroger parking lot (last week it was Biggby) where I proceeded to cry some more in what felt like a semi-anonymous space.
Apparently, motherhood has turned me into a Class A Car Crier. But, hey! It’s the one space outside of the house where I can scream my guts out and ugly cry as much as I want to without permanently scarring my children or creating a scene in town.
This stage of motherhood is particularly difficult. My kids are 18 months apart: Loren is 3, Kai is one-and-a-half. The days are overstimulating—a constant bombardment of chaos—especially for someone who identifies as a sensitive, empath, introvert, and anxious person. It honestly feels like the perfect form of torture some days.
A few months ago I read a post by
called “Women Talking: The Mama Limit Line” on her Substack which I highly recommend if you’re into honest, raw, feminist material about sex, desire, the patriarchy, and divorce.In the article, Cindy interviews Minna Dubin about her latest book, Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood. I bought the book immediately after finishing the article and tore into it the moment it arrived on my doorstep. I felt so seen and understood that I was crying on page two. I wish I was kidding.
“When I get mad like this around my three-year-old son, I have to say to myself, like a mantra, “Don’t touch him, don’t touch him, don’t touch him.” Touching him with this rage coursing through me only ends in my shame, and my son’s shock, and what else I do not know; only time will reveal that. I have never hit him, but the line between “hitting” and “not hitting” is porous. In this “not hitting” gray area there are soft arms squeezed too tight, a red superhero cape (Velcro-clasped around his neck) forcefully yanked off, a child picked up and thrown into his crib. For me it is better not to touch at all.” —page 2, Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood
I have my own list of mom rage moments. And, if we’re being honest, don’t we all?
As mothers we are taught to hide our angry moments, to suppress them, and stifle them at all costs. We are conditioned to feel shame by a patriarchal society, and worse, to internalize that shame as personal failure when we don’t meet society’s expectations of successful mothering.
Minna Dubin writes, “The confines of ‘appropriate’ or ‘good’ motherhood—which come from white, wealthy, patriarchal ideas of mothering—are so strict that mom rage can feel both unforgivable and unspeakable.”
In an interview for the podcast What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood, Dubin says, “Motherhood is the pinnacle of womanhood. And angry is the worst thing a mother can be. If you’re an angry mother, it’s the worst thing a woman can be.”
And yet, anger is one of six basic emotions inherent to the human species. Isn’t angry one the most natural things a mother, or any human, could be?
My moments of mom rage are rarely about the plastic fire truck my oldest son just yanked from my youngest son’s hands, or about the permanent marker scribbled on the floor. It’s not about the pushing or the shoving, the screaming, or the refusal to listen and comprehend. It’s about the buildup of endless stressors and unresolved traumas moms are fending in the face of overstimulation and exhaustion on a day-to-day basis.
“We always focus on the one blow out moment we did have—the rage—and we breeze over the 100 times we quieted the rage, the times we reacted calmly, lovingly, the times we were able to keep our shit under control.” — Dubin
There are a hundred moments every day where I calmly and patiently show up for my screaming children. A hundred moments every day where the hardest part of being a mom is regulating my own emotions in the face of their dysregulation, but I still do.
And sometimes, when it’s all too much, I lose my shit.
Loren throws himself on the floor in heaps of tears. He heaves and sobs and runs to find blankie. He scream-cries, “I want my Daddy” over and over and over again.
The shame, the guilt, the failure. The feeling that I am officially the worst mother in the entire world. It’s all there.
Kai flinches—is visibly startled—when I yell. He pauses for a brief moment before bursting into tears and running away crying, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” He stands at the baby gate at the top of the stairs and peers down to where Daddy is working (and will not be coming up for hours) before he comes scratching at the bedroom door where I’ve hidden myself in hopes no one can find me. He stands there crying out, “Mama, Mama, Mama,” while I run through a series of calming breathing techniques in between fitful sobs, an immense amount of self-pity, and shame, shame, shame.
There is hardly any space in motherhood to be human, to mess up, or lose our shit. “There is no room in the claustrophobic box of Mother for anything other than self-sacrificing, gentle, and deferential.” (Minna Dubin, again.) But there needs to be. There has to be.
This is why I write. Every time a mom shares these moments, we normalize them. We create space for an alternative narrative—a better one. We create space for the anti-cooing, anti-nurturing narratives of motherhood.
We need more honest narratives like this. More stories that share the chaos, the insanity, and the utter shit show that motherhood so often is. We all f*ck up, but we can get through it together. One honest story at a time.
On the days when one or both kids are home sick we have started sharing responsibilities. It’s a huge help!
I realize Jim’s working and you are mothering, but really, you’re both working and he’s working from home, so, would it help if you figured out ways for you to have breaks from the kids during the day to rest, write and rejuvenate? Why do you have to have the kids for 8 solid hours when you could spread out the working and mothering hours by breaking up the day for sanity’s sake?