08/01/2026
I found it relieving to read the piece I have added below.
In an age of curated ideals and images the reality of parenting and motherhood gets abandoned for the picture perfect image of what it looks like to raise children.
Personally I succumbed to this myself and struggled with undiagnosed postnatal depression. It lasted a long time! The birth of my second child rendered me incapable in many areas of my life but it also began to heal me.
I can resonate with the anger mentioned in this writing. Gratefully, after much therapy, self reflection and education, I can relate to the reasons described here for how the anger was triggered. Thank fully I am supported well enough now (internally and externally) that this is a matter for the past. Yet, I believe that behind the curated lifestyles, there are likely an immense amount of women struggling with their transition into motherhood.
I'm reading a wonderful book at the moment called,
' Because I'm Not Myself You See,' by Ariane Beeston.
I will share more about the book in another post but for now i'd like to say that it's an incredible read - a memoir of Ariane's experience of becoming a mother. Unfortunately she was broken to the brink and suffered post natal psychosis. Did you know that even existed? It's a tragic diagnosis, which often goes undiagnosed and therefore untreated.
In a world where standards of beauty and performance are paramount - shame breeds in silence and mothers slip through the cracks. This is something that I care deeply about as a therapist...
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1FD3pwxCAy/
No one warns you that loving a child can feel like this.
Becoming a parent doesn’t just add a child to your life. It introduces you to parts of yourself you didn’t know were there, or at least parts you’d managed to keep quiet. Nancy Samalin’s insight lands with such force because it names something many parents experience in private and carry in shame. The anger feels foreign, almost monstrous, not because it’s unusually intense, but because it contradicts the story we’ve told ourselves about who we are.
Nancy Samalin spent her career listening closely to families. Trained as a social worker and family therapist, she became known in the late twentieth century for writing honestly about the emotional lives of parents at a time when parenting advice often leaned toward either strict control or cheerful reassurance. Love and Anger, written with journalist Catherine Whitney in the early nineties, arrived during a cultural moment when parenting manuals were beginning to acknowledge emotional complexity but still rarely gave anger its due. The book’s premise was quietly radical. Anger wasn’t a sign of failure. It was information.
What makes parental anger so destabilizing is not just its intensity but its intimacy. At work, with friends, or even with romantic partners, we can step away when we feel ourselves heating up. Children don’t allow that luxury. They need us when we’re tired, overstimulated, and stripped of the usual buffers that keep our tempers in check. Add the emotional stakes of loving someone so vulnerable, and anger can arrive with shocking speed. It feels less like irritation and more like an existential threat to our sense of being good.
There’s also a psychological twist here that Samalin understood well. Children don’t just test boundaries. They activate memory. A defiant toddler can awaken echoes of how we were spoken to, ignored, or controlled. A teenager’s contempt can stir old wounds about not being seen or respected. In this way, parental anger is often less about the present moment and more about an unresolved past. The fury feels outsized because it isn’t just responding to spilled juice or backtalk. It’s responding to history.
Culturally, we don’t make much room for this truth. Especially for mothers, anger has long been treated as a moral failure rather than a human emotion. The ideal parent is patient, attuned, endlessly calm. Even today, amid conversations about gentle parenting and emotional regulation, there’s often an unspoken expectation that the work should erase rage altogether. When it doesn’t, parents conclude something must be wrong with them. Samalin’s contribution was to suggest the opposite. The problem isn’t that anger appears. It’s that we don’t know how to think about it.
Seen this way, anger becomes a signal rather than a verdict. It can point to exhaustion, to unrealistic expectations, to the pressure of trying to repair one’s own childhood through a new one. It can reveal where autonomy feels lost, where support is thin, where the self has shrunk too far in service of the family. None of this excuses harmful behaviour, but it reframes the emotion itself as meaningful rather than monstrous.
Other female thinkers have circled this territory in different language. Adrienne Rich wrote about the tension between motherhood as lived experience and motherhood as institution. D W Winnicott spoke of the good enough mother, pushing back against ideals that demand emotional perfection. More recently, writers like Maggie Nelson and Rachel Cusk have described parenting as an identity that fractures and reforms the self. Samalin’s voice belongs in this lineage. She wasn’t trying to soothe parents into feeling better. She was trying to help them see more clearly.
What’s striking, decades later, is how current her observation still feels. The context has shifted, but the dilemma remains. We now talk more openly about mental health, yet many parents still whisper their anger to themselves, afraid it reveals something unforgivable. Nancy Samalin’s work invites a braver stance. To notice the anger. To get curious about it. To take responsibility for how it’s expressed without turning it into proof of inner corruption.
Parenthood, in this light, isn’t just about raising a child. It’s a confrontation with the self. The anger that emerges isn’t evidence that love has failed. It’s evidence that love has gone deep enough to reach places that were previously untouched. The task isn’t to banish those places, but to meet them with honesty, support, and the humility to accept that becoming a parent often means becoming someone new, for better and for harder.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
