The Mother of All Rage

Usually on Thursdays, I send out the newsletter that’s open and available to everyone. I apologize for running a little behind this week. My mom is in town, and I’ve not gotten to everything on schedule. I promise to send out the extra newsletter that comes out on Sundays and the usual Thursday piece very soon. All this is to say that I’m catching up, and I promise you won’t miss out on the regularly scheduled fun.

For now, here is the audio companion. Full disclosure that this episode was a hard one to record and even harder to admit to and share. For that reason, I am really limiting who gets to hear the juicy bits. The text below is my notes and some of what I covered in the episode. Thank you for your readership, listenership and for understanding!

Audio Companion Week 4: The Mother of All Rage

This week’s topic is deeply personal and for the first time ever, I’m going to record a lot of this off the cuff. I usually write everything out and read it—with a few interjections as I go—but this time, I’m going to use my notes as a guide and mostly just talk about this topic. And because I do plan to go deep into my feelings and there is a VERY real possibility that I might cry when sharing my thoughts, this audio companion will only have a very short preview for free subscribers. I’m not willing to blast this week’s episode out to everyone, so thank you for understanding. This episode is called The Mother of All Rage.

Minna Dubin is the author of the new book Mom Rage. I am going to read the book description in full, so you get the idea:

Mothers aren’t supposed to be angry. Still, Minna Dubin was an angry mom: exhausted by the grueling, thankless work of full-time parenting and feeling her career slip away, she would find herself screaming at her child or exploding at her husband. When Dubin pushed past her shame and talked with other mothers about how she was feeling, she realized that she was far from alone. Mom Rage is Dubin’s groundbreaking work of reportage about an unspoken crisis of anger sweeping the country—and the world. She finds that while a specific instance of rage might be triggered by something as simple as a child who won’t tie her shoes, the roots of the anger go far deeper, from the unequal burden of childcare shouldered by moms to the flattening of women’s identities once they have kids. Drawing on insights from moms across the spectrum of race, sexual orientation, and class, she offers practical tools to help readers disarm their rage in the moment, while never losing sight of the broader social change we need to stop raging for good.

Before the book, Dubin wrote a viral essay about mom rage for The New York Times in 2020. I learned about it through the Is My Kid the Asshole? Substack from Melinda Wenner Moyer, who interviewed Dubin this week in her newsletter. I then went back and read the essay, which made me cry. I think a lot of women with children felt the same way—that someone was seeing them for the very first time.