As if we haven’t got enough to do, another mother has gamely set herself the task of trying to bring to the attention of and explain to the wider world the underacknowledged and underexplored phenomenon of maternal rage.
Minna Dubin’s first foray into the subject was a short confessional essay in The New York Times, titled “The rage mothers don’t talk about”, which then went viral – as did a follow-up essay during and about the same phenomenon under lockdown conditions.
They have now become the basis of a book published late last month entitled Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood – and retitled here as Mum Rage, to the unending gratitude of all those who cannot do the “mom” thing. It asks where such anger comes from and why we deem it so inexpressible and unacceptable. To its publication, I have the bifurcated response I have to most interrogations of maternity.
On the one hand – yes! Speak truth to pre or never-partummed power, sister! And especially to those thinking about it, but who haven’t yet got off the fence. They have stuff they need to know.
On the other hand – well, there’s the rage. The rage that such essays, such books, such repeated dismantlings of an enduring and stupid myth are still required. It all speaks to the ridiculously illogical attitudes maintained towards the state of motherhood, still treated as borderline-sacred in an era when we have quite usefully put aside most of our religious devotions and delusions. Nobody thinks thunderstorms are the result of angering the gods any more. When King Charles III was crowned, nobody – except perhaps King Charles III – thought he was being given a divine right to rule alone with his nice robe and jewellery.
But motherhood – or rather, “motherhood” – is still hedged around with nonsense. From persistent old wives’ tales about what you can and can’t eat or do, or how to tell the sex of a baby from holding a ring on a ribbon above a pregnant belly, to hardcore natural birthers who will tell you that a drop of Western painkiller entering your veins will disrupt the special bond between mother and child for ever, to the image of the saintly mother whose love suffuses every cell of her being every moment of her now beatific life. All such nonsense does is mask reality and separate the woman from her humanity.
The only truly “special” thing about motherhood that needs to be acknowledged by society is the extremity of the experience. We have all felt pain – giving birth is the occasion (usually) of extreme pain. We have all lacked sleep, been overwhelmed by the day’s tasks ahead of us, been baffled by a new job without a clear brief and received conflicting advice from those further ahead of us on the path or up the career ladder.
A mother, especially a new mother, is operating under all of these conditions in frankly excessive amounts, and relentlessly so. Maternal rage (that’s an improvement on even “mum rage”, I’ve just realised) is simply the anger of someone, in the likely absence of a truly helpful partner, hugely overworked and wildly (thanks to wider society’s and successive governments’ preference for lip-service over practical, fully-funded childcare and other provisions) underresourced in the job. The only difference is that you are not generally trying to start a new career with a broken vagina at the same time. You would probably take sick leave first. For quite a while. But biology is a terrible employer and won’t let you.
Very, very few emotions, once the initial wave of hormones has dissipated, are solely the preserve of mothers simply because they are mothers. Most of them arise because we are – get this! – people under pressure. And what makes us really angry is not having those pressures acknowledged and not being allowed to express the rage they cause.
To be expected not to respond in the normal way to infuriating things because you are now almost permanently in the vicinity of the baby you have passed out of your body in some crazy way (because C-sections are quite mind-blowing too, if you think even for a moment about what’s actually going on) is absurd. It marks you as a mindless vessel, not a person. A shadow of what you were, reduced now to a thing that should smile at the baby! Love the baby! Sniff the head of the baby! Worry about the baby! Think only about the baby! Instead of responding in full to, well, you know, everything else in the world too, as you always did before.
It suits everyone to assume or to pretend that mothers don’t or shouldn’t feel anger – except mothers, of course. It’s a tremendously efficient way of ensuring that nearly half the population has another barrier it must fight through if it wants to claim time or space or demand changes or improvements for itself. And it would indeed be an incredible force if it were ever fully unleashed.
But it would be a force overwhelmingly for good, restoring mothers to themselves and – I daresay – ushering in a wave of policy changes and rational thinking that would benefit everyone. You’ve no idea what clarity a broken vagina brings.
