One of the best things about Mummy Blogs or mothers blogging or whatever you want to call it is the way in which women (and men) have started sharing their darkest moments of parenting online with each other. This article by the very wonderful Anne Lamott, calling for mothers to start talking about their moments of rage was written back in 1998 and I would hazard a guess that that silence has well and truly been broken now.
I once wrote about my own parenting meltdown but eventually changed it to a ‘private post’, mostly because it was written in the heat of a lot of emotion and was badly written. I am comfortable enough to admit to the facts of the meltdown here, which are that it was a very bad time for me, and that one morning I found I just couldn’t cope any longer, I couldn’t bear one more second of sadness and anxiety and responsibility and keeping-it-together so I shouted at my child terribly and then I locked myself in the bathroom. Lauca was two years old. She was distraught. The facts sound simple enough but it was ugly. To this day there is nothing Lauca hates more than to be forced apart from you, it sends her into a complete panic, and knowing this about her made my meltdown all the more awful. I knew how terrified she would be, and was.
I don’t punish myself over that meltdown, too much. I did something very smart after I unlocked the bathroom door. I picked Lauca up into my arms and I drove us both to a mother friend who was going through even worse than I was that year. She had told me about a meltdown or two of her own before, and she was the right person for me to tell. I told her everything. And she gave me real wisdom. She said every mother loses it and locks herself in the bathroom from time to time. That it happens. That children recover. That mothers are human beings with anger and sadness and everything else. That children can’t be protected from the human-ness of their mothers even it if was the right thing to do. That I wasn’t screwing my child up.
Some of my favourite posts ever on parenting blogs have been confessions of meltdowns. (Like this and this and this and this and this). Honesty between women, about our lives, especially when our lives are at their most difficult, is a profoundly feminist act.
A few mothers seem happy with their children all the time, as if they’re sailing through motherhood, entranced. However, up close and personal, you find that these moms tend to have tiny little unresolved issues: They exercise three hours a day or check their husband’s pockets every night looking for motel receipts. Because moms get very mad; and they also get bored. This is a closely guarded secret, as if the myth of maternal bliss is so sacrosanct that we can’t even admit these feelings to ourselves. But when you mention these feelings to other mothers, they all say, “Yes, yes!” You ask, “Are you ever mean to your children?” “Yes!” “Do you ever yell so that it scares you?” “Yes, yes!” “Do you ever want to throw yourself down the back stairs because you’re so bored with your child that you can hardly see straight?” “Yes, Lord, yes, thank you, thank you …”
So, let’s talk about this.
Great post!
I’m happy to know that I’m not the only one to have locked herself in the bathroom in the face of perceived hideousness. You have made me remember how I used to pick up the kids and get in the car and go to somebody else’s house when I was getting to breaking point.
My hiding place is the closet — but I haven’t haven’t used it with the baby… yet.
I have though, shouted at her in the midst of incessant whining, and received shocked looks from the family. The scary part was that I didn’t register the shouting. I thought I was reasoning with her, not competing with decibels!
Nice post
Oh Blue Milk, I love you!
you are a lady after my own heart, or my own anger. My blog is confessional. I certainly started out confessing to all sorts, because i’d spent so long loathing myself for losing it with my kids. I@m in a better place now, thank god. But i think it’s important for us to speak out so that mothers stop comparing themselves to some kind of crazy perfection.
M2Mx
I screamed at my little boy last night “Why don’t you want to sleep” in absolute desperation. And do you know what? He went to sleep! Today we had cuddles and I told him how sorry I was for losing it at 4 am in the morning. I felt so guilty and so bad for losing it.
I shouted at my daughter last week when she flatly refused to put on her shoes and started having a tantrum (she’s 3 i went onto full Mummy meltdown) After many tears I told her I was sorry for shouting but it was because Mummy felt angry and she was wrong to shout at her. We hugged and the storm passed.
My Mum used to loose it with me and she would never talk about it or apologise or explain her actions to me. It left me confused and with no idea of how to deal with my anger. It left me blaming myself for these emotional outbursts. It left me confused. I now know she had no idea of how to channel her frustrations and she had no emotional outlet either apart from her own children.
I may not be perfect and may be a hot headed bag of hormones but I know when the tempest has passed it is up to me as the bigger of the children in our house it’s me who needs to explain why Mummy decided to explode temporarily.
I can’t do more than that.
This is a very important point Doodlemum. We are all human, we all lose it occasionally. If you dont’ talk about it afterwards you leave a vacuum in which your kids will fit their own explanation. It’s the same with arguing, far better to argue in front of your kids and for them to see a resolution than to just witness silent treatment which they don’t understand.
M2M
You only exploded and locked yourself in the bathroom once?! That makes you basically Mother Theresa compared to me… I finally learned to remove myself from the scene, i.e. go to the porch with a book, and cool down. My temper is awful and boy does my son love to push my buttons until I lose it.
What Jill said. Except if I try to remove myself my son follows me and continues to push my buttons. He’s a professional.
Great post yet again Blue Milk. As someone who doesn’t blog and who only has one truly honest mother-friend, I really, really appreciate meltdown/boredom/parenthood is eroding my soul type posts. Talking to other mothers about how great parenting can be is easy. I’ve tried talking about those dark moments of parenting but have been shut down pretty quickly.
I have one friend who really gets it. She is the one to whom I can say “I hate this” and I don’t have to qualify it or make excuses for it. She knows I love my son. She knows that I’m not depressed and that this feeling generally wont last for long.
It wasn’t until I found blogs like yours, blogs which deal honestly with parenting, that I realised that I wasn’t an anomaly. I honestly thought for a while there, that I really wasn’t cut out to be a parent and that feeling angry about a baby who wont sleep was a sign of a serious personality fault on my part.
I used to be that woman who exercised three hours a day. The gym was a refuge from the children I was caring for at the time; it was the only place where they simply couldn’t follow, and although it wasn’t exactly a hub for deep, adult conversation, it allowed me to be alone with my grown-up thoughts. So I’d go at least an hour every day, and on Saturdays I’d stay the whole morning.
I can’t really say I feel guilty about this either, which kind of makes me feel guilty (feeling guilty for not feeling guilty?). It was healthy for me, as I’d always been sedentary before, and it kept me at least serviceably sane.
Thanks for linking to the Lamott essay; I’d never seen it, and really enjoyed reading it!
I love how you always do this. Just when I have been beating myself up about something, up pops a post that makes me feel so much better.
I lost it with my daughter at the supermarket this week. She’d been having a tantrum for a while but we’d run out of everything, and as I’m working extra hours at work I really only had this one hour to get the shopping done. (I’ve pretty much given up shopping with her, for now). So, I lost it. I felt so ashamed of myself but tried to brush myself off, ignore the tantrum and continue shopping. A dear old soul in a walking frame came up to me and said “Well, aren’t you just reaping with what you’ve sown?!”
I was so ashamed I left the supermarket as soon as I could. I told a dear friend who said “Oh, just ignore it” but truth is I couldn’t stop thinking “The old lady’s right! I have brought this on myself.” I couldn’t get the “bad mother” mantra out of my head all week.
And I finally manage to log on and see your post.
Thank you!
Also thanks to the other comments. Interesting thoughts and advice.
You are very kind refering to them as a ‘dear old soul’. I would be using quite different words. There always seems to be someone around with a nasty look or unkind word when you are at your lowest ebb. Giving myself permission to shop without the kids was one of the best things I ever did. So much quicker and cheaper too without little helpers popping things into the trolley.
A little bit of losing the plot is not such a bad thing. I spent years locked in a struggle with my own mother – I’d be tantrumming up a storm, desperately wanting mum to shout back. She never ever did, not until I was about twenty years old. The more worked up I got, the quieter and more calm she seemed. Somehow it just didn’t seem fair, such a power imbalance in an argument/tantrum when one person was planning and keeping their cool and the other was flying by the seat of her angry pants. Looking back, I think I was trying really hard to provoke an emotional reaction – I wanted the strength of my emotions mirrored instead of diminished.
Now, with a child of my own, I don’t relish losing it and shouting and scaring him. But what so many of you said is true: we’re all human and it matters that our kids know that too, that they can see us trying and failing and apologising and trying again.
Great post. It definitely happens to Every mother, even if they say it doesn’t. No one is perfect and no one can ever say, honestly, that they haven’t been angry with motherhood. Mothers are expected to do it all, and keep a job going. But it’s so damn hard sometimes. We aren’t robots, we’re human beings, and we have feelings too.
I’ve lost it many times with my daughter, who’s autistic. But I don’t blame anyone because it’s just a part of life to get frustrated.
CJ xx
My mum once lost her temper with me and my sister and threw every one of our soft toys out of our bedroom window.
It didn’t do us any lasting damage, and now I’ve grown up I can’t really believe she managed not to do it more often!
(Family legend also says that when I was about 11 and my sister 9, we left our dad a note to tell him that he “was always grumpy and shouty and it wasn’t nice”. His own father was dying from cancer at the time, so he had good reason to be grumpy and shouty, but he still made an effort to first tone it down, and then explain it to us. Explanations help.)
YES.
Lamott is a goddess. If you haven’t read “Operating Instructions” (and her other stuff, too, but first and foremost, that one), you need to. You NEED to.
My meltdown moment was at about 2 years old, trying to get groceries and 2 year old into a second floor apartment. 2 year old was being beastly- defiant, disobedient, the whole package. I finally lost it, screamed, locked him behind a toddler gate in his room, and just left. Went out the front door, down the stairs, and outside. Walked around the building once, muttering, cursing, and swearing to myself. At that point, I had calmed down enough to go back upstairs. He was inconsolable, of course, and it took a while to calm him (and me) down.
I’m not proud of it, but I was redlining. Violence would have occurred otherwise, and I NEVER would have lived that down. Sometimes, in extreme situations, it is best for everyone that you just be separated.
Totally hear you on the Lamott is a goddess, and have long loved Operating Instructions too.
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