I am afflicted by pangs of conscience following my negative review of “Screaming on the Inside.” I maintain that the book is fairly ridiculous, confused, and reinforces unnecessary emotional turmoil in the writer and readers. However, one issue in my shoddy review is worthy of further development: why are mothers so angry?
I breezily added in to my rollickingly unfavorable review that many women, including me, did not have any significant experience of anger until having children. This could lead to the assumption that motherhood makes people angry. The system is rigged against mothers! Jessica Grose was right!
However, it is worth noting that having children is difficult, simply put. As systems degrade, it is harder to maintain civility while civilizing the savages we birth and bring into our homes. But I venture the argument that all these factors are still not the real reason why mothers are angry.
One simple cause of anger in mothers is sensory overload. While children subjected to too much sugar, too much noise, synthetic fibers, and not enough time outside may be screaming on the outside, mothers might start screaming on the inside. But this is not simply the way it must be. Small, meaningful steps can be taken to lessen the feeling that everything is too loud and too much. That’s the simple part.
Now, for the complex part: The root of anger is pride. There is an ugly reaction in us when we see ourselves for what we are and are pained. Most mothers under 40 set out to be “perfect” mothers. According to polling, the stated goal of many mothers is perfection. This sets the stage for blistering self-contempt and bitter disappointment.
As we saw with Ms. Grose, these expectations and supposed societal pressures are not extrinsic. What we choose to internalize is what hurts us. Just because many people become ensnared by bad ideas does not mean that we must also. The silly ideas about being perfect only hurt you if you accept them. Is it harder to resist bad ideas when more people commit to them? Yes, but we continue to bear the responsibility of interrogating our ideas. You don’t have to try to be a perfect mother; it’s bound to fail. As one woman told her perfectionistic granddaughter, “Don’t worry that you might screw up your kid; you will!”
Beyond the unrealistic expectations and the overweening pride of assuming those before us were simply too dumb or lazy to succeed in perfection, there is another source of anger: forgetting the art of femininity and the taking of rest. I was struck in reading interviews from the 1980s how often people, men and women, would state as a fact that “there is no difference between men and women.” This does not hold water. On average, there are significant and meaningful differences between the sexes.
To put it whimsically, men are creatures of the sun, women the moon (There’s a marvelous allegorical story about those differences). While many men thrive on day-to-day consistency, many women follow cyclical patterns that ebb and flow. Some weeks may be manically “productive,” while others are devoid of “progress” in the realm of work. Failure to acknowledge these energetic rhythms can result in exhaustion and self-rebuke when all that is needed is a respite.
It seems trivial to suggest that all an angry mother needs is a nap, but it’s astonishing to find how true it is sometimes. All that was needed was a power nap or a quiet morning or 20 minutes of sitting in the sunlight or an evening out. Those seemingly insignificant moments can change the whole dynamic. Unfortunately, many mothers are plagued by the idea that rest is “unproductive.” This is often coupled with the implicit assumption so easily absorbed from the general culture of total equality between the sexes that bearing and caring for children must never interfere with everything else we do. Women have been led to believe that motherhood should not take away from anything else. No extra time or effort required.
I’ve made an informal study of mothers of yesteryear, glimpsed in the wings of stories going about their daily life. For example, in “Betsy-Tacy,” Betsy’s mother takes a daily rest before tackling the second half of the day. She’s far from an exception. People like to bemoan early-rising women fixing breakfast for the household. That is not easy. However, rising early when paired with an afternoon rest time and moments of calm and quiet punctuating the day makes for a fine life. Keep an eye out for the well-ordered moments of rest and relaxation in mother’s lives of yesteryear. Recreating them in our isolated and strange time takes some experimentation, but they remain no less necessary.
Feminists are often outraged by portraits of self-sacrificing mothers. The idea that women should aspire to devote themselves to motherhood seems to them to cast into doubt the possibility of a woman doing anything else. However, fully devoting yourself to motherhood—not exclusively! But fully—is a way to succeed without losing your mind.
Exerting effort and energy, setting aside time, making it the main thing that you are doing all make having children more than just tolerable but, often, a joy.
