Tag: rage

Rageful

My husband and I are at THAT mid-life stage. There is a lot of emotional turmoil in many of our friends’ relationships, the cusp of divorces or other challenging consequences, and we ourselves are certainly far from immune to feeling the spiritual demands of these years. 

One of the messages my husband keeps bringing home from his friends is how they feel they have coped with their wives as they have journeyed through the menopause and a recurrent theme is that they were ‘crazy and rageful’. 

Now I am sceptical about this description for so many reasons but I also understand that many men just don’t understand the process, cycles and energy of women. We can be an enigma to them and there is dual responsibility here, the women can help men unravel their waves and cycles (though to be fair, many women are also disconnected from our ancient wisdom and wild power via modern societies demands so aren’t always able to explain or fully understand their own patterns) and the men can be willing to try and learn about this wisdom too, rather than simply dismissing it as crazy or unpredictable. 

I am not an expert but I certainly know that a few days before my menses there is only a fine veil between my patience and frustration. The rest of the month I can walk through fields of graciousness, but annoy me close to my bleed and it’s just a tiny ditch away from anger. It is not irrational, there is always a valid trigger, it’s just that the comparison of how I communicate and resolve that annoyance is a chasm away from the rest of the time. So I understand that men can receive that as too different to process. 

Now brining this to the menopause, I myself have begun to have disrupted cycles. This month I am already ten days over my usual date and that window of short fuse is stretching into a full conservatory. I suddenly realise how this is being received by the masculine, that odd day of ‘crazy’ that can be quickly forgotten or forgiven each month is stretching and elongating. That ditch is being jumped back and forth on too many occasions and when will it end? What if I don’t bleed for months? Will I still feel this premenstrual angst for the entire time? 

And it has purpose. Just like it did for every regular cycle I have had for the last thirty something years. Would I describe myself as rageful? Nope. But I’m certainly less gracious right now. I’m less willing to put up with my notion of bullshit, I’m less patient, I need authenticity, directness and clean communication. Is that wrong? Could that be positive? I believe so. 

Not knowing when this will end, I can’t just check out, read books, take baths and try all my previous ploys to navigate those one or two days of lore. I have to learn to adapt and adjust but I’m also not going to be labelled as negatively rageful when I know the root of my energy is power. I will learn to channel it and honour it as I step into this new era of my life. I am moving into a time where I have the greatest energetic potential, so it’s no wonder that the transformation is fiery. Call it rageful if you must but I will reclaim that word and alchemise it into gold.  

First published on social media on 15th April 2023

The Voice of Reason

In a recent discussion with a therapist it was suggested that I was, at times, too reasonable(!). Not only that, but by being too reasonable I was actually hurting myself. 

My husband raised his eyebrows when I told him this, clearly he did not agree! 

But I have been sitting with it; churning it over in my mind and of course as a result I have had the most unreasonable couple of weeks I could ever have imagined. 

Everyone and everything has felt desperately unreasonable. 

One days notice from a teacher at school that the cake ingredients rules have changed as I prepare for my child’s birthday. Unreasonable. 

Car insurers wanting me to provide information that they know better than me. Unreasonable. 

My child wetting the bed twice in one night. Unreasonable. 

My babysitter cancelling a two month standing booking less than a week before. Unreasonable. 

The resident permit zone being arbitrarily changed so that our property is no longer granted a permit. Un-bloody-reasonable. 

And then there’s the bigger stuff… 

  • the school mum throwing her unmet needs in my face 
  • my husband having a ‘moment’ and wondering if I’m really the right one (yes that happened!)
  • my mother refusing to take any accountability for her behaviour 

These are the bigger life hurdles when someone else’s choices can feel so utterly and desperately unreasonable and yet I am very good at making them reasonable. I am very good at looking behind the gauze and finding the reasons, the pain, the whys and the because; and understanding why everyone’s behaviour or choices are the way they are. 

A good skill? Compassionate? Able to hold the bigger picture? 

I need to segue a moment… when my friend Kim was dying, we talked about the emotional trauma that may have contributed to her illness. Kim was utterly reasonable. She always found a way to walk on a higher plain, she didn’t want to stoop to the level of those who had wounded her so deeply. And that is so honourable and so ‘right’, right? Except that all that justifiable anger and pain stayed inside and perhaps it is what killed her… 

So I have sat with my flair of fire, this rage of witnessing the unreasonable and I have held it in conflict with my desire to be so thoughtful and measured and kind. 

And then I exploded. 

My husband lit the touch paper and I vomited out my rage at all the holding I do for everyone else’s ‘unreasonable’ choices. 

And he held me there. 

He held me there when I poured out my anger, my grief and my own unreasonable demands. 

And he listened, and he heard me. And for the very first time, I felt safe. 

It is the hardest thing in the world to hold someone in their pain, just hold them, not fix them, not wrong them, not right them or join them. But just to listen and be with that flow of emotions. And I love him more than ever for being courageous enough to do so. 

Because sometimes the emotionally healthy thing to be is utterly unreasonable. 

I needed that exorcism as part of my own healing and now I am calm again and able to bear the weight of all of life’s reasons….