MotherRage

Jamie asked, "Did you deal with rage issues before kids or was motherhood the big trigger?"

Motherhood was the big trigger.

I had, I think, a typical temper as a kid.  I fought with my sister a fair amount (we're three years apart and shared a bedroom) and I fought with my mother a lot.  I wasn't popular enough to fight with kids in grade school.  I participated in the typical rounds of evil junior high girl behavior, but nothing out of the ordinary.  I didn't consider myself an especially anger-prone teenager.

During high school, I was an exchange student with a prominent service organization and learned all sorts of emotion-quelling coping skills.  "Put a smile on your face and the bad feelings will go away."  Self-defeating bullsh*t but useful for creating the illusion that I was in control of my feelings and my self.

By my mid-twenties, I considered myself a paragon of emotional health.  I'd been through two rounds of therapy (the first more useless than the second).  Calder and I had our issues -- I read, and failed to convince him to read, Getting the Love You Want before we were married -- but I wouldn't have classified our anger issues as out-of-the-ordinary.  Yes, we had our share of Very Noisy Battles, in which I was known to swear and he was known to retreat like a turtle into his shell and I was known to swear louder.  But in general, I considered myself to be in remarkably good emotional health.

Ah.  Ha.  Ha ha ha ha.

I would now address the links between infertility and depression, and between high-risk pregnancy and depression, and between premature birth and depression, and then between depression and anger, but I would be here all week month year.

Suffice to say, by the middle of the first year of the babies' lives, I had discovered that motherhood could provoke in me a rage I hadn't known I could feel.  I was pretty careful with that rage, but there were moments -- a too-loud screaming rant while a very small baby was still in the room, a toy banged against a floor, a door opened and a loud F*ck shouted into the neighborhood -- that I'm not happy to recall.

It only got worse as my babies grew older, and I felt less restrained by their helplessness.  I could hear my mother in my head as I spoke the words: "Why don't you act your age?"  Never mind that hey, they were.  I was filled with anger.  I didn't stop myself from directing all my furies at my dependents -- small people acting in perfectly age-appropriate, situation-relevant ways.

Also, Calder and I went through a positively awful period after we became parents.  Moxie just addressed this issue.  We were too addled in the first weeks and months to engage in organized battles, but the rage slowly built.  By that 9 to 12 month window, we were in crisis.  There was a particularly spectacular fight at 5am on the day of the kids' first birthday....

Ick.

We made it through by making it through.  I honestly don't know how we would have survived, if not for our long history together, a basic foundation of time together to keep us sane.  Also, our mutual, total unwillingness to have sole custody of three babies, or financial responsibility for two households.  But of course the marital anger spilled over into my mothering, too.

(That's the answer to Mia's first question, by the way, as to why I believe any one partner in a relationship must have veto powers over questions of reproduction.  As seriously as I take my own desire to have another baby, I have to take Calder's profound unhappiness about our first two years more seriously.  The fact is, he's more or less conceded that I could bulldoze him convince him to try again.  I remember too well his periods of unhappiness these past five years to risk it.  Really, I'm not so much angry at Calder for not wanting to have more children as for being the sort of person who just doesn't enjoy life with children when they're very young.  One of the reasons why I married him was because I thought he'd be such a great father.  And he is.  But he's looking forward to parenting grade-schoolers a lot.)

So, apart from depression and marital stress, why did/do I have such problems with anger?

I don't have the tools to manage anger.  Until I had children, I simply didn't have occasion to discover that.

Now, I am not a big believer in the "my parents damaged me forever" storyline, but the simple truth is, I didn't learn good anger-management skills as a child.  And I am absolutely convinced that when a mother or father is tired, stressed, and confronted with a small baby, their bred-in-the-bone, unthinking first response is to react as their own parents or caregivers reacted to them.  I've seen that in my own behavior, and in Calder's, again and again and again.

I learned my mother's patterns for managing anger before I was even old enough to realize what I was doing.  Those patterns lurked, underground and unexamined, until I became a mother myself.

Unfortunately, my mother was exceptionally angry at her life and exceptionally unable to express anger safely.  Instead of owning her anger, and expressing it without being hurtful or insulting or shaming, Mom would bottle it up.  Of course, I knew she was angry anyway, and spent days or weeks trying to figure out what I had done wrong.  "No, no, nothing's the matter.  STOP ASKING."  Finally I would get the truth, almost always in an "I can't take it anymore" explosion.  It was awful.

Also, ours is a culture that equates discipline with shaming.  With labeling.  With discounting.  Not a good wellspring from which to draw, for mom or for me.

Mom genuinely wanted not to be angry.  Her own rage overwhelmed her.  She thought it was easier to run away from it.  But it always came back, worse than before.  If she was anything like I am, her over-the-top outbursts arose in part from her self-loathing at not being able to be the perfect, anger-free mother she thought she needed to be.

No one will be surprised to learn that my mom's mom had her own battles with anger and rage.  And of course her mother -- my great-grandmother -- was never known to smile a day in her life, which isn't surprising when you consider that she was married to an alcoholic farmer who couldn't even hold onto a tenancy and worked seasonal jobs for the railroads to support his family.  Anger is a long-running problem in our family.

Perhaps because of that family history, I have become a big believer in the concept of "ghosts in the nursery."  Too often, I react to my children -- as opposed to act -- based on how I was parented myself.  I am especially convinced because so many of the scripts in my head, when I'm tired and not paying attention, sound exactly like things my own mother would say.  I find myself making the same dramatic complaints, the same accusations, the same pleas, that my own mother made.  Even though our life choices were different, even though I have a hundred million more resources than she did, even though the scripts I learned at her knee make no sense in my own life.

I get tired, I get angry, I open my mouth and become my mother.  It's insane.

---

What have I been doing -- however ineffectively -- to manage my mother rage?  I'm going to be looking for a therapist this fall.  I've been trying to meditate -- I'm a big believer in conscious breathing now.  And of course, I've been reading a lot of books:

• Everyday Blessings and The New Diary to help me deal with my emotions, a sort of self-therapy if you will
• Growing Up Again and Unattended Sorrow to help me address the childhood, infertility, and NICU sorrows I'm carrying around
• Between Parent and Child and How To Talk So Kids Will Listen and Siblings Without Rivalry, because I simply cannot rely on "my instincts."  Parenting instincts come from our own childhoods, and my childhood lessons about anger simply do not work. I must use new and different scripts for discipline and anger management when talking to my kids.  These books give me those scripts.

I found the cognitive-therapy approach of When Anger Hurts Your Kids especially useful.  I haven't been as disciplined as I'd like in implementing its techniques, but I'm working on it.

I found this list -- of reasons why parents face the sorts of extreme stress that give rise to hard-to-handle anger -- especially reassuring.  It helped to know that my anger wasn't entirely a result of my own psycho-social failures.

The following list from the book When Anger Hurts [1989] ... describes the working conditions of your job as parent.

1. Long Hours.
2. Children are incredibly messy.
3. Children are noisy.
4. Caring for children requires that you do many repetitive and time-consuming tasks.
5. Children are self-centered.
6. Children push the limits.
7. Children need tremendous amounts of attention and approval.
8. Children require vigilance.

With all that to carry, it would be only fair if parents were exempt from the other stresses of life.  But being a parent is only one of the roles you fulfill.  You must also face the everyday stresses of being an adult in the world. ... Whatever you're facing in your life, it is important to recognize that as a parent, and as an adult, you manage a tremendous number of responsibilities that inevitably create stress.  Therefore, any effort that you make to cope with anger must also include effective strategies for coping with stress. (When Anger Hurts Your Kids, 28-30.)

Motherhood equals stress equals anger.  It's how I manage and express the anger that makes all the difference.

Comments

[Sarah]

Thought provoking. My mom never shows when she's angry. (Or I could believe she's never angry, but that's gotta be nonsense, right?) So I agree I don't have good coping skills or good ways to express and deal with anger. Thank you for the book suggestions.

[Libby]

Oh, my goodness yes, becoming a mother revealed my anger to me in ways I still have not fully comprehended. But I do remember being shocked and outraged at the depths of emotion that children (or, at first, just one child) could evoke in me--more than any other relationship ever had. I'll be coming back to look at the books again...

[Amy]

Thank you for this. I can't remember how I stumbled here, but I needed to read this. The anger is always there, simmering and ready to erupt at any moment. I need to get a grip on it.

[Phantom Scribbler]

My sister-in-law gave us Everyday Blessings right before LG was born. In general I am impatient with the American Buddhist shtick, but this book was so incredibly helpful to me as I was learning to parent. Really, given my own ghosts in the nursery, I think I can probably credit that book with most of whatever I've managed to do right as a parent.

I think it's time for me to take a little trip to the library to get some of the rest of these books.

Thanks for another eloquent, honest post, Jody. Maybe I should start paying you for the therapy...

[patricia]

this post speaks to me. The depression and rage related to infertility. The strain on marriage with a small child (or three, good lord.) The lack of interest in newborns by my husband.

He has always been a good Dad, but since my son turned about four it's been a whole new level.

Great post.

[patricia]

this post speaks to me. The depression and rage related to infertility. The strain on marriage with a small child (or three, good lord.) The lack of interest in newborns by my husband.

He has always been a good Dad, but since my son turned about four it's been a whole new level.

Great post.

[beth]

Great post. Chalk me up as another avid reader of Everyday Blessings, and another believer in the infertility=rage=depression equation.

[SheilaC]

Wow. I feel the same way you do, and react with anger so easily, for so many of the same reasons.

Except that my family of origin is quite different. So I can't blame my parents for modelling the ways that I lose control of my anger - they kept it all controlled inside, and spoke to us kids in appropriate ways. So when I get angry I feel guilty for not being as good a parent as they were, or as my husband is. Which makes me more angry and depressed - lovely.

Maybe I will read some of the books you suggest. Though you seem to be saying that in spite of reading all these good books, you are still struggling?

I have read Siblings without rivalry, which is very good. Though I don't believe you can ever eliminate rivalry and competition, their suggestions for how to change those dynamics are good.

Good luck sorting it all out, and becoming the parent you want to be, most of the time.

[SheilaC]

P.S. I think you are already a terrific parent!

[tallulah]

Thank you for addressing this issue. Being a Mom has provoked anger in me that I never knew I had. Thank goodness for the "happy little blue pills" I take and a supportive husband that walks in the door and says..."hmmm....looks like you need a break. why don't you go to the movies?"

[Leggy]

Great post, and very brave. How do you pull out all these thoughtful posts so quickly (just after writing that eloquent terrorism one)- it usually takes me weeks between deep thought posts.

Yes, yes, yes, to the relationship issues and to the strain of IF/depression and its long-term impact on parenting. I have wondered how much my efforts to have a second child have hurt my son when what I really want is another child (for myself mainly, but also) so that he doesn't feel the burden (that I do) of being the center of everything (love, devotion, joy, anger, frustration, aggrevation) in this family.

[shannon]

Thank you, thank you thank you!

Mother Rage runs in my family way back too. So far, I've been okay, but every day, I sense myself getting closer to a line I dread to cross...

I am going to look at a couple of your books up there.

God FORBID I do to my daughter what my mother did to us re: anger and lack of knowledge about how to deal with it.

[isabel]

Thank you for posting this. I'm worried about my own anger issues and future (possible) children, and it helps to have info like this. I think it's great you can address it openly.

[chris]

Jody, you are a good mother. Don't be so hard on yourself.

[mc]

Thanks for this. I am astonished at how angry I can get at the tiny, helpless girl in my arms in the middle of the night, or when she's screaming (or both) -- my husband is horrified by it, and I am disgusted with myself afterward. I'm going to have to head to the library...

[juniper]

Thanks so much for writing this - I too was shocked at the depths of anger I could feel at my son when he was smaller. And I'm also trying to teach him healthier ways than the "everything's fine" strategy. And I'm getting the books, too.

[liz]

Thank you for this post.

[suso]

You write so many great posts but this was especially great. Count me in as another one who went through some of this, although my moments of sudden rage tapered off at an earlier age, probably because I only had one child. I also had the most furious relationship fights in the first year of parenthood, after 11 happy years together.
I have a slightly different take on what causes the rage - oh, I agree about the inherent stress. But I think it brought out for me jealousy and resentment towards my baby - because he was so needy (as babies are, nothing more than the usual) and I as the mother had to meet his needs and I think that situation triggered my own sense of deprivation - my own needs had not been met as a baby/small child. I think that's at the root of the rage.

[Emmie (Better Make It A Double)]

I've been through a lot of this too. I got some counseling about this time last year, which helped a lot. She wasn't too into meds or labels (not judging anyone who is helped by either here!) which was a good fit for me, and she really helped me to understand that a. my rage and anxiety were totally understandable, and therefore normal, and b. I could learn to cope, and that it would get better if I did. A year later, I do feel alot better. My therapist recommended Growing Up Again, which was the single most helpful book I've read on the subject of emotions. The suggestion that most stuck with me was to talk to my kids during hard moments and say the things I need nurtured in myself (or had needed as a child and didn't get). It was a concrete way for me to show myslef some love to rock my crying babies and say "it will be ok, this will pass, it's very hard, but you can do it". Thanks for the thoughtful post, and the reminder.

[Jamie]

Thank you, Jody, for writing this. There's a lot you say here that resonates for me.

[Kay]

This is a great post, thank you. Anger issues have come up for both my husband and I in recent months - since our son tuned four mostly, but no doubt the sleep deprivation etc of a long awaited new-born haven't helped!

Getting my hands on a copy of When Anger Hurts Your Kids has been on my to do list since you mentione it a couple of weeks ago.