The Importance of Female Rage, Part I, 'Scary Mommy'

(A note on this series: 1) I will not do it justice. This essential topic could be a scholar/activist’s life’s work. 2) I will not use clinical terms in these essays – except to point out our culture’s own pathologies. Instead I will place female rage in mythic and ecological perspectives. 3) Even though this is Part I, I have no idea how many parts there will be, or how frequently I’ll release them. Needless to say, writing about this will likely have ramifications I cannot foresee. 4) I apologize ahead of time for the redundancy of my descriptions of the brokenness of our culture. I feel I cannot overstate how broken it is and, as a result, how unfathomably tragic the extent of the collateral damage we are now navigating. There is no escaping it.)

This morning I’m sitting with the Boulder, CO horror of Anna Englund, the 29 year old mother who’s been charged with the murder of her two month old baby. I feel both my (enculturated) horror (what kind of a woman would kill her own baby?!) and my empathy (I wonder what particular landscape of impossibility she was navigating that led to this horrific act). Anna’s neighbor and friend has shared that Anna was suffering ‘postpartum depression’, which as far as I’m concerned is simply a way to pathologize mothers for a natural response to a thoroughly unnatural situation – being at home alone with a newborn, no sisters, no aunties, no grandmothers. This post will not be for everyone. I will make some statements that will bristle and even insense some readers. I look forward to that level of reaction. I am exploring a thing that cannot possibly be understood in a culture as woefully damaged as ours. As endlessly, relentlessly misogynist and biophobic as ours. And that is the phenomenon of mother rage (or despair) and the violence that understandably accompanies it. So let’s begin…

Over the span of my thirty years as a clinical social worker, private practice therapist and now mentor, I’ve spent hundreds of hours sitting with mothers as they speak of the horrific moment when, as many of them have coined her, scary mommy comes roaring into life.

(Already a caveat – I am in no way saying that when we ‘snap’ at our kids, or even when we yell at, or grab a hold of, or even slap our children we are only steps away from killing them. Something stops most of us from actually killing our children. Whether that moment is determined by our level of resilience and resource, the fabric of our mental health, or something else, I don’t actually know. Most of us don’t kill our children. And yet most of the mothers I have worked with will admit that there were plenty of times when they felt the boundary between snapping, and grabbing and slapping and killing so slight it was terrifying.

And this makes perfect sense.

Though we might joke about wanting to kill our children, because what else can we do in a situation that is so thoroughly inhumane as the one in which we attempt to sufficiently parent our children, there is absolutely nothing humorous about what has become of the conditions within which we are expected to raise our children. Even the most wealthy among us cannot buy her way out of the desertification and commodification that has become motherhood (and parenthood in general, but for this essay I stick with mothers and the essential task of mothering).

Back to scary mommy…

This horrific moment that most of us interpret as a moral reckoning, is simply a nervous system reaction. A stroke of evolutionary brilliance sounding the alarm bells to identify an untenable situation. Scary mommy is the moment – sometimes seemingly out of the blue but actually always trackable – when the nervous system snaps into self preservation mode and the mother responds violently towards the threat – which happens to be in the shape of her child. In that moment the child is requiring resources she does not have (yet everything and everyone around her, likely including her own biology and misshapen ego, are telling she should have them). Perhaps the child is requiring resources the mother has *never* had (because she was not offered them when she was a child). Perhaps it’s simply that she has run out of those resources, the account has been bankrupted – too many withdrawals and too few deposits. But what actually constitutes a genuine, nutrient-dense deposit into a mother’s emotional bank account, anyway? Do we have any idea? I imagine there are many men reading this exclaiming an exasperated “Yes! Nothing I offered worked! Her needs were so great. I had no possible hope of getting it right!” We tend to think in terms of ‘self-care’ at times like this. She simply needs to attend to herself. Take responsibility for her situation and care for herself! Maybe she should get a massage? A night out with the girls? Maybe she needs to go to a yoga class or simply have a night off-duty to sip some tea (or a fifth of vodka) and watch a few TV shows? No matter what the culture tells her she should do to nourish herself, it will only patch the breech in the family system’s hull, at best. Our culture has no clue how to genuinely nourish a mother. It’s far more lucrative to keep her malnourished, jumping through hoops, doubting herself and her innate wisdom. And it also keeps her from turning her exhausted night vision toward the culture itself and busting a move so radical the entire capitalist system might fall on its head. ‘No, Mother…if you’re having a hard time it’s simply because *you* are weak, morally suspect, unworthy, incompetent. You might try harder. Perhaps mother & baby music classes? Or perhaps in-home Ketamine therapy. And don’t forget, you really ought to nap when the baby naps.’ But what if sleep simply can’t happen because her nervous system is so jacked, so vigilant, there will be no deep sleep for years to come?

The average mother is so egregiously under resourced and isolated she cannot help but see her infant’s and children’s needs as threatening to our own survival. In a system that is running on fumes, this is inevitable. Of course the extent to which we cause damage, the extent of our self-preservation outbursts, are a function of our own attachment modeling and imprint. Because we are only offered motherhood models that are befitting a culture that’s denied its dark nature (and is, therefore, being ruled by it), we are horrified by the facets of ourselves we discover at 3am when we are up for the fourth time, with no sunrise in sight and a grandmother nowhere to be found. This little bundle of needs (who needs things that perhaps weren’t ever even acknowledged or offered to us when we were that size), this little baby who offers us very little in exchange for turning ourselves inside out in an effort to be the one-woman show of all shows, a three-ring trifecta of mother, auntie and grandmother all in one, becomes a mortal threat. The shame of not being able to conjure patience, creativity, or even a smile is like salt in the open wound of what the culture tells us is surely our own terminal inadequacy. The exhaustion from sleep deprivation clouds our vision and shortens an already too-short fuse. What happens next is invariably a moment that we will take to our graves. And though we are horrified by Her, the one of us who appears – stirred into action from a primordial calling – is as necessary to a thriving ecosystem as is the all-nourishing, all-loving Mother. She is actually the very creature we need to appear, in different circumstances, with a different foci of her protective rage. But when She appears at 3am or 1pm, when we are alone and in charge of this small human, She is not merely terrifying. She is horrifying. We, mothers who have met this one of ourselves, will not ever forget what now lives as the truth of us. We do not need to exorcise Her. We need to reclaim and redirect Her.

While many have called Her scary mommy, I prefer to call Her by Her mythic name. As I have come to know Her, She is the Gorgon - capitalized because She is to be revered, honored, and certainly feared. She is created out of necessity. She appeared from the depths of the brilliant ecology of the Cosmos as an answer to a very dangerous absence. In an ecosystem being marauded and plundered, laid to waste by humans, She is essential. You might know Her as Medusa, though what you’ve been told about her is likely completely inaccurate. She has many forms and many names. Kali, alone, has more than a thousand names.

She is, simply, Nature protecting Herself.

Contrary to how our transcendence-, light-obsessed culture has portrayed Her, She is no monster. Though it makes sense that in our misogynist culture She has been re-narrated as one. She is a Female-creature who appropriately harnesses Her rage in response to people and situations which threaten to harm what She dearly loves - Life and all expressions of it. In the case of the scary mommy situation, She is called into action in the face of a (sometimes terminally) untenable situation: the task of attending to the most important responsibility in human culture – mothering – in an environment that needs to be like the Amazon river basin in its fecundity and yet is more like the Mojave Desert in its barrenness. Here She points Her protective rage at the creature who seems to pose the most imminent threat – her child. Of course this isn’t accurate. Yet it makes sense that this happens. What we need Her to do is point Her formidable, generative, efficient rage at the culture-at-large, at the absurd model of the nuclear family that isolates its mothers and places them in competition with each other. We need Her to put all Her human heads together and dream up alternatives where young mothers move in with each other regardless of their partnership status (partners could come too), with volunteer grandmothers and aunties who take round-the-clock shifts; where 1am might find any number of mothers and grandmothers awake, quietly telling stories or bawdy jokes, taking turns holding a crying baby, holding the mothers themselves, modeling resilient nervous systems in action. All in a day’s work. Exactly what we were built for.

In the absence of something as simple as this, the Gorgon’s appearance is a foregone conclusion. At this point I do not bat an eyelash when yet another mother sits with me in horror, sobbing, shaking, as she describes the scene from last night. Up until now I have felt it my responsibility to place scary mommy in its proper context. But might I have missed Anna Englund had she come to see me in her despair and despondence? Of course I might have. And what would I have done for her even if I’d spotted how close to the edge of an irrevocable moment she was? The culture tells us to report her. Of course that’s the culture’s answer. But what really needs to happen is the mother house I described above. Sitting with these young mothers who have understandably terrified and repulsed themselves, I feel the Gorgon’s protective rage aimed at my culture, that it has so efficiently and strategically created an unnavigable mothering landscape within which we are to do, arguably, the most important task of a healthy human culture – to raise brilliantly well children so they can take their place as initiated, responsible adults.

It’s no surprise that the only thing in this culture more demonized than a mother who has become enraged with her children is a mother who has killed them. When this is happening on Earth surely we have opened the very Hell Mouth of Hades. When a mother becomes so malnourished she sees her own children as a mortal threat to her survival we see her as a monster. And what about the mothers who are themselves in abusive situations so terrifying they would rather kill their own children than risk the possibility that their abuser might turn his attention on them? We rarely ask why she might do a thing as horrifying as murder her children. We simply wonder what is wrong with her.

Mothering is a village endeavor. It will never be anything but this. If evolution were a quicker process, it’s likely the essential capacity to Mother would be inoculated against the endlessly deteriorating conditions of our human species. But as it is, like all essential tasks in a well-enough ecology, mothering requires tremendous resources. An all-hands-on-deck moment. When we attempt to mother outside the structure of the village we will do a marginal job at best. Raising a child requires multitudes of adults and older children to accomplish the task. It requires dozens of arms, dozens of nervous systems and dozens of diverse perspectives, eyes, and of course opinions. Anything less is paltry and places everyone at risk.

I don’t mean this to send the mothers among us into deeper despair. I mean this help you harness your rage accurately. I also hope it empowers you to realize there’s nothing wrong with you. You simply need more than you are getting. Much much more. And getting what you need will require you to break the rules, reshaping the intimate spaces of family and community. It is only from this nourished place that we might unleash the formidable power of the Gorgon within each of us – not on our babies but on the true threat to our survival.

There is no end to the darkness we will experience – and cause – until we risk everything to create a different human culture.