Lauren Novak remembers the first time she experienced mum rage: her daughter was four months old and had finally fallen asleep in her bassinet in her bedroom. Lauren, utterly sleep deprived, was drifting off to sleep by her side.
“My partner had gone to our bedroom down the hall and the click of the door closing woke me up. It’s not like he came up the stairs singing at the top of his lungs, he just carelessly shut the door. I was incandescent,” she says. “I stomped down the corridor, turned the lights on – at this point I didn’t care if I woke my daughter. I couldn’t stop myself, even though, ideally, I didn’t want to – the feeling in my body was overwhelming,” she admits.
Novak describes it as “different from frustrations I might have felt pre-kids, where I could sort myself out”. While she can’t remember how the argument ended, she’s now conscious her anger was “the build-up of my unmet needs so I could meet the needs of my family”.
At the time, she felt she was doing everything – “objectively, I was doing about 90 per cent; the only thing I wasn’t doing was earning a pay cheque” – and didn’t feel she could ask for help.
Now Novak, 39, author of Meltdown: Why motherhood makes us angry and what to do about it, wants to lift the lid on this uncomfortable emotion so it’s not shrouded in silence or shame – and to help others address and dilute their own mum rage.
Anger is an uncomfortable emotion, especially for women, just as men are conditioned to repress sorrow. “We’re told women shouldn’t feel anger, and even if we feel it, we shouldn’t show it outwardly,” Novak says. “It’s so accepted that a man who is stern or yelling is coming in to put his foot down and stop chaos, whereas women, when they express those emotions, are often ‘hysterical’, or ‘emotional’, or ‘not able to control the situation in another way’.”
She also explains it’s not a particularly sympathetic emotion. “If you’re crying, you’re likely to elicit sympathy and an offer of help, whereas if you’re angry, which could be coming from the same place, people find it harder to go towards someone. So it can push people away, even though it is also a cry for help.”
Mum rage shouldn’t be shrouded in shame and silence, believes NovakMum rage is common: some surveys suggest that between 70 per cent and 90 per cent of mothers experience it. And women in general are feeling more furious than men. By 2021, the year Sarah Everard was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a serving UK police officer while abortion laws in the US were removing women’s choice, the anger gap was six percentage points higher for women, according to a BBC analysis of data from the Gallup World Poll.
I’m certainly not immune: on Saturday when my sleep deprivation and PMT boiled up at my husband Mark for not pulling his share of overnight wake-ups and 6am starts, I roared. It’s a very different feeling from the irritation I’ve experienced if, say, I’ve asked one of the children to please put their shoes on about 35 times and I’m being ignored. Then, my voice sounds tense and I immediately feel horribly guilty while still trying to get everyone out the door.
When I’m experiencing mum rage, my anger feels hot and justified: the sleep imbalance in our home feels like a symptom of a world where women are systematically discriminated against.
For many, including Novak, mum rage extends to their children, too. “Everybody gets an explosion,” she admits. “That’s a lot easier to say now than two years ago because there’s a lot of shame inherent in it. I’ve slammed doors. I’ve stomped off. We lived in a two-storey house for a while and I’d make a big show of stomping off up the stairs. I was really grumpy.”
Novak has surveyed over 200 mums and has found that around 60 per cent have yelled at their children; 45 per cent have told their child to “go away”, 40 per cent have slammed a door in anger and a third have sworn. “I admit, I’m in that group. I think spending 20 years in a newsroom has probably given me a bit more of a potty mouth.”
She believes the connection we make between anger as an emotion and aggression as an action is one reason it’s hard for mums to say they are angry. “If we make it easier for mothers to put their hand up when they’re at the point where they’ve yelled, slammed a door, sworn, without judgement, then we’re far less likely to have them slide down to feeling so stressed and isolated or ashamed that anger is actually coming out as aggression.”
Novak also says the difficulties with admitting to anger overlaps with difficulties mothers find in asking for help. “There are so many messages that tell mothers: this is something we wanted and something we chose to do. And we love our children; I always wanted to be a mother. So to ask someone else for help, or suggesting we are not capable, even subconsciously, stops a lot of women, including me, from asking for help,” she believes.
‘I think spending 20 years in a newsroom has probably given me a bit more of a potty mouth,’ says NovakHowever, in dealing with her mum rage it is crucial. “A key learning, for me, was to ask for help and then to use that help to be able to get some time alone. You need to figure out who in your life you can ask, because not everybody is going to be able to give it to you. Your partner is definitely someone you should be asking, if that’s not already forthcoming.”
Novak addressed her anger by dealing with physical triggers first. “I needed more sleep. I needed to move my body more. I have chronic pain from endometriosis and I need to move my body to manage that,” she explains. “I couldn’t address bigger, more structural issues that were contributing to my anger before I could get sleep, more movement and manage my pain.”
She also recommends automating help, so for example she’d know that she had a couple of hours on a Tuesday afternoon when the children were with their grandparents. “That freed up brain space to have the energy to sit down with my partner and have the conversation about getting better systems in place,” she says. “It’s very easy in a partnership in parenting to play the, ‘Who’s got it worse?’ game. We could go around in circles. So sometimes it wasn’t about having a conversation, it was actually just about getting time to spend with each other and meeting our need for a relationship. And sometimes it was getting time apart from each other.
“We had to have a conversation about how we could help each other make that happen and again, we automated; we settled on a Saturday morning when I get some time and he looks after the kids, and then on a Sunday morning we swap.”
These changes helped her regulate and she’s now more comfortable when her rage rises. But they are not a cure. Her children are now six and four, and different things set off her anger. “Mum rage is a lifelong condition; I’ve also had women talk to me about grandma rage. It’s not something you cure, it is a legitimate emotion and part of the human experience to get angry.
“Dr Sophie Brock, Australian motherhood studies sociologist, described anger to me as ‘a completely reasonable response’ to the circumstances we find ourselves in when mothering in these conditions. My intention is to help bring the temperature down so that we’re at a simmer.”
Novak has also learnt that her anger has to move. “It’s got to go somewhere. Quite often, at a personal level, the moving is the stomping or the slamming the door. Anger at structural inequalities can go to ‘actively resisting’ [the patriarchal status quo] when you can: maybe it’s actively resisting in a conversation with your partner about why should it be you that goes back to work part-time when you’re the higher earner. But it’s not always possible for any individual mother to resist something structural that is the job of a government or a corporation to fix. But if people have a better understanding of how systems work, they can question them.”
She also feels less guilty when she does explode. “I am not a bad mum for getting mad. It’s really helpful not to get stuck in that anger-guilt trap, where I blow up, get angry at the kids and then think: ‘I’m going to be an even better mum’. And then, of course, I can’t meet those expectations, because they’re even higher than they were before. So I fail at that, get angry again and then feel guilty. Lessening the guilt actually means it’s less likely that we get angry, because we’re taking pressure off. I still have blow-ups, but now I realise much quicker, and sometimes I can prevent them by asking for help.”
Meltdown: Why motherhood makes us angry and what to do is published on 23 April by Lauren Novak (HarperCollins, £14.99)
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