Mar 6 • General discussion
Encouragement
If you're a "yeller" right now… if something switches in your brain and suddenly the room feels on fire… I need you to read every word of this before it's too late.
Because if your heart sinks every time you explode at the people you love most, if you feel that crushing guilt settle over you after you've snapped… if you're terrified you're turning into someone you swore you'd never be…
I've lived it. And it almost broke me.
But now — I thank God I finally found out what was really happening.
Because it revealed what no one had ever explained to me before… and made my children run toward me instead of away from me.
And now, this is my letter to every mother who feels herself slipping into anger she can’t control.
I remember the exact moment I knew something was deeply wrong. We were at home on a completely normal evening, and I was on the phone with a friend. From the kitchen my daughter kept yelling, “Mom, when is dinner going to be ready?” My son ran up to me, tugging at my arm, saying, “Mom, look at this! Mom, watch me!” And from the bedroom my husband called out, “Honey, have you seen my pants?”. It was just noise and questions and “Mom, mom, mom” coming at me from every direction while I was still holding the phone to my ear, trying to finish one sentence.
I felt it building before I could stop it — that pressure in my chest, that tightening in my throat, like everything inside me was being pulled too tight. And then I exploded.
I yelled, “CAN YOU ALL JUST LEAVE ME ALONE FOR TEN MINUTES? I just want to talk with my friend for the first time in days!”
The house went silent. Not peaceful — stunned.
And when I looked at my daughter, I saw it in her face. She wasn’t annoyed. She wasn’t arguing. She looked scared of me.
That was the day I went to bed with the thought: "I am becoming the thing I was most afraid of."
I used to be the mom who was present. Warm. The kind of mom who could handle chaos with a laugh. Now I was white-knuckling every transition, every tantrum, every moment they needed me — which was all of them.
I became "Rage Mom."
I tried everything — meditations, deep breathing, stepping outside. I told myself it was just stress, just a phase. I apologized every single night and promised tomorrow would be different.
But deep down, I was lying to myself. Because what no one tells you is this:
Mom rage doesn't just come from anger. It comes from running on empty, silently, for way too long.
It’s the kind of tired that steals your softness. It's the overstimulation — the noise, the crying, the constant touching that never, ever stops. It's the mental load of remembering everything for everyone. It's the lack of support, the resentment that builds when you're holding all things and no one is holding you.
Your brain is too tired to feel joy. Your body is too drained to feel love. But anger? Anger is fast. Anger is easy. Anger doesn't take energy — it gives it.
Not because you want to be this way. But because you are desperate to feel something. Because it's hard not to feel anything anymore.
I used to ask myself what was wrong with me. How some mothers seemed steady and present while I was crying in the bathroom replaying the look on my kid's face when I yelled.
I sat with the guilt for hours. Thinking about every repair I owed them. Every time I'd turned their safe place into a place of walking on eggshells.
I blamed myself. Maybe I just wasn't built for this. Maybe I was broken somewhere deep. Maybe this was just who I was now.
But now I know the truth. It wasn't a character flaw. It was a signal I didn't know how to read.
Because what turns a home from a place of rage to a place of safety... what takes you from exploding to steady... is not willpower. It's not "trying harder." It's not swearing every morning that today will be different.
What I didn't understand was that I was a dysregulated mom, whose nervous system was stuck in survival mode, because I had never been taught to sit with big emotions.
My kids' meltdowns triggered something ancient in me — fight-or-flight, everything activated — because I was never allowed to fall apart as a child either. How could I possibly regulate my child when I didn't know how to regulate myself?
I only learned this because of a quiz I found at 2 AM, eyes still burning from crying. Something about mom’s rage and how a mother's nervous system actually works under chronic stress.
I almost didn't take it. I was exhausted. I was ashamed. But that night, I was desperate. So I clicked.
And what I learned stopped me cold. It explained exactly why the rage was happening. Why the switch flipped so fast. Why "just calm down" never worked and never would.
And more importantly — it revealed the tools that teach you to pause instead of react, to feel what's underneath the anger, to regulate yourself so you can actually be present for your kids.
Because underneath the rage, it was never really anger. It was fear. Exhaustion. Grief. It was years of pushing through instead of being supported.
Once I understood that, everything changed.
I followed the tools, even though it felt scary to change my habits at first. And within weeks, the switch stopped flipping so fast. I learned to move slow when my whole body wanted to react fast. I learned to say "this is not an emergency" out loud, to myself, until my body believed it. My feelings were real. But I didn’t have to let them control what I did next.
Now?
I wake up without bracing for impact. I feel the rage rising and I know what to do with it. I am the steady one — not because I'm perfect, but because I finally understand what's actually happening inside me. My kids still have meltdowns. I don’t lose myself with them anymore. I am the calm in the room instead of the fire.
And all I can think is: What if I hadn't taken that quiz? What if I'd just kept telling myself it was hormones and hoping it passed?
So I'm writing this for two reasons: 1. To thank the quiz that gave me back my own mind — even if I had to almost lose myself first. 2. To speak to the mother reading this right now… who is so tired of being someone she doesn't recognize.
If that's you — listen to me. You are not a monster. You are not "too broken." You are not a bad mom. You are a human mom who has been running on empty, with no one teaching her what to do with the fire.
But the switch is getting faster, isn't it? The recovery time is getting shorter. The guilt is getting heavier. And they are watching, every single day, learning what love looks like.
There is a way back. But only if you understand what's really underneath the rage.
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Encouragement
