All The Rage
Harnessing Anger For Good Instead of Evil
I am angry. There I said it! Full on Mom Rage! I can feel it in my body. My shoulders clench, my belly contracts, my jaw tightens like I want to bite someone. I want to bite my husband. You want to know why? Great, I’m going to tell you all about it.
Well you see, we have a 7-month-old baby and a 4-year-old. My body has been through so much in the last 5 years, including over 3 years of breastfeeding, 2 pregnancies, and 2 vaginal births. Every morning, for the last 7 months, I wake up with each of our boys snuggled on either side of my body so that I can’t move. The baby is usually latched on my breast lying on one arm and the 4-year-old is snuggled on the other arm, poking the vein on the underside of my elbow over and over while the baby pulls on my nipple. It’s at this point- 5:30am or so- that I want to scream. First thing in the morning I wake up totally “touched out” and angry. I just want to sleep! I just want No One to touch my body, to suck on my nipples, poke or claw at me. I want a week off!
But I also don’t want to miss anything. Our baby’s about to start crawling and I want to be around for that. I’m not ready to stop breastfeeding either, or it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do. So I can’t leave for a week because it would be incredibly painful for my engorged breasts and I’d have to pump sooooo much milk! You’re getting a picture of the wasp nest that has been forming in my body over the last few months/years, just waiting to be kicked.
Meanwhile my husband was invited to a reunion with his friends from high school and of course he really wants to go. Somehow, about 5 months ago we made this plan so that he could go on vacation when the baby is 7 months old. We idiotically thought that we’d have it all worked out by then. You know, the sleep thing. This is our second round! We should know better. My best excuse is that I’m extremely sleep deprived and walking around like I’m in another world a lot of the time, like I’m micro-dosing acid (can you do that?). I imagine that my husband asked if he could go, all cute and excited, and my fried sleepless brain said, “Sure whatever, as long as my parents can come help, you can go.”
We imagined that he’d go on a little trip to see his old friends and my parents would help out with preschool pick-up and drop-off, dinners, and chores around the house. You know some casual help.... Well, now the baby is 7 months old and he wants to crawl so bad. Our fat happy roly-poly little guy is working so hard to move his plump form around and he’s fussy and frustrated. Oh and he’s pretty much stopped sleeping all together! For the first 5 months he slept in our bed and I could nurse him back down with each wake-up, like magic. This isn’t working anymore so I asked for my husband’s help and Baby got moved to a bassinet and then to his own room. But the sleep thing is still not happening in any sort of predictable or consistent way.
Now this trip is a week away and in our shared calendar it says Hubby’s gone for 5 days but really the trip was 9 days and neither of us has been gone overnight since the baby was born. As this reality started to land I began to get angrier and angrier. I’m so fried, like a shell of a human being fried. Also I teach meditation classes for moms and for birth so there’s this stigma against anger. But I’m fucking mad anyway because I need a vacation more than I ever have before! The idea of parenting alone, even with the help of my parents, for 9 days has me feeling homicidal. (Don’t worry I won’t kill anyone. My husband has been my main editor here. Hi Honey!)
Let me tell you about the process of dealing with this Mom Rage so we can get some relief together and also use our anger for good instead of evil. First I tried deep breathing and pushing the anger away. I believe this is called “spiritual bypassing.” Then I went for an angry run and hurt myself a little (my poor right hip). Then I yelled at my husband a lot and made crazy angry faces until he really got that I was feeling fucked-over by this plan. We needed to do something so that it didn’t feel like he got to go on this romantic getaway with his friends, hot-tub included and full night sleep guaranteed; While I’m stuck at home cleaning baby butts and trying not to lose my fucking mind, more sleep deprived than ever.
Then I started making demands thinking this would make things better. I told him I would do NO laundry for the week leading up to his flight, that I would only get up once a night to feed the baby (this one hasn’t panned out so well), I wanted him to get me massages and self care things, I didn’t want to hear about his trip at all because I couldn’t get excited about it, and I want a fucking night to myself before and after the trip. One fucking night to myself! Where I can sleep as much as I want, take myself out to breakfast all alone with a book, go to hot springs, and hike in the woods. These are my demands, like a hostage situation. I feel like a hostage.
I feel trapped. I feel like a caged animal. Trapped in motherhood. Those of you who know me or have been reading these stories for a while, you know that I was wild AF before having kids. I traveled all over the world by myself, guided boats over waterfalls, made love to exotic men, and stayed up all night dancing. Well for now, that’s all out the window! Now I have to check if one of my boobs is hanging out before I leave the house and make sure there’s no poop on my pants. I mean baby poop!
Are you getting the hornets nest metaphor? Then I asked my husband if he could at least try to change his flight plans because we both realized this was a very stupid plan, made out of sleep deprivation and that clearly I was not in my rational mind when I OK’d it. I called my friend, who is also a therapist, and told her that I needed help being nice to my husband, that I was losing my shit and filled with rage. We all need friends like these, who love us even when we’re covered in poop (even if only metaphorically). She suggested that I take as many nights to myself as possible. She gave me the brilliant idea that I could ask my parents to sleep at their house sometimes while they stay overnight with the baby. (Mom, Dad, can I do that?! This is a family affair over here- can’t keep anything from my parents or my husband.) She agreed that it was probably going to suck, that we made a bad plan, and then focused on what to do now. She pointed out that I really love my husband (she officiated our wedding, thank you!), and that I needed to remember that he would never intentionally fuck me over. We just made a bad plan and now he needs to make it worth my time.
The interesting thing about anger is that when it doesn’t get stuck in the body and hurt us, it’s actually a really cool tool and helps to show us what is needed and awaken us to our own power. I tried breathing with it, running with it, and doing a Sensory Awareness practice about working with the jaw so I could release this urge to bite my husband. Then last night I went to out dancing. This was what really worked for me to move the anger through my body and release it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still mad at my husband, but now I don’t have a headache. I was able to angry sexy dance my way out of this sticky sense of being a caged-in-trapped-feral-animal. So that I could get to the other side. Now I can say, “I love you and I’m still mad,” to my husband and not want to kill him at the same time.
It’s just anger. But anger has power. I’ve been working with mothers for years and a lot of us feel angry and powerless and this is such a shitty feeling. We are not powerless. We are powerful creative forces, literally raising the next generation. If that’s not power I don’t know what is. So how do we show up for ourselves even when the anger feels suffocating? Even when we want to kill our partners from frustration and rage but we can’t because they are our allies, our biggest helpers? How do we show up for ourselves and give ourselves time and space to dream, to feel into what is needed and tend to it? Even when the needs feel so big and so hidden that it feels like to uncover them would be to get swallowed up by the entire ocean. To drown in a gargantuan pile of laundry. This is the task anyway. To become a mother is to be completely dismantled, taken apart, destroyed, and then come back together in a way that is unfamiliar and strange.
The task is to feel at home in our bodies, not to “get our bodies back.” There is no going back. There is curiosity. There is wonder. There is time to slow down, go inward, and explore our own landscapes with all the hills, valleys, scars, and pleasure. Don’t turn away from it. Keep going! Stay with the breath and explore the next step. Baby steps.
Feel free to leave a comment below and tell us all about your rage! Let it out! We are better together and if we can harness all this Mom Rage, Moms will rule the world!