Rage

 I am so angry. I am raging. I can barely concentrate. But I have to because I have to work. And I have to parent.

So I have to do everything I can to mask this anger because it is not the fault of anyone else but me. My rage. My fury. But I have to control it.

I want to bark at my daughter who doesn’t want to wear her new shoes to school BECAUSE OF COURSE SHE DOESN’T. She doesn’t want to clean her teeth or in fact, do anything else I ask her to do because I have dared to ask her to do it. It took us all day, from the minute she woke up, to get her to shower yesterday. She finally did so at 7pm.

But I don’t bark. She knows I am angry. She can sense it. She can see it whilst I storm around the kitchen. WHERE ARE MY KEYS?  I keep telling her it’s not her fault and that I am not angry at her but I know she feels a bit scared. This is fucking awful. I don’t want her to be scared. But I don’t know how else to reassure her when I have to be in her company. I have to walk her  to school. I am holding her hand and stroking it as I do so but inside I am a boiling cauldron of fire. I want to scream. I am trying to maintain at the very least, a neutral expression.

My daughter is skipping. She’s calm. I ask her to tell me about the newest character she’s created in her ipad game. I think I am masking it quite well now. Squashing it back down. Keeping it in. Managing tight smiles at the parents I am on nodding terms with along the school run. I see a friend of my daughter’s and her mum. I smile at the girl and chat to them mum, confessing my hormonal state. She sympathises. The reigns of my tension slacken, just a touch.

I drop off my daughter. She’s happy. I am relieved. My bad energy doesn’t seem to have affected her too negatively. I see some other mum’s who normally I’d love to stop and chat with. But I can’t fake it today. I can’t fake happy, light hearted feelings. I know they would be supportive and lovely but I don’t want to be around people when really I am angry about NOTHING. I don’t feel like I have a right to be this angry.

There is no REASON for my anger. I mean the trigger was the stupidest. After the no shoe incident, I realised I couldn’t unfold her scooter for the school run. Meaning we would have to walk, meaning we would be late. And instead of calmly taking this in my stride, “it’s ok Jess, being late isn’t the end of the world”, this made me want to punch my hand through a wall. I battled unsuccessfully, trying to prize apart the folded parts of the scooter. All the while on the phone, taking my mad frustration out on my husband as he tries to explain how to unfold it. It wasn’t his fault. But I bellowed at him like it was.

It’s like when you’re already angry and you snag your jumper on the door handle. That small act of defiance by an inanimate object sends you into stratospheric irrational fury.

I say there is no reason. There is. I am hormonal. But I am perimenopausal. So my rage / tears are not predictable where once they might have been. My periods don’t follow a normal cycle. So my emotions are a Russian roulette of up and down. It’s so embarrassing.

My wish for the future generations of menstruaters is that they will develop a little arm patch which can show us on an app what level of fuckedness we should expect from our emotions today. At least we could plan around it and put strategies in place to deal with the upcoming surge of rage nonsense.

For now, I’ll just have to deal with it, mad eyed, mouth stretched into a tight smile, simmering under my skin, ready to scream the house down the minute I walk back through my door.

Actually. I didn’t do that. After marching home to blaring Deftones on my ear pods, avoiding eye contact with everyone, I came straight up to my desk and wrote this. And I do feel better. So thanks words. Maybe I’ll make a chamomile tea and have a little relief snivel.