How Mad Can a Mother Get?

Editor's Note: This essay is a modified excerpt from "Crossing the Line in the Sand," one of the essays included in "The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage," edited by Cathi Hanauer.

On the phone I tell my mother about the essay I am working on.

"You're writing about anger?" my mother says with surprise.

"Well – yes," I say. "About, you know, my anger, and how can you teach your kids to express anger constructively, when you yourself never learned how to."

"What do you mean?" she says. "You weren't an angry child."

There's this pause. Sickening as it is, my mother and I rarely argue or fight – and even then it's a war of kid gloves not boxing gloves, all politeness and barely raised voices. (If you supposedly love someone, you don't hurt their feelings.) When I was a child, my mother would, when put out with me, yank me not so gently by the arm, or – far worse – torture me with a lengthy discussion of my crime, and our feelings. She didn't yell, and never hit. I don't remember ever being afraid of my mother.

Nor can I remember my mother and father having a real fight, ever. In terms of my sister and me, my father got mad the way fathers, historically, are permitted to: He'd yell some, shake his fist, and on very rare occasion spank. Once, I got slapped across the face for insulting my mother, but only once. I can count on one hand the occasions on which my father's anger seemed excessive, or frightened me.

For the most part, my family didn't do anger in the raging, rampaging, veins-bursting-in-the-neck way. My family stopped anger in its tracks. We drowned it in cocktails, or ate it with chocolate frosting, or left the room and let it starve.

"I could get pretty mad," I tell my mother on the phone, feeling my chest start to tighten in defense of my girl-self's anger.

"About what?" my mother asks.

She has a point. Even now, I can't truly pinpoint the source of my childhood anger. Clearly, I was put together with different parts than my parents. I was high-strung and overly sensitive – especially about being taken seriously, which is hard when you're under five feet tall and your nickname is Pip.

"I don't remember you being that angry," my mother says, but what I hear is, Oh, come now. You're exaggerating.

"Well, I was angry," I say. "I was angry a lot."

I want to hurt her a little.

"I threw a high heeled shoe at Rob's head in a French restaurant," I say.

"...When?" she says, finally.

"It was early in our marriage. I was in my twenties. Lots of stuff happened, actually. Some of it much worse than that."

"Really?" she says, but I can tell she does not want or need to hear one more thing. "I'm sorry to hear that, honey. You seem just fine to me."

"It's good I found a great shrink," I say, thinking, blessed is more like it. Over many years, Dr. B., my therapist, has helped me understand that I'm entitled to my anger and to express it, but not to slap a man across the face or rip off all his shirt buttons simply because he annoyed me.

"I agree," my mother says, the relief palpable in her voice. "Dr. B. sounds wonderful."

"She is."

And that's that. We are in agreement on something, so we can stop. Nothing has been lost. The key is to keep the peace.

What I don't tell my mother, then, is that the reason I went back to my therapist in my early thirties, after stopping for a time, wasn't depression, but a fear of losing control of my anger. I was humiliated by my behavior; it shamed me and made me feel guilty (for now, as in childhood, what did I really have to be angry about?). I was concerned because my husband, Rob, and I were thinking about having a child, despite the fact that I'd always considered babies shrieking menaces – glorified larvae – and children irrational, needy, unpredictable and narcissistic (much like myself I suppose). And if and when we did have this child, I didn't want to be a bad mother. I wanted to be my mother – safe, protective, rational, calm – but (and here's the catch) without giving up all my anger, for if it sometimes scared and shamed me, it also fueled me: my drive, my ambition, my work. It was a fundamental part of who I was, and I didn't want to sublimate it completely – only to tame it. I had horrible fantasies of shaking my child until his or her teeth fell out, yanking their limbs out of their sockets, burning them with cigarettes or smacking them around. I was terrified of what my anger might make me capable of.