Angry all the Time

Oh, Anger, my longtime enemy. You have helped me hurt so many people I love. You help me through meanness, yelling, and biting words, through cutting looks and audible sighs. You make me feel bad inside. I feel like a raging lunatic sometimes, and my mind succumbs to your wishes. I can feel my hands tingling, my heart racing, my chest tightening, and my jaw clenching. If I really let you take over, I can feel the remnants of you in my throat long after my screaming match is over. Just there, reminding me that I lost my cool and I let my voice raise enough to hurt someone else and even to hurt me.

I hate you, and I’ve had enough of you. I’ve had enough of myself allowing you to take over. Allowing you to respond poorly, and to try to control everything.

This. Must. Stop.

Of everyone who I’ve been angry towards, I think the person I have hurt the most is my son. Sweet, smart, loving, wonderful Adler has, in the past 8 months or so, endured a lot of anger from me. I want to be clear. I have never physically hurt him in anger. My anger manifests itself almost exclusively through words and tone of voice. But it is NOT pretty, and I would never want anyone to see me angry. I would be so very ashamed.

So why, if I don’t want anyone else to see me this way, would I be OK with my own son seeing it? He’s the one I care for, his is the opinion I care about. His is the heart I am trying to win, to shape, and to teach. Why would I yell at someone I love, when I would never consider doing it to a stranger, someone I don’t even care about? Why would I yell at a child, someone who still hasn’t learned how to process feelings and thoughts? How have I let myself get to this point?

These are the questions I have been asking myself lately. I think my negative pattern with Adler started when I was pregnant with Maddox. Towards the end of my pregnancy, to be precise. It was hot. I was big. Everything hurt. Nothing was comfortable. And Adler was heading towards his third birthday, that lovely time in a child’s life where opinions get stronger, independence gets more appealing, and emotional processing has yet to catch up. None of these things are excuses for beginning a negative pattern, but they are reasons that it could have happened. And that gives me something to go off of.

Anyways, at some point during that time, my relationship with Adler went from relatively stable and cooperative to more difficult, fraught with conflict and battles. I didn’t notice at first, and it slowly got worse, as those things tend to do. Once I did notice, I justified it, saying I was tired, Adler was becoming a “threenager,” it would all be better once the baby got here, etc.

But it wasn’t, and instead of working to maintain calm in our home, I let us get stuck in a negative pattern. I even blamed him, saying, if he would just listen, or if he just wouldn’t argue, it wouldn’t be this way.

It’s not like our relationship since last summer has been awful, it’s just been…bipolar. One moment we are getting along fine, the next we are clashing and I want to pull my hair out. We are too much alike. We are too different. There’s just a lot of room for conflict when I’m a stay-at-home mom who has never parented a 3-year-old before.

During the past two months, things have gotten a little worse. Brandon’s busy season with work is the beginning of the year. This year he has been traveling back to back, and when he’s not out of town, he has been working long and irregular hours. So I have been soloing this whole parenting thing about 90% of the time for a few months now, and let me tell you, it’s not for the faint of heart. It has been during this time of exhaustion that the negative pattern became even more of a habit. This past week, it escalated more when Maddox and I came down with a nasty bug that left him in constant need of my attention and knocked me off my feet. Not to mention, during the middle of our illness, Adler developed his own stomach bug for about 24 hours.

So here I was, sick as a dog and trying to care for two sick children alone, getting next to no sleep, and wishing all of this was behind me. Adler was on my last nerve almost constantly. I knew I wasn’t responding well and I needed to change, but try as I might, I could not pull myself out of my funk. I needed perspective, but in order to get that, I needed to remove myself from the situation and I couldn’t. So I felt trapped, which only deepened my funk. This caused me to respond negatively to poor Adler a lot of the time. By Thursday morning, I was fried. My mom was finally able to come and take Adler off my hands for a few hours. Miraculously, Maddox took a long nap during this time, and I was able to just sit on the couch. I decided to not worry or think about Adler or myself or overanalyze the situation or beat myself up, which I was very tempted to do. I just turned on Gilmore Girls and marathoned it for the whole morning. I ignored the pile of dirty dishes, the mountain of laundry, and everything else and just chilled.

By the time my mom got back with Adler, I had a more balanced perspective on life. I was not 100% better, but I knew Adler was not trying to kill me and I needed to remember he is only 3 and see him as such. I was able to welcome him home happily, and since then, have been better about responding when there is conflict.

After my Thursday morning chill time, I have been thinking about how to work on yelling and anger, and how to maintain a more balanced perspective. Saturday morning, I came across an article on Facebook entitled, “How I Learned to Stop Yelling at my Kids.” I clicked on it, and it referenced The Orange Rhino. So I clicked on that, and what I found was an amazing resource from an honest mom who recognized her yelling habit, didn’t like it, and decided to change it. She has since written a book about her journey, and offers resources to other parents who want to change. I was so excited – what an awesome find just when I needed it!

So, I’m taking the Orange Rhino Challenge. I am going to go 365 days without yelling at my kids. One of the things she says is to tell others, so I am telling ALL the people who may happen to stumble on this post. I am going to stop yelling at my kids. I will not use anger to get them to do what I want. I am not in control of them, I am only in charge of them, and there are so many other ways to cooperate with one another than out of anger. Just look at all the ways the Orange Rhino suggests!

I know I can do this, but I will need encouragement, accountability, and ideas. I plan to blog both about my journey to stop being angry/yelling, and my journey to reduce my anxiety. Really, just my journey to relinquish the control I’ve never had. I want to write it down so that I can externally process. I want to write it down so that I have accountability. I want to write it down so that I can remember what I was like and what I don’t want to return to. I want to write it down to see how God works to change me. And maybe, just maybe, my writing it down will encourage someone else.

Do you struggle with control, anxiety, anger, or yelling? If so, how do you combat these things?