On Anger

I’ve been listening to too many parenting podcasts – trying to get through this interminable week with nothing but bad news in it.  My obsession this week is getting the children to be competent since - according to Dr. Becky Kennedy – competence is the opposite of anxiety.  (Although, I can attest to the fact that obsessing about competence can be a sign of anxiety Dr. Becky.  So haha on you!)  I was teaching one of my sons to make his lunch (competence!) and he was excelling at his "job" which was to complain with aggrieved rage.  “What is WRONG with YOU” he yelled at me.  “I am a child! This is CHILD LABOUR!” 

As I dutifully thanked him for sharing his feelings with me while telling him that I “loved him too much” to let him go into adulthood with no life skills, and that I was "working hard" to learn how to help him to be more competent, he told me: “Mom, I can give some free advice, parenting podcasts are the worst!”  In praise of incompetence – in honour of my youngest son, let us delve into anger.

Anger and parenting is such a struggle.  I mean, maybe I’m the only one.  I, like other parents, have sometimes had an almost out-of-body experience of rage while parenting.  “Describe the behaviour” say therapists everywhere, including my own brilliant therapist telling me that “observation is the first step of nonviolent communication.”  I am trying.  “I see chewing gum being thrown on the floor, I see plates sitting on the couch” I singsong.  “I see tic tacs being fed to the dog!”

I see I see I see, describe, describe, describe! What I long to say: “I see two wolves dressed up like children, slyly contemplating the best way to eat me alive!”  Like their parents, like all of humanity, so too do our children struggle with angry feelings, what Mister Rogers called “the mad that you feel.”  I’d like to add here – the mad that lights a fire in your brain that you try to douse with the cold water of 1000 hours of parenting classes while simultaneously holding in a primal scream.  We are in such an angry and anxiety-ridden time – it empties our buckets, in preschool language.  Or I guess in adult language, it is super annoying and eats away at our limited reserves. 

Too much rage - and also too little.  I recently taught a class on feminist approaches to popular culture that children were invited to attend.  My children came as did the children and younger siblings of my undergrads.  "What are some unfair things to boys?" I asked.  “That they can’t cry, that they get teased for wearing nail polish, that they are expected to be tough” said the children in my class.  "And for girls?" I wondered.  “That they can’t get mad,” said one of my sons wisely, “although the girls I know sure don’t seem to have gotten the message.” 

And yet, for all the times women and girls and nb folks are systemically accused of being mad, hysterical, unhinged: the justified rage we feel so often goes unseen and unspoken.  I watched my niece pushed out of the line by older boys as she waited for the monkey bars.  “It’s my turn” said my niece quietly, firmly, and to absolutely no avail.  Rather than push forward, she sighed and turned towards the slide.  Rage is structural, it is primal, it is a cover emotion for deeper feelings of grief and misery.  And here is to facing it with tenderness, with chagrin and with understanding - and to accompany us on that journey here are picturebooks.

Lunch Every Day
By Kathryn Otoshi

This amazing book is so uplifting and it explains a parenting principle that is very counterintuitive – at least to me.  Children so often don’t say what they mean.  Technically called a “miscue” in psychoed speak – this book is filled with the miscues of a boy who is a bully.  Every day, he acts angry while feeling sad and emotionally lonely.  As part of this struggle, he bullies a boy he calls “Skinny Kid” by taking his lunch, every day.  It becomes clear that the child who is doing the bullying does not have an easy home life, with parents who fight, a brother who frightens him, and no food to bring for lunch.  But “no way am I standing in that line” says the child doing the bullying, speaking of the shame of standing in the free lunch line.  Then one day, Skinny Kid passes out birthday invitations, and everyone gets one, “even me.”  Although the child doing the bullying is afraid to go to Skinny Kid's party since he doesn’t have any party clothes to wear or a gift to bring, at the last minute he decides to go anyway.  When he arrives, he realizes from photos that Skinny Kid’s dad has died.  Skinny Kid’s mom sees the bully who takes her son’s lunch and comes to speak to him.  For the first time we see the bully's face as Skinny Kid's mother says in a real quiet voice:

I hear you like my lunches.
Here's what I’m gonna do. I’m going to make a second lunch.  And my son will bring it for you, every day.  Okay?

And do you know something?
She did.
And that’s how I got lunch every day. . .
and a whole lot more.

I cannot read this book without crying.  This beautiful, true book speaks to the deepest places in us - those places that see that kids are noble, wonderful, kind creatures - who long to do well if only they have the right soil to grow. And isn't that true of all of us?

Sitting in a lawn chair waiting for my partner to arrive, 3 minutes late, to a swimming class, I silently fumed.  When she arrived and the kids were in the pool, cheerfully learning to swim, I turned my silence into speech - shaming, cruel sentences leaving my mouth with frightening ease.  "Why so angry? What's your request?" said our brilliant couples therapist as I rehearsed it later in her office.  Unbidden, I said, "I'm afraid I'm too much, too angry, too much.  I don't want to be too much anymore."  And my patient partner, holding my hand still after the storm, told me, "I don't think it's about being late."  And really, it never is, is it?

Oh the "miscues."  The psychoeducational anaesthetizing way we have of describing our deepest pain - here's to all those wise role models who see beneath the rage to the cry for connection underneath.

Beneath 

By Corie Doerrfeld

This book does the work of seeing the child underneath the behaviour.  It features a sad and mad child, who is non-binary and uses they pronouns.  Although it is not clearly stated, it seems like this might be part of the reason for Finn's horrible "mood."  “Everything and everyone is more than what you see”  - this book reminds us all, and its beginning lines remind me of the start of so many of my pickups of children from school:

Finn was in a horrible mood.
Grandpa wanted to talked about it. 
Finn did not.
“No.  You won’t understand.”
 
Finn is under their blanket, and when Grandpa asks if Finn wants to go for a walk, Finn “let out a long sigh.”  “Fine.  But I’m staying under here.”  “Don’t worry,” said Grandpa. “I’ll remember to think of what’s beneath.”

As they walk, Grandpa reminds Finn that there are always parts we cannot see: “beneath what’s growing up above . . . is what’s growing deep below.”  As they walk further, they see together that “Beneath something solid . . . can be something hollow.  “Beneath what’s falling apart . . can be what’s just starting to form.”  And that is not all:

Beneath appearances are experiences. 
Beneath actions are explanations.
Beneath what’s different is what’s the same.

And sometimes . . . “ Grandpa paused. 

Beneath someone who looks like they won’t understand . . .
is someone who knows exactly how you feel.

I Hate Everyone (en français Je vous déteste tous!

By Naomi Danis, illustrated by Cinta Arribas

In this post-election time of the ongoing attacks on so many of our communities - the deep misogyny of the world makes me so angry.  Hate is a powerful word, and it’s a challenging time to think about hate when white supremacist/misogynist/transphobic hatred is here and everywhere. Many of us wish our children wouldn’t use the word hate and we try to get them to use more descriptive words to articulate their feelings. And yet, our children do use it and we need to find ways of speaking with them about hate. This book follows a little girl who is having a meltdown at her birthday party.  She demonstrates so well that we are born with all the feelings we will ever have and none of the skills to regulate them. So too does this book validate that it is ok for girls to be enraged, and that they can have good reasons for feeling this way.  That this is a picturebook that features a little girl who feels profound rage and is not shamed or talked out of her feelings is in itself profoundly feminist. 

It makes me laugh when the little girl says: “I hate when the balloons pop! And I hate when you say stop popping the balloons!” Revealing how difficult it is to be a child where you are bossed around continuously, our heroine yells: “Don’t tell me to stay when I want to go! And don’t tell me to say goodbye when I want to stay and play!” this book always reminds me how little control my children have over the world that grownups built for them. And yet, when her parents try to leave her, she articulates the frantic need for connection so often at the heart of big feelings. This little girl needs to push her parents away so that they can show they love her by staying close. My eyes always well up at the end of the book when she says “I hate you but I want you to love me.”

Isn’t this profound human desire to push people away just when we need them most something that persists into adulthood? How many times have we all told the people we love most: “I told you to leave! … Where are you going?” To me, this book does the profound human work of unpacking what lies beneath the words “I hate you” and the yearning for connection they often reveal, as well as opening up the possibilities for talking to our children about the complexities of hate. Simply telling children “you can’t say I hate you” (which I still do all the time) to me isn’t as helpful as the nuanced conversations that are made possible using this book. (For another great description of hate and its complexities, l’d also recommend the chapter titled “Hate” of Lynda Barry’s graphic memoir One! Hundred! Demons! (Barry’s book is for grownups only though). SO many women and nb folks suppress so much of their anger under patriarchy that we don’t even know when we are angry anymore. I Hate Everyone helps to remedy this failing while also suggesting that desire for connection is an intimate part of rage.

Oh, life, art, wonder, grief – all mixed up into every second of every moment of every day.  “See, there,” said my youngest son to me, “that puddle is hiding a beautiful home for the fish who live there.”  “Yes,” I told him, marvelling at his ability to see worlds within worlds – marvelling at him, marvelling at this beautiful, impossible world, full of kindness, cruelty and puddles for fish.  “I do see.”

Until Soon,
Shoshana