Since having my daughter at the height of COVID fear in May 2020, I have learned the best way to scream in your car. Windows up, no matter how hot it is. Maybe you think about what it would be like if you accidentally left your baby in the car this hot. Maybe it\u2019s good you feel too hot. Maybe you deserve it. No music. Shut off NPR, silence reports of death tolls or an active shooter or the election or a new hot restaurant or air pollution. If you can, wait until no one is walking past, though you might not be able to wait. The scream will be loud and painful; the car amplifies the sound in a way that scares you\u2014the first time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cover your ears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My entire life, I\u2019ve prided myself on never being an angry person. My parents rarely yelled at me, and I rarely yell at anyone. I\u2019ve never been in a physical fight. In my dreams, I sometimes try to scream at someone, but I can\u2019t. I try to hit someone, and my arm hits soft like a child\u2019s, or my fist dissolves into smoke. In these dreams, I\u2019m angry about my weakness. When I\u2019m awake, I\u2019m not. The symbolism is, of course, obvious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I read enough, fixed everything, controlled it all, she would be okay.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n But six months after my daughter was born, something changed. I\u2019d been up all night, every night, Googling every terrifying thing that could happen to our precious, perfect baby. I\u2019d fallen in love, and was obsessed with the many possible ways I could lose her. If I read enough, fixed everything, controlled it all, she would be okay. A false, impossible hope, I knew\u2014but I didn\u2019t care that my worry was beyond logic. Sometimes, in the middle of an article on the Mayo Clinic\u2019s website, I\u2019d realize I\u2019d read it before\u2014many times before. None of it helped, and yet I kept on. Was the swaddle too tight, was her room too cold, was she wearing too many<\/em> layers? Was her cough okay? Was this rash ok? Was that other weird sound okay? Was she eating enough? Was I playing enough? Was I playing too much?? COVID anxiety multiplied my new-parent anxiety. At the start of the pandemic, the rhetoric for parents of young children was that they could and maybe would<\/em> die from COVID. Public spaces (which I avoided as much as I could) were almost intolerable. Someone coughing made my adrenaline jump like I\u2019d seen a bear. Even on walks with my daughter in the stroller, anytime another person passed, I worried about the air we breathed. I suffocated. Later, that rhetoric about COVID changed, but my body has never quite forgotten it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One night, changing the laundry over for the hundredth time, my fist connected to a basket of laundry. I found myself throwing it across the room. I write \u201cFound myself\u201d because my body felt like the time I\u2019d accidentally grabbed an electric fence\u2014my chest pained and buzzed and my arms became locked and tough, tingling all the way down into my fingertips. I wanted to make a loud sound, wanted to keep myself from disappearing, fury without a target (the laundry, sure, but not just the laundry). Another night I went to my car and screamed. The sound was so loud it pierced my own ears like a needle; the bear was back and it was me. I couldn\u2019t remember ever screaming like that. And once, after putting my daughter down for bed, she was asleep, but my ankle cracked and she woke. I got her back to sleep, and then I closed the door a little too loud and she woke. I tried to get her back to sleep again and failed. I couldn\u2019t shut my brain off until she was asleep and I needed her to sleep and she needed to sleep and I set her down in bed just a little too hard and left the room. Over and over, I slapped my face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My anger had at last forced me to look at it. I wasn\u2019t even sure what I was raging about. It was never rage at my daughter. I loved her so deeply even something as small as the precise sound of her tiny teeth crunching an apple made me ecstatic. I try, every so often, to write about my love for my daughter, but I always fail. Instead I build a garden around it; I cannot get to the heart of it with language. I worried I could not stop the world from taking the best person I knew, that they would never know her either. I don\u2019t even like writing those sentences. We\u2019d planned for and wanted this child. I had a supportive and devoted spouse who loved being a father. We had every privilege imaginable\u2014whiteness, steady money, family support, maternity and paternity leave, health care, a safe home. I had no right to feel rage. It was me, I thought. My fears were wrong and had broken me somehow. I was determined to figure out why. I was determined to fix myself. Didn\u2019t my daughter deserve a happy mom who didn\u2019t need to go scream in her car? I watched the way my daughter felt my moods, the way I felt sunshine, wind, rain. I watched her begin to imitate my walk, the inflection in my voice. If I was a mirror, I didn\u2019t want her seeing her reflection in such a broken one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even if the rage was new to me, it was not new to parenting.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n I went to therapy, of course, and I turned to books. I don\u2019t know if there are actually more books about mothering being published now, or if, like playgrounds, I am simply more aware of them because I am one. I thought my rage was new, that I was a violent monster, but the books I read taught me that monsters are everywhere. Even if the rage was new to me, it was not new to parenting. Talking about it, publicly, is new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I read Rachel Yoder\u2019s 2021 excellent, darkly funny novel Nightbitch<\/a> <\/em>first. In the novel, a new mother\u2019s rage becomes so great she turns into a kind of werewolf. And, eventually, she likes it. The sentences are long, looping, delicious. The main character does not have a name. She is just \u201cthe mother,\u201d or later, \u201cNightbitch.\u201d I felt like I was reading the inside of my own mind\u2014if I allowed it to truly do what it wanted, pure instinct, feral. (Of course, what mother can allow this? Even now, here I am hiding in a parenthetical.) I devoured the book, read pages without realizing I had read pages, the way I hadn\u2019t read since I was a child reading Harry Potter<\/a><\/em>. Yoder captures the precise monotony of having a young child, but more than that, helped me discover something about my anger: it was not<\/em> new for me. Here, Yoder\u2019s narrator describes her first real rage:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHer child\u2019s screams fanned a flame of rage that flickered in her chest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat single, white-hot light at the center of the darkness of herself\u2014that was the point of origin from which she birthed something new, from which all women do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou light a fire early in your girlhood. You stoke it and tend it. You protect it at all costs. You don\u2019t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that\u2019s not becoming of a girl. You keep it secret. You let it burn\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHer anger, her bitterness, her coldness in that darkest part of the night surprised even her. She wanted to think she had become another person altogether the night before, but she knew the horrible truth, that Nightbitch had always been there, not even that far below the surface.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I recognized the flame. I thought about when my younger sister sat in my room pushing every button the way only siblings know how to do. I picked her up and threw her bodily from my room. And later, the many touches from men I didn\u2019t want. I knew I couldn\u2019t get angry, or lose control. Before I ever nurtured a child, I nurtured anger. Now, I am the thing to be feared. Yes, I thought, reading Nightbitch: <\/em>I am an animal. I am only now failing to hide it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I turned to Minna Dubin\u2019s 2023 nonfiction Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood<\/a> <\/em>to think about why. Mom Rage<\/em> is a vulnerable, deeply researched work that locates mom rage by describing a \u201cbasement\u201d of systemic issues that can underpin moments of rage, wearing on mothers long before an angry outburst. Dubin describes many of these issues as different versions of a lack of \u201cmothercare\u201d\u2014a capitalist system that punishes women for leaving the workforce to do care work; a racist and ableist healthcare system that does only the barest of medical minimums for mothers; a governmental uninvestment in providing universal, quality childcare; the dominance of the nuclear family that erodes the \u201cvillage\u201d; a pervasive, social-media influenced belief in what mothers \u201cshould\u201d do and look like, which demands mothers subdue their anger. At the same time, there is little incentive to fix these problems\u2014why would we? The entire system is balanced upon mothers providing free childcare at home. As Dubin writes, if mothers blame themselves for their anger, and society blames them too, then the larger society needs to take no responsibility. The problem of mom rage is mothers\u2019 own problem to fix. <\/p>\n\n\n\n After that, rage is physical: the nervous system responding to constant stimuli of small children, lowered coping ability from sleep deprivation, and the high stakes, for giving a shit about what you\u2019re doing. In her book Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control<\/a><\/em>, Amanda Montei locates motherhood\u2019s trajectory through a lifetime in the body, and through touch. Dubin also writes, \u201cMom rage lives in the body.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rage seems inevitable\u2014the standards are high, the hours are long, the demands immense. Of course we rage. Dubin also shares her own moments of rage, and the subsequent shame. I saw myself there, too\u2014the electric limbs, the Nightbitch\u2014but I knew how other mothers would react. I saw them on Goodreads, on Instagram, in the New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s review of the book: how could a mother act this way? It makes sense\u2014mothering and caregiving are burdened by many of the same difficulties no matter who you are, but the web of experience is so unique it\u2019s impossible to fully see yourself in other mothers. There were many other mothers who saw their rage in the book, too, many still who felt this rage unfathomable. They did not think Of course we rage<\/em>. They thought, as I feared my daughter did: How could you?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Mothering and caregiving are burdened by many of the same difficulties no matter who you are.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n Even with all these books, we are still circling the question of what to do<\/em> with this rage. In the New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s review of Mom Rage<\/em>, Merve Emre writes about Dubin, \u201cShe sensed that her reactions were excessive, but she made no real effort to understand. Understanding was not the point of her essay. The point was to unleash the primal scream of a mother who had regressed\u2014spectacularly, obscenely\u2014into a tantrumming child, not unlike the three-year-old who had spurred her rage in the first place.\u201d When I raged, I threw things. I screamed. But inside, I felt older than ever. I did not feel like a child. The review is steeped in the kind of misogyny, infantilizing, and judgment that mothers and caregivers rage against. The review was clear: even in 2023, this is bad, monstrous, not allowed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I told a male friend about my anger\u2014peripherally, for I chose not to share the whole truth\u2014I told him how hard I worked to not yell at my daughter. He laughed. \u201cI yell at my kids all the time,\u201d he said, shrugging. I didn\u2019t ask him if he feels shame about it. He doesn\u2019t seem to, and I\u2019m pretty sure I know the answer: no shame in yelling for many fathers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mom Rage<\/em> was a candle held out\u2014yes, thank god, it isn\u2019t just me. But there was still too much of myself in the dark. I still didn\u2019t yell at my daughter, or at my husband. After reading Mom Rage<\/em> and the New Yorker <\/em>review, I understood\u2014there was no appropriate place for me to feel rage. Like Nightbitch, I feared I was bad at the core. I was not able to let myself be feral. I was not allowed to be angry. I was a bad mother if I was angry. With nowhere else to go, I turned my rage inward. I raged at myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When my husband tried to help and understand me, I would often tell him I was a bad mom.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n In my post-rage, post self-harm shame, when my husband tried to help and understand me, I would often tell him I was a bad mom, a terrible mom. \u201cPlease get her a better mom,\u201d I told him. \u201cSend me away.\u201d I said it as a way to punish myself further. The next two books I read played on that ultimate fear\u2014that your child would be taken away from you. One of the mothers sharing their rage stories with Dubin for her Mom Rage <\/em>interviews hesitated after Dubin\u2019s question. She wanted to make sure Dubin was not going to take her child away. Early in my pregnancy, I\u2019d listened to a story about a woman experiencing postpartum psychosis who was separated from her child in the earliest, most tender days. I didn\u2019t think this was me, maybe, probably not, but the thought was there\u2014what if?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n