How Angry Is Too Angry? Unpicking My Maternal Rage

Would I actually be less ragey if I spent MORE time with my children? I don't know...

Here are some of the things that made me teeth-grindingly, fist-clenchingly blind with range before 9AM this morning (almost literally, I got so angry my vision blurred):

• Being woken up at 6AM after six hours of broken sleep

• The fact that I’d stayed up till 10.30 watching a second episode of Severance, which I could have skipped to get the magic six hours sleep that I need to function (rage at myself still counts)

• My son refusing to take his nappy off

• My other son refusing to get dressed until Ninjago had finished

• The same son telling me I was putting his shoes on wrong so many times that I pulled it off and threw it at the front door

• The younger one weeing himself just as we were about to leave the house, having finally got them into their coats, hats, gloves and scarves, despite me asking him if he wanted to use his potty 27 times in the preceding 10 minutes

• The fact that I decided we should just get potty training out of the way and not wait for summer

• My newly dried, dressed son hitting me painfully hard on the leg with a stick on the way to nursery

• The fact that there’s a 15 minute gap between the train I can never quite make in the mornings and the next one, making it impossible to get on

• Every other person in the train carriage with me

• Every person ahead of me in the queue for a Pret coffee

• Past me for forgetting to sort out a new work pass again which meant I had to queue up and beg the security guard to let me in

• The man who got in the same lift as me for ruining my only bit of ‘me time’ all day

If you’d asked me five years ago if I was an angry person I would have said no without hesitation. That’s not to say that I never lost my rag or got cross, but my rage wasn’t a constant presence, simmering under the surface, waiting to blow. Since having my children I feel like I spend 60% of my time somewhere on a spectrum between mildly seething and absolutely furious, and on a bad day, I’m one snapped hair band or dead earbud away from total fury.

Maternal rage is defined (according to the medically reviewed website choosingtherapy.com) as ‘overwhelming fits of anger that may arise in an instant and interrupt normal daily life. Mom rage can leave a woman feeling like she is losing control as her anger rises up and she lashes out. Maternal anger issues may be exacerbated by both external circumstances and by a mom’s internal state.’

As for what makes parents - mothers - so angry in the first place, they (The Man? Science?) seem to blame it on a range of factors from hormonal imbalances and sleep deprivation, to stress and lack of support - it can also be a symptom of postnatal depression.

Not that I need science (or The Man) to tell me why I’m so cross - I never get enough sleep (six hours a night is enough to function on, but I don’t have to feel happy about it), as I creep through my 40s my PMT is now off the charts so I’m sure that’s the start of the perimenopause. On top of this, the frenetic pace of life with small, mad children and a demanding job mean I rarely stop at all, and when I do it’s to catch up with friends, TV shows that I’ve missed or exercise that I think I should be doing. So I never have a chance to process my thoughts, or decompress or just stare out of the window for 20 minutes.

So I don’t feel guilty about the anger per se - life is hard and I’m doing my best. But I feel quite ashamed by how poorly I regulate my own emotions. I certainly don’t feel great that my children witness me getting, at best, quite aerated, and at worst, absolutely furious, quite so frequently. For the first 40 years of my life, I rolled my eyes at people who lost their temper in public - work colleagues who flipped out at the slightest provocation, furious drivers, commuters who had to start screaming at the train guard when their commute home was delayed yet again. I saw it as a sign of immaturity or emotional incontinence. And don’t even get me started at people who lost their temper with their children in public. Now the sound of be shrilly yelling at my children that they have ‘done it again’ and that I am ‘at my limit’ and that they will be going ‘straight to bed without dinner/a bath/any TV*’ can be heard ringing across North London on a daily basis.

Part of the problem is that I’ve done it so often now it’s become pointless. On the very rare occasion that my husband shouts, the children stop and listen instantly, because they’re so unused to him raising his voice. When I scream, shout and foam at the mouth they totally ignore me, they’re so used to me going nuclear that it has no power whatsoever - making me feel both guilty and impotent.

And more to the point, it’s not who I think I am – and not how I want them to think of me or remember me when they look back on their early years. I want them to remember that we were (are?) a happy family (despite all my moaning, we are), not that I was vein-poppingly furious all the time.

When I look at what I’ve got, compared to what other people have, I know, rationally, that I have no right to feel as furious as I do. But I can’t shake myself out of the very specific anger that life is just harder than it needs to be. That I shouldn’t spend 14 hours of my day essentially grinding through work and childcare only to fail at pretty much everything. I feel angry that I don’t spend more time with my children during what are formative years, but also angry at myself because I’ve contrived a situation (with a bit of help from Liz Truss’s budget) where I have to keep this up ad infinitum.

Or maybe that’s not fair - would I actually be less ragey if I spent MORE time with my children? (I genuinely don’t know the answer to that, and I challenge anyone to spend an hour with my kids and leave with their blood pressure at a safe level). Or are these just the rage years, and I have to accept that feeling furious is a total normal reaction to my life right now?

I guess the answer, inevitably, is that it’s a bit of both. Of course I need to learn to regulate my own emotions better, it’s crap for my kids and it’s crap for me if I’m a raging ball of fury half of the time. And I think we can all agree that there’s more than enough rage in the world right now, particularly coming from young men - do I want to model that behaviour for my boys? Certainly not.

But as someone who’s spent her life being the archetypal good girl - never losing my cool, always seeing things from other people’s perspective, cleaning up other people’s mess rather than (metaphorically) flipping a table and storming out of the room myself, there’s some power in being a bit more cross, a bit more impatient, a bit less forgiving of other people’s mistakes. You certainly get more done that way, and if you want to come out of a meeting with fewer monkeys on your shoulder than you went in with? Get properly furious. Granted, it’s not the way to deal with a three-year-old’s tantrum or a five-year-old’s refusal to put their shoes on in the morning, but if you want something doing? Ask an angry woman.

*All of which I will row back on within the hour. I’m furious but flakey.

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