Angry Mommy

I lost it. Like, really lost it. ‘It’ being my self-control, my patience, my compassion, my rational thinking, all gone. There was nothing redeemable about that moment with my child. In it, I was her, the genuinely crappy mom. I have my moments, and this was one. 

If my emotions were animated, it would be as Cruella de Vil having a psychotic break with reality, eyes clouded by anger and driving this metaphorical car forward with my rage sure to end the exchange in a fiery crash. This isn’t the mom I want to be. This isn’t the mom I want my kids to have. Yet sometimes I find myself there, ripping old skeletons out of my closet like I hadn’t done all that work burying them in the first place. 

God has done a great work changing my heart, and together he and I have been changing my actions. Less yelling, more calmness, less frustration, more compassion, less rigidity, more grace. This is the mom I’m trying to be, and I get upset with myself when that’s all left in the dust, and I become the angry mom. 

These moments of epic failure are seared into my memory, composing a highlight real of my greatest failures as a mother, heavy with the weight of shame. It’s isolating, this shame. I wonder if I’m alone in carrying it. If I had to guess, I would assume that I’m not alone, that there are many mothers with a list of screwups like mine. But that’s not how it feels. 

My internal playlist of failures meets the external highlights of everyone else on social media, and I feel disconnected. My raw and painful memories meet with cropped and filtered images, and I feel embarrassed. 

I love social media and its ability to keep me connected to friends around the world, but it can play mental tricks. It can distort perception, to lie and tell you that the smiling and happy pictures are an accurate portrayal of someone’s entire life. Of course, It’s not just social media. Most of us do this in person as well; we slap a smile on and say it’s all good.

How do we find the balance of honesty, optimism, and authenticity? I don’t want to be a walking billboard of my greatest failures. I don’t want to wear a scarlet letter A on my chest for Angry Mom or be labeled according to my mistakes. But I also don’t want to wear the thin veneer of “perfection,” waiting for it to crack and expose what’s beneath. I don’t want someone else to look at my highlight reel and think that she’s the only one with a list of mistakes. 

I don’t have all the answers here, but I think grace is always a good place to start. Maybe we start by giving ourselves as much grace as we would give another mother. And since I’ve never seen grace and shame occupy the same space, we’d find that viewing our failures with a lens of grace would free us from the weight of our shame as well.

“Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” Hebrews 4:16