Motherhood is messy and sometimes furious

The first scream doesn’t always come from the baby. Sometimes it comes from the mother – silent, inside, burning her ribs like flares. We don’t talk about that scream. Because we have built an image of “good mothers”: a culture of patients, sparkle, self-sacrifice and bliss. But true motherhood is much more troublesome. And sometimes it gets enraged.

The concept of maternal anger has gained traction in recent decades as scholars and clinicians began to challenge the myths of mothers of all patients. meanwhile anger In motherhood, it was long considered a taboo, a second wave feminist in the 1970s. The born woman– Name emotional contradictions nursing carecontains anger. term Maternal anger It has since been explored by psychoanalysts, feminist theorists and mental health experts as a legitimate emotional response to invisible labor and chronic fatigue. Identity Fragmentation is faced by many mothers. Rather than signaling pathology, mothers’ anger can be understood as a response to impossible needs, structural abandonment, and especially impossible needs placed on the mother. Mattress

Mother’s anger and mattress sense

In 1973, Dana Raphael coined the term Mattress Such deep biopsychosocial changes to explain the process of becoming a mother pubertyshowing a dramatic change in identity, Feelingsand embodied. Still, Matthence still lives in the shadow of medical discourse, often mistaken for pathology rather than being recognized as a developmental transition. I believe that one of its least understood but most intense expressions is what we call maternal rage (Dubin, 2023).

There are many reasons why mothers’ anger builds quietly over time before they erupt, and these reasons give up across socioeconomic backgrounds. Whether a person is a working class mother navigating limited support and finances? stress Or middle class parents facing “intensive” pressures Child-raising” and Career Emotional sacrifices of care without demand, proper recognition or relief accumulate. Regardless of status, the fatigue, isolation, and tumultuous identity changes in inherent to early motherhood can create slow, burning frustration that ultimately breaks through as anger.

Eruption: “I’m finally being honest.”

When there is no space for the self, the mother’s anger often erupts when the time of living collapses into the needs of others. It’s not always linked depressionalthough it often receives medical care like that. It is often said to be explosive and out of control, shame– introduction. But in phenomenological terms, it is also a cry of recognition. It is a materialized protest against alienation, invisibility, and impossible ideals.

In my phenomenological interview with my mother, the woman describes this anger as a moral rupture: the moment when their reality no longer coincides with Fantasy Maternal calm. One mother said: “When I scream, I feel like a literal monster… but I feel like I’m finally being honest.”

Anger is not the opposite of love. It is often its echoes, distorted by fatigue, invisibility and self-destructing during radical reorganization. In the fourth period, Postnatal Later in pregnancy, pregnant people become mothers, often with little warning and little structural support. The psychophysical self is reorganized around a new axis and new priorities, and this shift occurs all at once, not gradually. As another new mother said, “Your life, suddenly, it’s not what it was before… I have no time or presence to understand my life. I’m not there. I’m trying to keep the baby alive and keep us floating.”

Anger as an alarm

Therefore, motherly anger may be understood as a signal. It is an alarm from the new self, struggling to collect and repair the scattered pieces left behind by the sudden expansion. The reorganized motherly self has no space or time to lean towards her inner core, managing emotional overload, injustice, or chronic stress. Just as she visibly rearranges herself after her belly and organs have physically expanded pregnancyand that must also be given to her inner self to give time and patience and reassemble. The conflict of care and elimination, self-sacrifice and loss of sovereignty creates motherly anger.

This is anger born from the distortion of time. A. explains clearly. “This is all a change moment. Something will always need me.” There is no pause or “off” button. H. calls it “always a post call.” Monica repeats this unforgettable tempo. “It’s like you’re always late. There’s still 5,000.”

Body shock

There is also a physical shock. Pregnancy and birth fundamentally change the body, thereby changing the mother’s sense of agency. E., the former athlete“I was training with 200 pound guys… right now I can’t pee, I don’t like to ask for help.” When strength becomes vulnerable and autonomy becomes addictive, identity becomes cracked.

Emotionally, mothers report division: soaring, gentle love for children who exist together sorrow For the self that no longer exists. N. looks back: “I didn’t think she was the second time she was born… I grew to endlessly how much I love her.” A. Confession: “I love him. He brings me a lot of joy. But it’s… it’s conflicting.”

Conflict is not a sign of failure, but a sign of transformation.

Social breaks and paternal anger

There are many reasons why mothers’ rage quietly build over time before eruptions, and these reasons cut across the socioeconomic lines. Whether you are a single mother juggling multiple jobs or a professional navigating the pressure to “do it all,” the emotional weight of primary care often accumulates without adequate structural support. But what’s impressive is that we rarely rule out. Paternal anger. This absence reveals important. Motherhood anger is more than just personal feelings. It is about the systematic condition of being the primary caregiver of a society that still disproportionately assigns the role to women. If more fathers occupy the role of daily 24-hour care, we may also start to hear about paternal anger. The term maternal anger exists because it designates a conflict between selfless motherly cultural ideals and the living reality of unsupported care. It comes not from the mother’s failure, but from the structural failure of not recognizing caregiving as shared labor.

I’m becoming

Instead of diagnosing maternal anger as a personal defect, or hormone Glitch, we read it as a symptom of mattress sense. Is this a signal of a deep, unfinished work that reorganizes itself around an entirely new center of gravity? Self learning to feel, think, move again – but in a different body, under constant surveillance of responsibility, self with different constraints?

My anger hurts. It hurts those who feel it and those who receive it. Especially in the context of caregiving, mothers’ anger can be frightening, shame-inducing and deeply destroying. But the alternative – the silent cry of swallowing frustration, buried sadness, and invisible fatigue, is not so harmful. To support both mothers and their families, we must resist the impulse that moralizes or pathologizes anger too quickly. Instead, we need to learn to read it – not as a character failure, but as a signal: something in the caregiving ecosystem is broken. Something about yourself struggles to retain its form in radical change. If you ignore that signal, everyone involved will fail. But when we listen, and with compassion, we may begin to build support structures that allow for healing. Anger is not the solution. But it can show us where we need care most.

This rage might say: I am becoming. I’m not who I was, but I’m not who I’m going to become yet. And in the gaps between them, I need support, space and time.

It’s not silence.