I never thought of myself as having a problem with anger. Sure, there was the odd bump in the road, but mostly I went about my early adult life enjoying smooth relationships with friends, family, colleagues.

I had waited until my mid-thirties to become a mother, and like everyone, had very high expectations for myself. I would be the Über-Mother: able to negotiate any and all difficult child-rearing situations with ease and grace, building the most loving of mother-child relationships.

… Or at the very least, I would make none of the mistakes that I felt my mother had made with me. Mom was angry a lot. She didn’t seem to have much fun raising two embattled girls, mostly on her own. My sister and I still joke about Mom’s “Angry Face” – the bulging eyes, the gnashing teeth, the death-grip on the back of your neck. That, I vowed, would never be me.

Then I had my first child.

He was a beautiful little bundle of intensity, with emotions that completely trumped his size. At first it was amusing to see his little face all scrunched up in anger and to encounter his acts of pint-sized defiance. Then it was exhausting. (I often laid awake at night worrying about what I had in store for me when he reached adolescence, given that his will at the age of two already completely outstripped mine.) By the dawn of his toddlerhood, all of my notions about über-motherhood had flown out the window and I was hanging on by my fingernails, just hoping that we would both survive the next 16 years without a visit from the Department of Social Services.

As a mother I have experienced rage that I never knew could exist in an otherwise sane person – all directed towards someone less than three feet tall. Someone who in a few short years has managed to discover and master the art of manipulating every button I never knew I had. I have taken my mother’s Angry Face to a whole new level; in fact, I’m sure that there was at least one time when actual steam came out of my ears. Suddenly I understood the logic of corporal punishment; it may not be a very healthy tool for teaching the child, but, Oh, what a release for the parent! It often takes every ounce of restraint I have not to hit my son, especially when he is hitting, kicking and biting me. The best alternative I can muster most of the time is to shout: “Mommy needs a time out!” and lock myself in a room. I suspect that this takes its own kind of emotional toll on my son, but it’s the best I can do.

And in the heat of parental anger, I have discovered that yelling is my release. “PUT THAT DOWN THIS INSTANT!” “I SAID DO NOT THROW THINGS IN THE HOUSE!” “NEVER, NEVER KICK THE CAT!” I had no idea just how loud I could be, and I’m not proud of it. Before we had our son, we moved from a tiny condo in the city to a house on what felt like an expansive ¼ acre lot. Given the decibels I can reach when my son and I lock horns, I feel sure that the condo association would have thrown us out by his first birthday, and frankly, I’m kind of wishing we had held out for a solid acre lot. There are days when I’m afraid to meet my neighbors in the street.

I recently bought my toddler a book about a little girl named Sophie who gets so mad sometimes that she is like a volcano, ready to explode (When Sophie Gets Angry, Very, Very Angry, by Molly Bang. He related to it instantly, though I’m not sure whether the connection came from his experience of his own toddler-sized rage, or of the seismic anger of his mother.

I suffered mightily from what I felt were my unique failings as a parent (and alas, so early in my career!) until I began to hear whisperings from other mothers…

At a play date with several other toddlers, one mom (whom I had never taken much of a shine to) was talking about a particularly hard day she and her daughter had recently had: “It’s mind-blowing,” she said. “I never used to get this mad at any of my co-workers!” I looked at this woman anew and began to feel the stirrings of a powerful kinship. She continued: “It seems like every day that I get so mad I have to close my eyes and count to ten to try to calm myself down. Then she starts in: ‘Mommy, why are you counting?’ Aaaargh!”

Then there was my perfect friend, who works 40-hour weeks as a “part-time” lawyer, yet still finds time to make bon-bons from scratch and create flower-shaped windmills with her children. She once described how merely asking her three-year old to put on her shoes degenerated to the point where, and I quote: “If someone had handed me a stick, I would have hit her. Honestly,” she said, “I can’t quit my job and stay home full time. They would lock me up and take my children!”

And then there was the time that after a particularly bad, Bad Day, I left our little devil child in the care of his father and escaped to the mall. In the elevator to the parking garage, I squeezed in with a mom and dad and their two young children. Their oldest was having a whopper of a meltdown, and I kept trying to meet the parents’ eyes to offer them a sympathetic glance. But they were locked in their own embattled world, and the mother, after repeatedly hissing at her son to Knock It Off, turned to the father and said, “I swear I’m going to kill him in about 4 minutes.” The father, glancing my way, said, “Shhhhh.” And then the mother turned on him: “Don’t SHUSH ME!”

I walked out of the elevator feeling lighter than I had in days.

We are, none of us, immune to the intense tangle of emotions involved in raising our children. It’s not pretty or fun to be angry, but it is human. We may lash out at our children, just as they lash out at us, but when the storm passes, we can sit down with them and say we’re sorry, and go on. When they grow up, they’ll have their own stories to tell about Mom’s Angry Face, but with any luck at all, they’ll love us anyway, and maybe even want to come over for Sunday dinner once in awhile.

– Karen McMillen

If you liked this article, you’ll probably love the book! This article is an excerpt from The Kids Turned Out Fine. Copyright (c) 2006 by Paula Ford-Martin. Used by permission of Adams Media. All rights reserved.