I'm not angry, I'm overwhelmed

It's time to normalise and re-frame maternal anger

Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash

Maternal anger or mum rage is something that I’ve wanted to write about for a long time, but I’ve always stopped myself.

Why?

Because I thought that if I admit out loud that I get angry as a mum, then people will judge me and think I’m a bad mum.

Keeping it quiet

I honestly thought it was just me who got angry as a mum. Just me who couldn’t control her emotions. Just me who snapped and shouted.

None of the mums I knew were talking about the anger they felt as a mum.

What was wrong with me?

Why couldn’t I just stay calm?

The fact that I thought it was just me, meant I didn’t tell anyone how I felt.

Every time I got angry and shouted, I felt ashamed and guilty.

Here’s the problem - if you feel, as a mum, that you can’t talk about your struggles then those feelings have nowhere to go. The shame and the guilt just grow.

As Brene Brown says:

"If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgement. If you put the same amount of shame in the petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive."

So this post is my attempt at dousing shame with empathy and bringing maternal anger to the surface, so we can talk about it and normalise it.

---

What triggers your anger?

Some of the things that trigger my anger are when I feel out of control, when I’m trying to rush or when I’m trying to cram too much into the day.

Also, when I’m tired after a rough night with my youngest, I wake up and I’m instantly in a reactive state. The energy reserves that I desperately need to stay calm, just aren’t there.

I think even knowing what triggers your anger helps you see that there’s more behind it. It’s not just a simple matter of you not being able to calm down, or control yourself, it more complicated than that. A lot of it comes down to sheer overwhelm.

This helps remove some of the shame around anger, so you can instead look at it from a more compassionate perspective.

The good girl narrative

There’s also something else at play here too, the ‘good girl’ narrative - where we are socialised as girls to:

• be nice

• be good

• not have extreme emotions

• not upset anyone

• always be kind and put others first

That narrative has left us stifling and stuffing down our emotions and feeling ashamed of how we truly feel. So, we’re left feeling like we can’t expose that angry part of ourselves to others, because it doesn’t fit in with how we are ‘supposed’ to be.

How different would this feel?

A few years ago, I started to see the work of Dr Caroline Boyd and Anna Mathur, and they both talked about maternal anger. They not only normalised anger as a very real experience of being a mum, but they also offered a kinder perspective on it.

(I’d urge you to check out their work to help you re-frame maternal anger and understand it better, if it is something you are struggling with.)

Reading their work helped me see that anger is a natural and valid emotion, and like all emotions, it’s there to tell us something. It’s there to help us take action on something that feels wrong.

So, instead of judging ourselves for being angry, what if we saw anger as a sign of things that we need help with?

What if we realised that the anger we felt as mums, was a very real response to:

• Overwhelm

• Sensory overload

• Feeling disorganised

• The mental load

• Mothering alone (most of the time)

How different would that feel?

Instead of internally beating yourself up for being angry, you’d be looking at how you can meet your own needs.

If you are in the position where you are literally with your kids 24/7 and you have no time to meet your needs, then here’s my free 15 Self-Care Tips for Mums (that you can do even when you’ve got the kids).

My podcast episode on ‘Totally do-able self-care for busy mums’ might also help (it’s only 11 mins long):

---

Let’s normalise talking about maternal anger

I wish, when I first had kids, that I knew that being angry didn’t mean I was a bad mum. Instead, that the anger was a signal for me to delve into what was triggering my anger, and how I could meet my needs better.

Let's normalise talking about maternal anger.

Let's forgive ourselves.

And, let’s listen to what our anger is trying to tell us.

---

If you do feel like anger is showing up for you more than it's not, then please think about talking to your GP or I found MIND super helpful for someone to talk to when I was struggling.

---

I'd love to hear in the comments your thoughts on maternal anger.