What does the darkness of parenting really feel like?
Am I the only one who feels so bloody angry?
I’ve lost hours foraging bookshops, blogs, the internet for a real, raw description of deepest darkest early parenthood. But found very little that really gets under the skin of it. Explosive poos, fish finger dinners and needs-must TV marathons might now (thankfully) make acceptable discussion points. But what about how the hardest stuff really feels? The brink it sends us to. I found nothing on the fertile rage aspects of parenting seem to trigger in me.
Catherine Cho’s Inferno, and Emma Jane Unsworth’s brilliant After The Storm, both came close. Each generously mining their early parental experience to share its bleakest bits. But Cho suffered post-natal psychosis and Unsworth brutal PND. Do we need these diagnoses to legitimise swirling awful feelings? I had neither on my Dr’s notes, but still felt incalculably lost at sea many times. Did this make me a bad person? Was I sick, but just in other ways?
Temporary solace was found in Clover Stroud’s writing. She skilfully and viscerally depicts that friction point between beauty and banality. Her wonderfully raw My Wild and Sleepless Nights did just that through the prism of mothering. But as I closed the final chapter, I still felt the lightness outweighed the dark. Could she have inched deeper into those more shadowy bits? Or perhaps I am out there on my own?
Where, I wondered are stories of parents who consider themselves otherwise mentally well, yet still howling at the moon? The women pushed to their emotional limits with little to no support. The women left growling at their beloved children to please just go the fuck to sleep. The women micro-dosing vodka just to get through bedtime. The women who do shout and snap. The women praying for a minor accident, so they can lie horizontally in a hospital bed, alone. Just for a little bit.
These are difficult words to write. I’m compelled to swaddle them with reassurances of my sanity. The safety of the kids. With declarations of how much I adore my children.
Of course. Of course. Of course, I do.
I worry these words might come to haunt me – be held against me as some proof of my failing as a mother, as a person.
Few of us dare to really go there. To speak of the darker notes that underscore so much joy and lightness. I wonder that we’re too scared to speak freely because speaking our truth may mark us out as mad. And aren’t we all considered quite hysterical enough already? Too scared people will think this is all we feel. Too scared that something might happen to our children, and our perceived badness will be rushed under scrutiny, traced back, like a dot to dot, to these thoughts we’ve bravely, (foolishly?) committed to paper. Too scared our future selves and children might discover these murky pools and question if they loved at all.
Of course they were. Of course they are.
Of course. Of course. Of course.
But I am certain as stone, that it is not just me that feels the hardest bit likes gravel under bare feet.
I know you’re out there, feeling it occasionally, too.
I know because you tell me after three drinks. Because you leave me voice notes confiding how close you were to pinching your child’s fleshy thigh after the fifteenth wake up at too late o’clock. Because I’ve squeezed your hand as you’ve gently shaken your head from side to side and said with absolute certainty – ‘I don’t think I can do this anymore’.
During the pandemic, when my children were both under four, my first thought each morning was, “I can’t do this”. I would lie on my back in bed listening to them yelling out for me from their respective bedrooms and feel paralysed with fear for the day. Bone tired. I literally had no energy or belief that I could survive another 12 hours of abject chaos.
Things have changed since then. We are not caged in our own homes. The children have grown. I have grown.
And yet, when I found a snapshot of these bleaker times on my iPhone notes the other day, they felt so real I still flinched at the heat of it all. The hopelessness, the isolation, the red-hot anger. I wished I had read something like that, to comfort me, to know I wasn’t entirely loony tune, alone.
So, my next post – and email to you – will be that exact snapshot. The piece is extracted largely from my iPhone notes, written in 2021 (from the depths of that rainy, second lock down). Edited slightly because this is a writer’s space after all, but with the sharpest bits left exactly as I documented them back then.
I hope the piece might find its way to at least one other ‘angry mother’ and make them feel slightly less mad, slightly less alone. Perhaps it will inspire one other ‘angry woman’ to find a way to ask for help, too.
I’ll be writing more on female anger, (through the prism of personal experience), and the things I’ve learnt since committing to lessening its grip on my life. Things like why anger comes up for us, how to cope with it, how to listen to it, how to safely release it from our bodies without shame, how to make friends with it, how to put it to bed.
But for now, please look out for that next post and a rather rabid snapshot of me ‘losing it’.
It details in unflinching glory the day I unravelled. The day I really scared myself. The day I realised it was time to get a therapist.
If you think this might be helpful to someone you know, do please invite them to subscribe. I am trepidatious and but intrigued to see how this one lands.
Wow I really loved this. Totally resonates with how I feel a lot of the time whilst parenting. Raw and honest which is exactly what the world needs more of. Not these unrealistic expectations of the perfect family who live in harmony the whole time only to find out the reality is a lot harder and far more RAGE inducing! 😂 Love you little one, what a clever dot you are xxx
I only wish I’d have had your brave, raw, honest words back when I felt the same.
Shared xxx