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I was only a few pages into Minna Dubin’s new book Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood when it hit a nerve.
“Mom rage lives in the body. Fingers curl, cheeks burn, breathing quickens. Similar to road rage, mom rage bubbles up fast and hot,” she wrote. “Mom rage is fury — mothers bursting with an uncontrollable anger. Its release is often aural and physical: a rhythmic string of high-pitched curses; a booming trombone yell, so growly the mother’s throat is sore the next morning; hands slapping out a sharp beat on her own stinging thighs; a bass drum foot pounding out each word — BRUSH (stomp) YOUR (stomp) TEETH (stomp) NOW (stomp, stomp)!!”
If you’ve ever felt mom rage, you know how accurate this description is (and the cascade of guilt and shame that inevitably follows). When my kids were little, as much as I would have loved to be perpetually calm and patient — as much as they deserved that kind of mom — I would have described myself as “a yeller.” Dubin’s description of the sore throat brought tears to my eyes, even now, at least a decade later — because I have, unfortunately, been there. Just typing out this admission makes me cringe. Years later, I still feel horrible about it, having internalized the mantra that repeated in my head every time I lost my temper: something is wrong with you. You’re a bad mother.
What I didn’t realize back then is the exact thing Dubin sets out to prove in her book: experiencing mom rage doesn’t mean you’re a bad mom — and you’re most definitely not alone.
“The book is my attempt to make people understand and normalize mom rage so that moms feel less shame,” Dubin tells me when we sit down to discuss not only the book Mom Rage, but mom rage in general. “My biggest goal was for moms to read the book, see themselves, and feel a little bit of relief … and be able to experience some self-compassion.”
Dubin knew that addressing this shameful, secretive topic would resonate, because when she bravely admitted to having those feelings in an article for The New York Times, it went viral, garnering a massive response from moms who could relate. Someone had finally said the unspeakable thing, and it opened a floodgate of relief among mothers that it wasn’t, in fact, a personal character flaw. So for the book, Dubin gathered insight from mothers across a broad spectrum of races, classes, geographical locations, and sexual orientations on the unfortunate topic that unites so many of us, no matter how different we are otherwise.
Like a sinner in a confessional, I admit right off the bat during our interview that I, too, have been sucked into the dark and loathsome abyss of mom rage — and that in reading the book, I was struck with a profound sense of relief to know I’m not the only one and that it doesn’t make me terrible. That being said, I’d love to know why it feels like such a shameful, personal secret that we shouldn’t discuss.
“Why aren’t we allowed to be angry as mothers?” I ask.
“I think we’re not allowed to be angry as women, first of all,” Dubin says. “Then that gets compounded when we become mothers because there’s this mythology around motherhood in America that mothers are these mythic, perfect creatures [meant to] nurture, and nothing else. Mothers don’t get to be complicated people, because the world just wants us to be mothers. We don’t get to be all the other things that we are, and that we were before we had children.”
It’s a strange dichotomy — because for me, being a mother truly is the most important thing in my life, a role I willingly prioritize before any other: wife, employee, sister, friend. And yet there’s a simmering resentment under my skin that I think many other moms can identify with. It’s the societal expectation of putting that role first, the fact that as a mom, I’m expected to do the lion’s share of the parenting duties including the “invisible load” of remembering everybody’s everything: medical history, sports schedule, where their other shoe is. It’s just … what moms do. Right?
Dubin mentions that it’s often this way for the “default parent” — which, in many cases, is the mom. Our partners get to be who they already are, with the role of parent tacked on “like an extra thing … like a hobby, like being a ceramicist or something.” But for mothers, everything else disappears, and your identity as anything else is all but squashed.
“That can be a painful and angry process,” says Dubin. “And I think there’s a lot of resentment — how come I have to get flattened into this [one-dimensional] specific thing?”
Add to that the trend that Dubin calls “intensive mothering.” The expectations of motherhood, she says, have reached a high-intensity, professionalized level. No more shooing your kids out the door to run the neighborhood until the street lights come on, and don’t even think about scrolling through your phone while they play at the park; we must be actively mothering at all times. Not only that, but if your kid doesn’t have sports and music lessons and dance and STEM club and Taekwondo every weeknight, what are you even doing?
“The expectations right now of motherhood are outrageous and untenable,” says Dubin. “You have to have eight arms to do everything. It’s so hard. And I wish that society recognized that, but that’s why we rage, right? Because no one recognizes.”
Did I mention that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 80 percent of mothers with kids ages 6-17 work full-time jobs? Despite those stats, research shows that moms in heterosexual relationships are still doing more at home than dads — even if those moms are working full-time. “Husbands in egalitarian marriages spend about 3.5 hours more per week on leisure activities than wives do,” reported a 2023 study by Pew Research. “Wives in these marriages spend roughly 2 hours more per week on caregiving than husbands do and about 2.5 hours more on housework.”
Dubin emphasizes that in the course of her research, she learned that mom rage doesn’t care whether a mother works outside the home or works as a stay-at-home mom: “Motherhood just feels overwhelming. For the stay-at-home moms, there was a sense of isolation and [the daily labor] not being seen. And then for moms who are working, it wasn’t as isolating because they were out of the house all day, but the labor was still there. And so there was still the resentment.”
This could change, of course, but why would it? “Right now [motherhood is] in service to the patriarchy,” Dubin points out. “It does not serve men to change anything around motherhood, because we are providing this hugely valuable amount of labor for free.” She theorizes that moms “could be the largest labor union in the world if we actually organized” — but sadly, “If society saw motherhood as a multifaceted, complicated, professionalized job, which really it is, they would have to give it benefits and pay.”
“Right now [motherhood is] in service to the patriarchy. It does not serve men to change anything around motherhood, because we are providing this hugely valuable amount of labor for free.”
Moms are expected to do it all, an impossible task for anyone, and screaming for help into a thankless void. No wonder we’re angry. No wonder the mom rage boils up inside and rears its ugly head at the littlest thing — or the littlest people.
I ask Dubin how we can shine a light on mom rage; how to normalize it, so that we aren’t villainized for feeling a natural human response to the heavy expectations we (constantly!) labor under. Fortunately, she tells me — for as many perfectly-curated lives we see on social media — there’s also a lot of honesty around motherhood surfacing. “I have seen the mom rage conversation change so much over the last 5 years,” she says. “People are talking truthfully about motherhood more and more.” There are therapists on Instagram and TikTok, she says, whose entire accounts are devoted to it.
As for Dubin, she has found that focusing on her mom rage rather than keeping it a shameful secret helps throttle it back. “We’re ashamed of our rage, and we hate our rage,” she says — but shoving it down isn’t doing anybody any favors. Dubin discusses this in Mom Rage within a chapter entitled “Invite Your Rage to Tea.”
“I discovered that if I could set down my shame and self-hatred, even just temporarily, and view my rage with respect and kindness, I could actually hear what she was trying to tell me,” she wrote. “In order to see my rage as a teacher, I needed to become her student by asking questions.”
So, then, what should we be asking?
“Get really good and familiar with your rage,” she advises. “What are your triggers? Where did they come from — what’s happening underneath the rage? Because usually underneath the rage, there are some wounds happening there. There are some hurt places. And it might be lack of support. Or it might be that you’re feeling like your kid is dismissing you.” Getting to the root cause of the problem, she says, can help us identify what she calls our “personal rage risk factors.” Then, once we see a pattern, we can take steps to change it.
Mom Rage as a whole was both eye-opening and validating, but one of my favorite parts is the appendix in the back of the book. There’s a section entitled “For Partners: 19 Steps to Alleviate Your Co-Parent’s Mom Rage” which contains valuable, actionable suggestions that made me want to offer up a round of applause (and leave the book conveniently open to that part on my husband’s nightstand).
Dubin says that while America is in desperate need of an overhaul when it comes to the way society views mothers, changes on a smaller scale are important too. Starting on a “micro level” in the home, and with ourselves, will hopefully lead to changes on a macro level down the road. Our children are watching, absorbing the messages we send them about the division of household labor — which will carry over into their adult lives and how they treat motherhood.
In the meantime, we can talk about mom rage openly and honestly to lessen the stigma around it. We can rely on our support networks; mom friends are valuable, even when they’re just serving as a sounding board. We can get intimately familiar with our rage and learn how to head it off at the pass (at least most of the time). But most importantly, we can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that mom rage is not just a personal problem; it’s a nearly universal experience of motherhood. And with that knowledge, we can tell ourselves that we really are good moms — and truly mean it.
