I'm Done Being Anyone's Wife — 'Like So Many Women In Their 40s, I've Just Had It'
I'm permitting myself to feel and sit with my anger over how much society demands of wives and mothers.
Engin Akyurt | Pexels I had a lot to feel angry about last year. I’ve had a lot to feel angry about in other years, too, but in 2024, I tried something new. I let myself feel my anger. I sat with it. I got to know it.
Anger has a bad rap these days. In women it manifests as muted resentment; in men, it’s all bluster and rage. Neither of these iterations is particularly helpful, but just because anger is a so-called “negative” emotion, it doesn’t mean it has to be a negative force in our lives.
My learned default, of course, is to tamp down my anger. I didn’t consciously set out to interrupt this instinct — like many women in their 40s, I think I’d just had enough.
I was coming to terms with just how much I had given up to be a “good wife” and a “good mom,” and I felt furious that society continues to demand these sacrifices from women.
I was done with being anyone’s wife and wanted to be a “good mom” on my own terms.
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I came to learn that if I take the time to feel my anger, it has a lot to teach me.
That means resisting the urge to bury it, ignore it, or set it aside. Feeling anger is important; equally important is naming it.
Some people might call this “venting,” which also has a bad rap, but oh, I’ve done some delicious venting over the past year! We all need at least one person in our circle we can vent to, someone who we know will validate us without judgment or who won’t put undue pressure on us to “fix” anything just yet.
We can’t wallow in this phase, of course. Eventually, we must move on to process our anger, pick it apart, and consider other perspectives. That doesn’t mean invalidating our perspective; it just means considering our anger from different angles.
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As I alluded to in the introduction, it could be tempting to turn this into a magical three-step formula (feel, name, process), a no-fail anger solution, or a life hack. After all, I’m as qualified as any other Internet self-help guru, which is to say not very.
But like most things in life, this isn’t usually a tidy linear process. Sometimes I have to process variations of the same anger over and over again, sometimes I process it too quickly, and sometimes I wallow for too long.
The important thing here is to permit ourselves to be angry.
If we find ourselves feeling angry in reaction to certain things, that’s instructive. If we find ourselves feeling angry in reaction to certain people, that’s instructive. If we find ourselves feeling angry a whole lot of the time, that’s instructive.
My anger told me something wasn’t right. It had been trying to tell me that for years. In 2024, I finally decided to listen.
Kerala Taylor is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication Mom, Interrupted.