this morning I was the mother who slammed the door

This morning, I slammed a door.

I am not proud of it. But I want to tell you about it, because in the aftermath, I touched a healing that is worth sharing.

So this morning, I woke up and from the start I felt exhausted. My hormones had been out of balance lately, and my period was very close. I could feel it from the tension within my body. It was one of those morning when I was already ready to go to bed and say ‘goodnight’ before the day even started.

My husband had left early to pay the electricity bill. I was home with Xander, getting ready for a farm day. Our house helper, Karol, had kindly invited us to her grandfather’s farm, and we were both excited to go.

It was around 7:30 in the morning, and I had one hour before Karol came to pick us up.

In that one hour, despite the state of exhaustion and my body pleeding me to take it easy, I decided to prepare fruits, make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the picnic, wash the dishes, and leave the house clean.

Xander, on the other hand, had different plans. He was very clingy this morning. He wanted me to sit on the couch and play with him. He kept saying, relentlessly without taking a pause or even a breath, “Mama, come. Mama, come. Mama, come.” Non stop.

At first I was calm. I told him, “Xander, Mama needs to wash the dishes and make sandwiches.”

I went to the couch for a moment, cuddled him, played with him a little, and then tried to go back to the kitchen. But he did not want me to go back.

“Mama, come. Mama, come. Mama, come.”

Over and over again. Non stop. I tried to breathe through it. I tried to gently explain to him: “Baby, give me two minutes please. Two minutes.” But of course, he is two. Two minutes mean nothing to him. He doesn’t care about the dishes, sandwiches or a clean house. He only cares about play and all he wanted was to play with his mother.

And I knew that. But I was still so exhausted and I felt so depleted. His nonstop ‘mama, mama, mama, mama’ felt so overstimulating. I could feel the anger rising in my body. This boiling, heated sensation. And even though I knew it was not his fault, I still could not stop the anger rising. I just did not have the physical and nervous system capacity. I desperately needed space and quiet. And he desperately wanted me.

‘Mama come, mama come, mama come, mama, mama, mama…’

And eventually, I reached a point where I knew I had to walk away for a moment because I felt the rage coming out from my skin, I felt like screaming and losing control. So I ran into the bedroom and slammed the door. Not at him but still, I slammed the door. I had to let the anger out in some way. And it did the trick, it cooled me a little bit. Then I sat on the bed and started breathing.

And of course Xander started crying, because this is not something he is used to. We are not really a loud house. My husband and I do not slam doors. I am not saying we never lose our patience, of course we do, but usually we are able to keep it under control and stay kind and calm with him.

So when I slammed the door and disappeared into the bedroom, I think it confused and scared him. I could hear his little cries on the couch, asking ‘mama, mama’.

I took a few more deep breaths, I calmed down enough to go back out. So I went back, picked him up, held him close and said, “I’m so sorry baby. Mama is tired today. Mama is just very tired. It’s not your fault.”

So we cuddled for a while, and he stopped crying. But then he looked at me with teary eyes and said something like, “Is mama leave?”

He was asking if I was going to leave. And it broke my heart. I told him, “No aşkım (Turkish word for ‘my love’), Mama will never leave you. Mama is always here. She might go away for a little bit but mama always comes back.” And he repeated, “Mama comes back.” I said “yes mama comes back” and we cuddled more with teary eyes.

And then I decided to let go of everything that needed to be done—the fruits, sandwiches, dishes.

I realized I had created all of this pressure for myself over things that did not really matter. Why did the dishes have to be washed in that exact hour? Why did the sandwiches have to be ready before Karol arrived? She was coming in half an hour. I could make the sandwiches while she played with Xander. Or she could help me. Or we could simply take less food. No one would die over any of it.

Yet in my mind, I made everything so urgent.

This is something I am slowly learning about motherhood. Sometimes the pressure comes from the outside, but honestly sometimes I build the pressure myself. I create a list of things that “must” be done, and then I suffer under the weight of my own list. Of course, some things truly need to be done. Children need to be fed. Houses need some level of care. Life needs tending. But not everything is an emergency. Not every dish is urgent, nor every sandwich is worth losing my peace over.

Later, we went to the farm and had a beautiful day. Xander was happy. I was happy. Everything was okay. Then at some point I went to the bathroom and realized I had started my period. Of course!

Suddenly the whole morning made more sense. The premenstrual rage. I started experiencing more premenstrual rage after becoming a mother. Because before being a mother, I had the luxury and space to take space for myself, be away from people and rest as I needed. Yet being a mother the past two years, I don’t always have the same luxury. Thanks to my loving husband, he tries to give me space to rest as much as he can but sometimes life happens and I don’t get it. And if I don’t rest, especially when I’m depleted, my body starts asking for it with more symptoms such as fatigue, irritability and anger. And if I don’t listen, she eventually speaks in fire.

After the farm, we came home and my husband was home. I said ‘I have my period, I am exhausted, I need to shower and rest’ and he got it. And after a nice pampering shower, lying in bed breathing and resting in quiet and peace for only half an hour, I felt infinitely better. I felt like myself again.

And I started to think about the morning. Because after something like this happens, even if it is not such a big thing, the next part begins: the part where I have to forgive myself. Because I can be pretty harsh on myself.

I start thinking, how could I do that? How could I slam the door? How could I raise my voice? How could I scare him? How could I treat him like that when he is so little and innocent? Then another part of me says: it is okay, I am human too. I apologized and repaired. He is okay. I am not a bad mother because I had one human moment.

But this touched something deeper in me. I started remembering my own childhood. I remembered moments when my mother was stressed. She would be cleaning, cooking, taking care of us, trying to hold everything together. And sometimes she would yell. I remember feeling sad and scared in those moments.

As a child, I think I interpreted her anger as something about me. I thought to myself ‘maybe she didn’t love me so much, maybe I was a burden, maybe I was not a good child, maybe I was just too much.’ Children do not usually think, “My mother is exhausted and her nervous system is overwhelmed.” They think, “It must be me.”

But now, as a mother myself, I understand something I could never understand before. And I don’t only understand this in my mind but I feel it in my body, in my bones: It was not about me. I was not too much or bad, and she loved me so much and so deeply. She was simply exhausted and depleted. She was carrying too much.

And honestly, I am luckier than she was in many ways. My husband doesn’t have a full time job and shares all the house work and child care. We recently started having some help in the house, which has already made such a difference. I don’t have a job. I can rest. I can take care of myself. And even with all of this, I still get depleted because mothering full time is no easy job. So when I imagine my mother in her own circumstances, I feel her differently now. Not only as my mother, but as a woman.

A female body.

A nervous system.

A heart.

A mother who loved her children deeply, and was also exhausted. I can see now that her anger did not mean she did not love me. Just like my anger this morning did not mean I loved Xander any less.

I love my child infinitely. I love him with a love that is deeper than anything I have ever known. And still, this morning, I needed space from him. Not because I don’t love him or he did anything wrong. But because I needed space to rest and just be with myself. Because I felt depleted and in that moment I did not have enough capacity to meet him the way I wanted to.

So I forgave myself. And I found myself forgiving my mother. And through forgiving my mother, I found myself forgiving myself even more. There was such an interesting oneness in this. The more I felt her, the more I felt myself. The more I understood myself, the more I understood her.

Maybe this is one of the strange initiations of motherhood. It slowly removes the illusion that we are so different from the others who came before us. Before becoming a mother, I think it was easier to judge. I had ideas about the kind of mother I would be. I had ideas about what I would never do. I had ideas about what love should always look like.

Then motherhood came and humbled me. Over and over again.

Every time I fall short, every time I make a mistake, every time I do not become the mother I imagined I would always be, my judgements soften more and more. And so I am grateful for my mistakes and falling short because of the humbling they bring.

They take away my edges. They make me less judgemental. They show me that I am not better than anyone really. And I am not worse either. I am just human. We all are. We are all made of the same material. Flesh and blood. Hearts and hormones. Nervous systems and childhood wounds. Love and fear. Devotion and exhaustion. Our own stories and the stories of our mothers, grandmothers, and all the ones who came before them. And I feel the divine oneness beneath the difference of our stories.

Sometimes I see a mother not treating her child well, and before I became a mother, I would judge her and even silently shame. And I still do not think it is okay. It is not okay to hurt our children. It is not okay to pass our pain onto them. But now I see understanding doesn’t have to mean excuse. Or compassion doesn’t have to be permission.

And so now another part of me wonders when I see a mother.

What has she gone through?

What kind of support does she have or not have?

What kind of childhood did she have?

What kind of parents, grandparents, ancestors, fears, worries, and traumas live inside her body?

What is she carrying that I cannot see?

And if I had been placed inside the exact same circumstances, with the exact same childhood, the exact same nervous system, the lack of support, the relationships, the generational wounds, would I really be so different?

I do not know.

This does not make harmful things okay. But it opens a door. A door into humility and compassion. A door into seeing that maybe we are all the same light passing through different prisms.

The light is one. But depending on the angle of the prism, it comes out as different colors. We see red, blue, green, yellow. We see difference. But underneath, it is the same light. Maybe we are like that too. Each of us shaped by our own angle. Our circumstances, our bodies, our ancestors, our memories, our wounds, our love, our fear. No one exactly like us. And still, none of us separate.

I am grateful for the initiation of motherhood. Not only for the beautiful parts, but especially for the challenging parts. For humbling me into oneness. For bringing so much love and compassion into my heart. For opening me up to my mother and grandmother and all the mothers who came before me and stand next to me.

For teaching me that love is not the absence of tears. It is also the repair. It is coming back. It is saying, “I am sorry”. It is holding my child with more tenderness, and learning to hold myself, my mother, and all the mothers before and here with me with more tenderness too.

Love is all of it. And even if we lose touch with it, it always comes back. Mama comes back.