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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
How do we deal with the ugly furies of motherhood?
Apr 8, 2002 | "Wait right here."
I leave my two boys, both 2 1/2 years old, on our doorstep. I shut the door, walk to the back of the house and scream. I scream for 10 seconds. Stop. Then scream again. My teeth are bared, my face taut and red, my eyes narrowed into slits. I don't feel human. I feel like a cornered animal, fighting for survival. I stop, take a few gulps of air. I don't feel relieved. I feel tired. I want to run somewhere, anywhere. But my kids are waiting. I open the door. I don't know what they've heard. But they look at me and say nothing.
I pile the kids into the car and head to the playground. Let them play while I sit, drink my tea and think. Think about how deep this anger at motherhood really goes -- anger at the relentless barrage of needs. I know that mothering 2 1/2-year-old twins is particularly tough, and that they are at the apogee of their demands; but I still need to get a grip on my anger. I need to figure out how best to be with them when I'm coming undone.
I want some guides, some teachers to show me the way through this thicket of love, tenderness and fury. I want to know how to navigate an ambivalence that Adrienne Rich, 30 years ago, called a "murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness." Like Rich, what I want to know is this: How do you reconcile feeling hopelessly in love with your children and furious that you no longer have much of your own life? How do you untangle this complicated nexus of ferocious love, fury and bewilderment?
I drive slowly and think about what my own parents taught me about anger. Nothing I want to emulate. My father's anger was frightening, irrational and mean. It went from mild irritation to white-hot fury in seconds. My mother, a peace-seeker by nature, tried to calm him, sweep his rage under the rug and pray the rest of the day would proceed uneventfully. The way my father expressed anger hurt his children. When my children were born, I swore I wouldn't repeat the sins of my father. No hitting, no demeaning. I've kept my promise but am still afraid of the potency of my rage.
I speak with friends, but they rarely cop to mother-anger except in that exasperated "Do you know what my kid did today?" tone. When I introduced the subject of anger in my mother's group, there was a twitter of nervous laughter, like I had just introduced them to the slobbering mutant sibling I keep hidden in the shed behind the house. I got the feeling that even bringing it up represented some great moral failure on my part -- like I had flunked the good mother test.
Thirty years after Rich's groundbreaking treatise, we still can't come clean about mother-rage.
