Confessions of an Angry Mommy

Don’t you just love the early mornings (or for the night owls, the wee hours at night)? When everyone else is still (or already) asleep and you can actually hear yourself think or allow yourself the luxury to just appreciate what is right in front of you. In my case, that would be my son on my right and my husband on my left, both sleeping peacefully–sometimes snoring not so peacefully 🙂 — (and yes, I’m guilty of taking thousands of stolen photos of them sleeping. I can’t help it, they’re just too adorable!).

It is during this endearing time that I feel most at peace with myself as well, and am overcome with a deep feeling of gratefulness for God’s love, grace and mercy, and a deep conviction to start a new day as a happier version of myself, to be the wife and mom they both deserve.

But then, life happens. Like an omen, the phone alarm rings, our yappy dog starts barking, the clock starts ticking, and instead of the gentle, happy me that I hope to be, what they wake up to is a lean, mean, fighting machine of a mommy, who, like a drill sergeant, barks orders to send her son marching to the dining table, wolf down his breakfast, and be ready within thirty minutes, with very little (sometimes zero) tolerance for delays. At times, this ended in ugly shouting matches (with me doing all the shouting and my poor son crying his heart out in anguish), upsetting our peace-loving dog thus setting off more barking, then waking up my husband on the wrong side of the bed, and well, you get the picture. Of course this scenario is more the exception than the rule in our home (or at least that’s what I’d like to believe), and filled with indignation, I would rationalize the irrational outburst as a need to instill discipline, but nevertheless, it was definitely a far cry from the happy home that I long to make for our family.

It used to be a lot worse. So much so that when my son was five and saw the movie “Inside Out” for the first time, he pointed to the character that portrays Anger and jokingly said “That’s Mommy!” and the following year when we watched “The Angry Birds Movie” got a kick out of teasing me to be the main character, RED. I cringed and cried inside and there and then knew that I needed to do something FAST, before it causes permanent damage to the relationships I hold most dear. That was in 2016.

The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t aware of my anger management problem (redundancy intended for emphasis), however, I wasn’t exactly sure where that angry mommy was coming from. If you happen to know me, I’m actually pretty pleasant. Quite intense and a bit too straight-as-an-arrow, but I am usually very level-headed and put-together, rarely losing my temper or affected enough to cry, even if caught in the middle of a crossfire so to speak. I rarely (almost never) vent or complain, let alone share my real emotions with even my closest family or friends, usually out of love and loyalty to protect the people I hold most dear. I thought that made me a master of anger management; I even led myself to believe that I was practicing forgiveness in its finest form. But in reality and in hindsight, all it was had been a bad case of denial. Truth is, I wasn’t even processing the disappointments and frustrations that life threw my way, that it eventually consumed me. For years, I thought I was simply an insomniac who, for
some strange reason, wakes up between 1AM-3AM daily, only to learn from Traditional Chinese Medicine that it was actually my body’s way of warning me that I have built-up anger within me. Now it makes so much sense. As much as I love my son and think the world of him (he is actually a very easy and trainable child and tries his best to be a good boy), as thankful as I am for my husband and his many sacrifices for me and our family, I unconsciously and unintentionally, made them bear the brunt of my displaced aggression camouflaged as irrational anger.

Anger is a normal reaction, not evil in itself, but detrimental if left unmanaged, or worse if it becomes habitual. Always being short fused and getting all fired up for the pettiest of reasons, can cause our body to over-secrete stress hormones or to suffer from inflammation and various illnesses, even lead to a stroke. Or so I learned the hard way. Don’t get me wrong. The lesson is not to bottle up one’s frustrations nor is it to compartmentalize disappointments to preserve the peace; neither is it to reserve one’s anger for the “big stuff”. That’s a temporary and often counter-intuitive solution. The key is to have a healthy form of release. Some people exercise, others listen to music, most surround themselves with trusted family and friends to vent out. As of this writing, I’m still learning the art of venting as it goes against my basic instinct of self preservation, but I just keep trying.

As parents, we try to pass on our hard life lessons to our children in the hopes of training them to be better versions of ourselves. I always tell my son to let all the anger out, even if it means he shouts in rage, but after I process his anger with him, I encourage him to breathe deeply and regain his composure. Our term for this exercise of letting it all out is “keeping his heart from turning black.” Most of the time, I believe the prime cause of his (or our) anger is an empty love tank (be it real or perceived). As one of my favorite authors, Gary Chapman, articulated in his book, “The 5 Love Languages of Children”: “[We as parents] may truly love [our] child, but unless he/she feels it – he/she will not feel loved.” I may be looking out for my son’s best interest by instilling discipline and I may be seeking to meet his needs by constantly correcting his mistakes, but if my love for him is not expressed in a language he understands, if I don’t have the patience to hear his viewpoints and understand his concerns, then even with the best of intentions, anger, frustration, and disappointment will still spoil his young heart.

I remember when my son was younger, he suddenly blurted out, “Mommy, words are worse than actions – because wounds heal and soon no scars, but words, you remember forever.” Not sure if it’s a boon or a bane that he shares the same love language as mine (Words of Affirmation). How I wish I can turn back time and erase all the times I lashed out at him as a result of desperation and displaced aggression. Indeed, “The soothing tongue is a tree of life, but a perverse tongue crushes the spirit.” (Proverbs 15:4).

In my quest to be a happier mom, I meditate and pray for the grace to be kind but firm, especially with the words I speak, especially in the early mornings. I remember reading somewhere that the first five minutes of every encounter sets the tone for the rest that follows. And if I were to improve the atmosphere in our home and our relationship as a family, I need to get a grip of myself and make those first five minutes of every day count. So now, instead of waking up to the phone alarm and starting off our day in a mad rush, we decided to wake up 30 minutes earlier to give us time for an extra cuddle or massage (his secondary love language, like me, is Physical Touch) and hand in hand, we start each day by praying my son’s favorite morning prayer, “Father, I choose to put You first in everything that I do. I choose to set the tone for my day by starting it with You. Draw me close to You and empower me by Your spirit to fulfill the dreams and destinies that you have placed within me, in Jesus name.”

And that has made all the difference. 🙂