Anger has always been such a powerful emotion in my life.
My own anger but more so, the anger of people I love.
It's always meant devastation, fear and being out of control.
My father's anger terrified me. It was fury. It was rage. It was catastrophic. It was drunken spittle flying and massive, calloused square hands hurting a little girl. It meant pain and humiliation and violence and a feeling of complete worthlessness and terror. He frightened and enraged me so completely and the forever thing of all this is that now, as a grown woman, I see anger brewing and I am reduced: 5, 9, 14 years old again. I am unable to cope and am lost to the fear. It is cataclysmic in its power.
My own anger was medicated into a tight, black hole for years - squashed down by the strong, flat palm of alcohol and released in short crazy unbelievable bursts, leaving me weak with remorse. Now, I have a better grasp on it - can let it fly a little bit and not dread the repercussions. Those few words encompass years - decades - of therapy and effort and soul searching. It's too much for me to go into more detail. And anyway, this is about you, my little love.
Your anger is another thing altogether.
It is unknown to me. A brand-new thing, amongst all the bloody awful brand-new things this year of hell has brought us.
When you were a baby, you had plenty of anger. Crying almost solidly until you could speak. Trying days. Years ago. As a toddler, you had not one single tantrum. I would do anything to avoid you having to feel angry, frustrated, that vile churning inside. I would stop and attend to you if I saw it coming - divert you and distract you - take your feelings for myself - swallow them down and forbid you them. I shielded you from what existed inside you and forced you to suppress it or ignore it. But I never let you learn how to manage your own natural, real, normal anger. I thought I was doing it for you, protecting you and being a good mother when in fact I was neglecting your emotional development. In my desperation to save you from the horror of anger, I stole something too.
But was it just for you? Maybe I was protecting myself too. Bad enough having to witness my father. I couldn't bear to see that emotion on your face and in your body. It frightened me. But it means that now I have no frame of reference - can't reassure me/us with remembering past rages and recoveries.
When (in your recovery from anorexia) you felt safe enough with me (as the mother of an anorexic) - safe in the knowledge that I wasn't going to shout or cry or fall apart or die from it - you began to show some of your rage and fear. The first time, it drew me up so sharply I almost fell over, never to get up again. You shook and yelled and panicked - raspy, catchy breaths and bobbing shoulders, red face wild eyes garbled voice. I thought you were going to die of it. Literally fall over dead. I felt hysterical inside. I expect you did too. If it wasn't so tragic, I'd be smiling as I type that. Oh darling, what a pair.
I have variously responded to your anger with crossness, shouting, fear, wild eyes, pounding heart, walking-away legs, blank eyes - struggling to stay alive in the face of such a terrible thing. We have talked ourselves blue over this and I know you know me almost as well as I know myself and you are certain in the knowledge that my response is not about you. It is about me. It is my legacy. But it is lousy mothering. It is a part of the sickness he infected me with and that it has carried down the generations into you is something that incenses me.
I have always tried to fix you, to protect you.
I was raised to know the world as a terrifying place - filled with unpredictably awful things happening to the people I loved and being utterly powerless. How pointless all my effort has been. The bad thing happened anyway.
How ridiculous that I'd think I could alleviate your suffering. I can barely manage my own.
You will fix you. I am just along for the ride.
2 comments:
This post made me think so much of my own upbringing. It was very different from Grace's in a lot of respects, but anger was taboo in our house as well. I too never had a full-on tantrum.
I remember it always irritated you about me - that I was so controlled and falsely calm and accepting. You were actually the one who started me on the process of being able to deal with anger - all that therapy proving useful, I guess!
I was congratulating myself before I started to frame my reply on how I'd fixed that issue now. That I can feel angry and acknowledge it and speak up about it and get things changed. But I've been kidding myself a bit, I think. (Bloody personal development - it never ends!) I do do all those things, but it's still in my everso controlled, rational way with an even-toned voice and carefully-prepared case. The idea of losing control and dignity is still terrifying to me - I feel for you and for Grace so much. How brave you are both being to face it.
What you are doing is *not* lousy mothering. It would have been so, so good for me if my mother could have sat down with me and said 'I find this really difficult' or 'It frightens me because it reminds me of xyz but actually it's ok' and not just pretended that our family's way was the normal right way. Even if you can't give her the response to her anger that you'd like to, you are giving her the huge gift of your awareness and humanness and honesty.
And thinking about Grace as a little one, it seems to me that many of the things that usually frustrate toddlers and cause tantrums are unnecessary and it is good parenting to remove them. The expectations that they'll be able to do things they're not developmentally ready for and lack of respect for them as small people with feelings.
I get what you're saying about your own fears being part of the motivation for removing obstacles from Grace's path more than you wished you had. But it's such a lovely thing to let a child live in a world of 'yes' most of the time instead of the continual 'no' that they're generally bombarded with. I see you with Ruby and Red and the way you speak to little children is beautiful. I just wanted to say that - tell you the good I see about how you did things.
I waited until I was in my late 20's before I fixed up these kinds of issues with my mum, and some of them will only ever be forgiven, not mended, because we see the emotional world in such different ways. Maybe something good that will come out of this awfulness is the chance to resolve these things with Grace before she leaves home. When you are both adults, you are going to have the most amazing relationship.
M xx
ANGER. The word alone makes me shake inside. I don’t know why. I don’t deal with the anger of others very well and I very rarely get angry. I store it.
Are we not raised so that we don’t suffer the sins of our parents? They try to raise us in a different way to how they were raised. So we don’t suffer the injustices they endured, suffer the hardships, or they want for us to have what they didn’t. Want for us to have a better upbringing?
This is exactly what you have done. You brought your daughter up not see or feel the anger and violence that you were subjected to. For her not to become an angry person. You gave her diversions; you helped her channel any anger. That is good parenting. You were not neglecting her emotional development; you were, in my belief, enhancing it. Giving her the option, as she grew older, to talk out her emotions/feelings rather than vent them.
We all vent. There are times we need to. She found her time to vent. She needed to. Got out all that anger, rage and frustration. Without violence, the violence you associate with anger. Just anger. In front of you, at herself, at you, at the anorexia. At everything she could think of. You responded to her anger, because you could where before you could not. You were seeing your daughter do something that does come naturally to all of us at some point but something you were not used to. Nothing to do with bad parenting. Nothing at all.
You did not steal anything from Grace by protecting her. You gave her options. The anger might be about you but it is something you understand, and wanted to teach Grace about and not have to suffer. I would love to be able to talk out what I feel, whether it is anger or fear. Talking in my family is not a big thing.
There is not an iota of bad parenting here. You are an excellent mother. You talk to your daughter, she talks to you. You talk through things, what an option to have. Better to talk than shout.
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