The Postpartum Rage Room
Instead of the Edinburgh Postpartum Depression Scale, you can direct me to the nearest place to break some shit.
It’s 2:45 a.m. I’m delirious from sleeping in two-hour increments and wrestling with my one-month-old daughter to execute the perfect swaddle. “It only works if you do it this way,” a chipper blonde woman told me in a YouTube video. In the near darkness, with only the warm, shady glow of a pink salt lamp as my guide, I tug one side of fabric taut while holding the other in place. I roll my daughter’s small, burrito-shaped body onto its side while she screams as though I’ve plucked off each of her limbs, and pull to make the swaddle tight enough to suppress her Moro reflex.
My hairline moistens; I bend over in ways my body is not yet prepared to do, sending a sharp ache through my lower back as my daughter continues to emote with the passion of Satan. I also have a postpartum ailment called de Quervain’s tenosynovitis, aka “Mommy thumb,” which makes doing anything involving grasping—nursing my daughter, brushing my teeth, pulling up my pants—painful enough to elicit an audible gasp multiple times an hour.
With each tug of her swaddle, the Velcro on my carpal tunnel brace catches on the Velcro of her swaddle. Suddenly every fiber inside of me bursts into flames and white-hot rage courses through my body. I stand up sharply, away from her. I rip the cheap, black Rite Aid brace from my tender wrist and toss it across the room where it hits the wall with a smack.
Next, do I:
A.) Unleash the primal scream that’s begging to be let out, leaving my husband to wonder if someone has crawled through the bedroom window to murder me?
B.) Tear off my chilled, sweat-stained nursing pajamas and throw them at my husband, who is doing his best to catch some shut-eye?
C.) Cry in silence while rage festers inside me because I am too proud and too ashamed to disrupt anyone’s idea that I, a force of nature who has just grown and delivered another life, am having a moment of weakness managing the otherworldly lot of physical, emotional, and hormonal upheaval that I’ve been tasked with?
I chose C.
Only once or twice can I recall this kind of acute anger. The first time was after an airline customer service agent told me I was lying about the lost-luggage arrival time I’d been given, and I verbally unloaded on him like Solange in an elevator, flinging my fresh, hot latte into the street at passing cars. But my postpartum rage has been hotter, more immediate. Escalating so quickly, sometimes I don’t even see it coming.
This, of course, is in direct juxtaposition to the image society has of its new mothers, who, in reality, might prefer drowning out their screams to the dulcet tones of death metal alone in their car. To better explain, here are a few examples of things that incited a seething, explosive rage in me after I came home from the hospital with my precious bundle of joy.
When the temperature in my house was too hot.
When the temperature in my house was too cold.
Being thirsty.
Being thirsty because I drank all my water.
Being thirsty because I drank all my water while my husband slept next to me.
When my breastfeeding pillow was too low.
When my breastfeeding pillow was too high.
When my husband said, “Maybe you shouldn’t have caffeine. It might be upsetting her stomach.”
Untied shoelaces on my bedroom slippers, the neighbors playing basketball in their own private driveway, and a wealth of other inane things that, when experienced through a body swimming in postpartum hormones, caused me to feel as though my entire person had combusted into lawless flames.
I also felt rage of a more complicated nature. At my body for its aches and inabilities. For months, I could barely rise from the floor without the assistance of a coffee table or a chair—or dog butt or honestly anything within arm’s reach. I struggled in my new form, sliced open at the abdomen, an unfamiliar shape with boobs I didn’t know how to contain, each of my blouses threatening to rip at so much as a heavy sigh.
I felt rage at my daughter for not eating enough, not burping enough, and not complying with my own basic needs, which had whittled down to “sleep” and “water.” I wanted to rest. To eat untethered to a stopwatch. I wanted one fucking minute to myself. These micro frustrations, exacerbated by exhaustion, simmered. Like rising water in a tub, the rage accumulated until it overflowed. And when it did, I felt tears were my only outlet.
The delineation between my postpartum rage, depression, and anxiety muddied, meandering into one another the way roads assume new names at a fork or curve, yet they are still, geographically speaking, the same road. Sometimes, when her cries showed no sign of waning, I’d sob quietly over her, my tears dropping onto her fuzzy head while I gently jiggled her swaddled body like a maraca in my arms.
Other times, after 45 or 60 minutes of rocking, bouncing, Ferris Wheels, and other stamina-required attempts to console her, my husband would come charging past the bedroom door, the living room lamp lighting a savior-like path into our dimly lit bedroom. Any relief I might have felt was eclipsed by rage I saved for myself: For not being able to calm my daughter. I wasn’t enough to help her.
I’d retire to my side of the bed and pull the cool linen sheets over my body, which was still damp from my veritable HIIT class of Infant Soothing. I’d cry in the darkness while he swayed and shushed and successfully soothed her in less than five minutes. In those moments of defeat, my rage churned quietly into guilt that all I wanted was a full night’s sleep, undisturbed by her screams and the warm, sticky spit-up that saturated the shoulder of all my pajamas; at how selfish I was for wanting my baby to nurse less frequently and sleep more often. And indignation at knowing that day would not come anytime soon.
I had post-traumatic episodes from too many failed attempts at soothing her: Her screaming while I fumbled through a checklist: Dirty diaper? Hot? Cold? Hungry? Too many times I’d been at a loss for her needs, so when the time came to put her down, I had a Pavlovian response. At her first few cries, my eyes would run like a faucet.
One Sunday, when she was being particularly fussy, I crumbled after just 20 minutes of relentless cries. My husband intervened again, and when he emerged from our bedroom with her still awake, wide-eyed and hanging over his shoulder, he said, “Look at this face. You can’t be mad at this face.”
“I’m not mad,” I said, wiping the stream of tears from my cheeks with one hand while using the other to fish pump parts from a soapy dishpan. “I’m sad,” I said. “What’s all this about mother’s intuition? I don’t have it. I don’t know what she wants. I don’t know what her cries mean.”
For as much time that I spent adoring my newborn and kissing her sleeping head, I also wanted to scream into the void. Sob uninterrupted for hours on end. Rip the curtains from the wall. Crawl out of my skin and get as far away from this foreign-feeling body, full of milk and sweat, as possible. I wanted to rage and I didn’t know how.
Days after my daughter was born at a hospital in Los Angeles, I was asked to fill out the Edinburgh Postpartum Depression Scale, a survey that aims to identify postpartum depression and anxiety in new mothers. I was later given it twice by my daughter’s pediatrician, and once by my OB/GYN, a positive sign that PPD is widely more recognized than it was a decade ago. But when I asked friends in New York City how often they were presented The Scale, they answered “Once,” or “Not at all. What is it?” The EDPS scores new mothers through a numeric tally from a series of questions such as:
I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things:
As much as I always could ____ (0)
Not quite so much now ____ (1)
Definitely not so much now ____ (2)
Not at all ____ (3)
I have felt sad or miserable:
Yes, most of the time ____ (3)
Yes, quite often ____ (2)
Not very often ____ (1)
No, not at all ____ (0)
I have been so unhappy that I have been crying:
Yes, most of the time ____ (3)
Yes, quite often ____ (2)
Only occasionally ____ (1)
No, never ____ (0)
I had to give a lot of thought to questions like, “Things have been getting to me,” (everything “got” to me postpartum). And emotions like “sad,” “unhappy,” and “miserable” are relative. We all have different thresholds and have likely normalized these emotions within our own experiences. We only know them by their extremes, and with each circumstance, we grow, potentially, more tolerable to them. So, yes, I had been crying, but had I been crying because I was unhappy? Or exhausted or overwhelmed? Was this the most unhappy I had ever been? What constitutes “unhappy” to you, survey writer? The postpartum period is not so black and white.
“Unhappy” cannot adequately encompass the emptiness a person may feel at the loss of their former identity—or the sleep deprivation or the cluster feedings that have left their nipples bloody and too tender to wear a bra, let alone continue feeding their child—just as a singular word cannot contain the intoxicating euphoria a person may feel when holding their sleeping, snoring newborn against their bare chest. I am convinced no word or phrase exists to adequately explain the vast, real-life experience of motherhood. So, how, exactly, should I answer this Depression Scale, with its attempts to vaguely diagnose a deeply complicated condition?
And still, there was no discussion of rage, the redheaded stepchild of postpartum depression and anxiety. I’d like to propose something more specific, a survey that reads:
I have been so overcome with scorched-earth rage that I’ve wanted to flip a parked car with my bare hands:
Yes, most of the time ____ (3)
Yes, quite often ____ (2)
Only occasionally ____ (1)
No, never ____ (0)
I have felt an immense desire to scream inside my pillow, beat it against the floor, and rip off my clothing in the style of Hulk Hogan:
Yes, most of the time ____ (3)
Yes, quite often ____ (2)
Only occasionally ____ (1)
No, never ____ (0)
I have been whisper-yelling at my sleeping partner in the dark because I know they cannot hear me over the sound machine:
Yes, most of the time ____ (3)
Yes, quite often ____ (2)
Only occasionally ____ (1)
No, never ____ (0)
I’m going to assume postpartum rage is not addressed more widely because, like the early stigma of depression and anxiety in motherhood, it’s not a good look. But this sort of thinking is outdated, and after 2020, rage has officially stepped into the limelight. I also suspect people are tight-lipped about this unpleasant side effect because people equate rage with violence. And tragically, the only example we commonly have to look toward is the white male rage that continues to make headlines.
When I wanted to know about other mothers’ experiences with PPR, I had to turn to the Internet in search of “books about mothers and mental health.” I went to Instagram. I texted my friends.
If mothers are going to do the work of birthing our nation’s next generation, replete with cracked nipples and torn vaginas, mesh undies and airplane-sized maxi pads, and no federal maternity leave policy, we should at least be normalizing the reality that sometimes we want to smash the shit out of some drywall with our bare fists before falling to our knees to ugly cry. Can we just create a hotline for me to call and scream into the receiver? There doesn’t even need to be anyone on the other end. (Let it be known that this did actually exist in the aftermath of the 2016 election. It was called Just Scream, and in an article on NPR, it explains it “encourages people to "Wait for the beep. Scream. Hang up. That's all there is to it.")
Instead of my two-week check-up, I’d have appreciated an invitation to the nearest rage room. Like an escape room, but where I can throw a fax machine into some cinder blocks and then smash it to bits with a hammer. (Break Bar in Manhattan lets you start out with a shot or a drink at the bar and then have your way with a variety of raw materials.) They could print the directions for me when I’m discharged from the hospital. Or send me a follow-up email! I’ll even sign up for text updates.
Even with the support of my loving husband, who, after my C-section, had to do nearly everything, and my mother, who flew to Los Angeles to help with basic household chores and even asked if I’d like to go cry alone in the bathroom at times, I felt immense pressure to be the woman, wife, mom, and housekeeper the world expected me to be. I expected it from myself.
It did not matter that my body had done something miraculous. That my hormones had 10 months to accommodate a growing human and bottomed out in a matter of days. That I was waking up in pools of sweat that had saturated the mattress or that I was navigating the complicated transition of personal identity with the new, immense responsibility of keeping a human alive. I’d been led to believe that I could bounce back. That I ought to, somewhat swiftly, step into my role as housekeeper, cook, and pro bono personal assistant to Tiny Weeping Person. There is an air of expectation around new mothers that, after three months, we should be pouncing back into our full-time jobs with the mental prowess of a jaguar. In reality “mommy brain” had me grasping to remember words I’d learned 30 years ago. And put on some makeup while you’re at it! Of course I’m enraged.
Now my daughter is nearly two years old. I have acquired much more intuition as to what she needs, though, as a toddler, she now defies all rules of logic. She sleeps through the night and I no longer need the assistance of furniture to stand. The rage hasn’t gone away, per se, it has simply transformed.
It is still quick to appear, but it manifests in different ways now: In yelling, “WHAT HAPPENED?” after the thud, silence, and eruption of cries when she falls in the presence of another adult; the firmness with which I hold her when she is sick. Rage has morphed into maniacal laughter, in squeals and tickles on the kitchen floor. It turns to panic when I read the news. It’s the urgency I feel for advocacy. Rage—and all its iterations—has become me, and I think it’s just called Motherhood. Don’t I deserve my own room for that?
Thank you for writing this. For being brave and honest and real. I felt every word of this and am grateful you could put into writing what I have not been able to but felt so deeply. Yes to all of this!!!!!!!! It’s so damn intense. So much more to say…. but for now, what I will end with again is thank you.
Every bit of this! ♥️