No, I am not depressed. I am angry. And my anger is there for a reason

A few weeks after I gave birth to a healthy son in the hospital, I became increasingly angry. The anger resides in my body. She’s a gritty woman who won’t budge and lies silently beneath the surface waiting to break out of me. She makes my ventricles out of sandpaper and rubs them together. But most of all she knew my ratio and let me scream, be unreasonable, demanding. She is in every fiber of my shaky body, in my still bulging belly and in my pelvis. In my weary arms with which I carry my child night after night. I get mad at my friend when he forgets to pour vinegar into the bottles that need to be boiled, so that they now come out of the water with a layer of lime – which I myself regularly forget. To teenagers who don’t make room in the tram when I come in with the pram. To other people with babies who brag about how well their child sleeps. Little things that don’t deserve a frenzy in and of themselves.

Maybe the anger is because of my birth. A five-hour whirlwind in which I lose all sense of time and feel as though I’m on the brink of death. Prior to my delivery they had said in the pregnancy course that I would know if I had a ‘real’ contraction, but since my labor started with a contraction, I had no idea. When my son is almost there, at the end of those five hours in which I’ve been moved twice, first to the birth center and then to the hospital, where I’m naked under fluorescent light and I can’t seem to indicate that I want to put on a T-shirt, after I have contractions inducers and my son has a heart rate monitor on his skull in the womb, his head is born but his body is not yet. He has shoulder dystocia, which means he is stuck. There is panic, the midwife pushes an alarm button and countless people rush into the room where I am pushed naked on my hands and knees so that my child can be turned out of me. He is limp when he is born. Nobody says anything. We don’t know if he’s alive until he starts crying after what seems like an eternity.

crying hours

Maybe it’s because my son starts crying after a few weeks. No one told me about crying hours. They are not hours, but long, painful hours, during which I am in a panic and do not know what to do to help him.

Maybe it’s the pain I feel and continue to feel in my body that first year after I gave birth. A stiff and bad feeling in all my limbs every time I have to get out of bed at night because my son is crying, and every morning when I get up.

The first months that I am so angry, I expect that this anger will subside, but it does not in my first years as a mother. When I try to find something on the internet about postpartum anger, I am pointed in the direction of postpartum depression. People I tell about it ask if I’m sure I’m not depressed. But I’m not depressed, I’m angry. I don’t want my anger to end up on a medical spectrum and you can solve what I have with drugs. It is striking how people try to change what I feel into a more socially acceptable alternative. They want me not to be furious, but gloomy. They want to replace the aggression with sadness. But the anger is there for a reason, I think.

The myth of the pink cloud has now been somewhat shattered. After it has become clear that for many women there could be thunder and lightning in the clouds after childbirth, sadness during the postpartum period is somewhat allowed. Sadness and disappointment, feelings of guilt and sadness about not being able to meet expectations, for example. We’ve even come to appreciate mothers’ showing of grief at times, especially when tears are being shed for the child and not for the self. When the sadness does not come out in hysterical hyperventilation, but in beautiful, dangling tears over the cheeks. Tears that can be shared on social media, tears in which people think they can discern authenticity.

angry and bitter

Anger, however, remains out of the question as an emotion for women, especially mothers. This is also what Soraya Chemaly concludes in her book Sparkling with anger† She writes about women who come up to her and ask how they can stand up for themselves without sounding angry or bitter. She writes how anger is frowned upon in women, how women are taught from an early age not to express their negative emotions. Once a woman is labeled an ‘angry woman’, she knows that people do not think she is capable of thinking objectively and clearly.

According to Chemaly, motherhood and the response to anger are linked: “Motherhood is central to society’s image of women, and our ideas about mothers – as caring, forgiving and self-sacrificing beings – play a central role in how women react to anger.’ She also notes that many women are already surprised during their pregnancy by strong anger, caused by their changed relationship with their husband or partner, by their environment or by the realization that there is a double standard that puts them behind.

I recognize the latter, because although I have been immersed in feminism and inequality since my puberty, I have never been so touched by this as since I was a mother. From the moment I had a child, my autonomy has completely changed. Until my motherhood I had been a fairly independent individual, anyway I had tried my best to become one. As a mother of a young child, I seem to depend on everything and everyone. Something has irrevocably changed between me and the other people. This already started during childbirth, when I was completely dependent on the midwives and doctors. But even now I am always in need of help. I have become more dependent on my boyfriend, of course, but also on colleagues, who sometimes have to take over work, on strangers, if I want to get on the bus with the pram, or, worse, have to pee while we are out. From the daycare and the other people who take care of my child. I am less individual and more part of a collective system that has formed around my son.

become dependent

According to anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, this collective is one of the reasons we have made progress as a species. she calls it cooperative breeding, raising children together. The image of the mother who cares and cares and cares on her own is inconsistent with what we know about humanity. So my increased dependence on others is quite common. It takes a village to raise a child is a popular saying, but it depend on that village pleases not me at all.

First of all, not because the help is not a choice – without help you simply cannot survive as a full-time working mother – but on top of that, the people on whom you become dependent carry a certain view with them. A view of how it should be and how it should not be and in which mothers are still seen as those caring, forgiving and sacrifice-minded beings. A view that is often much more traditional than my view. 80 percent of the Dutch still believe that the ideal working week for a mother with young children is no more than three days. Of course I shouldn’t care about that, but it’s not that easy, because these ideas about how things should be, are also within me. I am in constant battle with myself about wanting to live up to the standards and not wanting to live up to the standards. This is partly due to the fact that the image of the caring, forgiving and self-sacrificing mother is still seen as natural. And that’s even harder than not meeting the standards: being seen as unnatural.

Adrienne Rich subscribes Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution that a problem with motherhood is that it is not seen as an institution, when it is. The institute disseminates norms, values, rules, traditions and structures, but according to Rich these are largely invisible: ‘When we think of the institution of motherhood, no symbolic architecture comes to mind, no visible embodiment of authority, power or of possible or actual violence. When you think of motherhood, you think of home and we see home as a private domain.’

Wine and breastfeeding

The institute promotes the mother who loves always and unconditionally. And instead of criticizing the institution’s standards, the unsatisfactory myths of motherhood, especially now that the mother is moving into a career and still taking on the bulk of the care responsibilities at home, mothers blame what goes wrong. himself. I argue in my own family and blame myself for wanting too much. It’s easier to fight an identifiable villain than to fight an invisible enemy. And the institution of motherhood is an invisible enemy. There are many situations in which people end up that we do not only blame on our own responsibility, situations where we see that the circumstances have an influence. In motherhood, the circumstances are still too little taken into account. Rich writes, “In our long history we have accepted the stresses of motherhood as if they were a law of nature.” You blame yourself for failure as a mother. Fathers are also not taken for granted in the institution of motherhood, which is disadvantageous for fathers and mothers.

In the institute, mothers also look out for each other. I share a photo of myself with a glass of wine in my hand and my baby in the carrier on social media and someone I don’t know writes under my post that she hopes I’m not breastfeeding. Motherhood means that I am much less able to withdraw from the judgment of others. As a mother out and about with a baby, you always have a lot of attention and you lose the freedom to think you are unseen. You become visible as a mother and invisible as something else. That is to be furious.

If you want to be anything other than mother, you have to claim it and resist that institution. Against the ideas of others and your own. And maybe that’s why I don’t want my anger to be seen as depression, because the anger forces me to resist. I need the anger to effect change on a personal level. To make known what I want, which I have done far too little until now. Far too often I have let other people use my time, but that is no longer possible with a child, because it is already quite impossible to really combine work and care. The anger forces me to stand up for myself like I’ve never done before. As Soraya Chemaly writes, “Although there is a perception that anger clouds the mind, when you really understand it, anger is a stunningly enlightening emotion.” And more than personally, I think we need this anger in society to change the institution of motherhood with its ingrained norms. It’s really time for that.