A Potent Cause of 'Mom Rage'
Image via @_puss_in_books_.
By Minna Dubin
With stress and lack of support both independently leading to anger, it’s no wonder modern Motherhood feels like a structure fire — it’s positioned at the intersection of two leaking gas lines.
The lack of structural and familial support for mothers leads to another contributor to mom rage: poor sleep quality. Not enough sleep might seem like a standard parenting problem, but it’s got
dirty gender laundry in the basement. Motherhood’s PR team has the entire culture convinced that mothers are the natural caregivers of children. This results in interrupted sleep being “a burden borne disproportionately by women,” according to Sarah Burgard, director of the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. Her 2011 study showed that even after children no longer need a feeding in the night, the gendered sleep imbalance persists regardless of work status, even when the mother is the primary breadwinner. Moms in dual-earning male-female couples are still almost three times as likely as dads to report that their sleep is interrupted to take care of the baby. The length of each waking is also skewed by gender. Moms are up for an average of forty-four minutes, dads for an average of thirty. Between moms having multiple children and the variety of reasons kids wake in the night, lack of quality sleep can be in play for mothers for a decade.
While most would agree that not getting enough sleep invariably causes next-day crankiness, this was empirically demonstrated in a study published in 2019. The authors showed that people functioning on a sleep deficit had an increased tendency toward anger, which directly inhibited their ability to cope with frustrating situations. Without a proper night’s sleep, mothers don’t have the wherewithal to pause before responding to stimuli.
Lack of sleep turns us into instinctual animals — sensitive, irritable, and quick to roar.
In 2022, Christine Ou and her colleagues published a study that investigated the relationship between sleep and anger in postpartum mothers. The results showed that poor sleep quality and feeling like their babies are not sleeping well are noteworthy contributors to mothers’ anger. Out of 278 Canadian mothers with healthy babies between six and twelve months old, 31 percent reported intense anger levels, a higher percentage than those who reported depression (26 percent).
To assess the mothers’ anger, Ou used the standard anger measurement tool created by psychologist Charles Spielberger called the State Anger Scale, which consists of approximately fifteen agree/disagree statements that measure temporary anger, such as “I feel like throwing something right now.” To be considered angrier than average on the State Anger Scale, the subject has to test into or above the seventy-fifth percentile. Ou raised the bar for her study and only considered the participants to be angry if they tested into the ninetieth percentile or higher. Though Ou did not use the word rage to describe the mothers in her study, she did say that her scale indicated they were “intensely angry.” “So many women being so angry points to, yes, this is a problem,” she concluded.
Both my husband and I wet the bed beyond the average age when we were children. I struggled with it well into fourth grade. Late bedwetting is a common symptom for kids on the autism spectrum.
Between genetics and autism, our kid never really had a chance. After he sized out of Huggies’ overnight pull-ups when he turned six, and we presented him with generic white ones with no cartoon drawing on the front, he said no way.
Without a diaper, he promptly began wetting the bed every night. We were constantly hauling him to the toilet at night. We tried taking him at night, before we went to sleep, but he still woke up wet in the mornings. So, for two years, we took turns setting an alarm and waking ourselves up in the middle of the night to take him again. There was one brutal year where we were waking up both kids to pee at three in the morning.
In the end, my sleep was consistently interrupted for eight years. Whether we’re waking up to nurse an infant, change a toddler out of wet pajamas, or comfort a kindergartener after a night terror, being a mother can severely throw sleep out of whack for years, leaving us bleary-eyed, exhausted, and teetering on the cusp of rage.
“Motherhood is relentless provocation. When we consider how mothering requires us to soldier through months-long parenting phases of teeth-gritting frustration, we are truly saintly every time”
As though it’s not enough to be stressed, undersupported, and exhausted, kids tend to know just how to push their parents’ buttons over and over and over again. In Emotional Intelligence, Goleman cites the work of University of Alabama psychologist Dolf Zillmann, who discovered that rage can build over time from repeated aggravations, “a sequence of provocations.” For example:
“Oh dear, please don’t grab things off the shelves at the grocery store.”
“Whoops, it’s not safe to stand up in the cart.”
“No more coming out of your room. It’s nigh-nigh time.”
“Don’t call for me anymore. You close your eyes and have sweet dreams.”
“This was my last time coming in here. Now Mommy needs to go to bed.”
“I made lasagna for you.”
“You do like lasagna. Remember you ate three pieces last week at dinner? You love lasagna.”
“Yes, the whole thing has sauce on it, but not a lot. It’s the same sauce that’s on pizza.”
“The green stuff is just basil. It’s an herb, not a vegetable.”
“No, Cheerios is not a dinner option tonight.”
Motherhood is relentless provocation. When we consider how mothering requires us to soldier through months-long parenting phases of teeth-gritting frustration, we are truly saintly every time we manage to remain calm, gently steer, remind, redirect, teach, ask politely, and request firmly but without anger, over and over, and then do it again the next day and the next day and the next. When we berate ourselves for losing our tempers later in the Mom Rage Cycle, what we are not doing is remembering the countless times during the Ramp-Up phase when we did not blow up. We tend to forget that before we gruffly grabbed their little wrists and bellowed, “STOP HITTING ME!” we gently held their pudgy hands and said in a nurturing, self-contained voice, “No, no, hands are not for hitting. Hands are for hugging friends.” We erase all the times we kissed our little ones’ fingers and tried to help them name their emotions. Though these stellar mothering moments slide right into the ether, they are part of the ramp-up to mom rage.
Excerpted from Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood by Minna Dubin. Copyright © 2023. Available from Seal Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.