I Was Completely Blindsided By My Postpartum Rage

Through the muffle of both an interior door and an exterior one, I hear a chair scraping against pavers. Instantly, adrenaline courses through my body. I can hear the whoosh of my blood pumping in my ears, can feel a flat and unyielding pressure against my sternum and throat.

My eyes fly open, and I imagine the hairs on my arms and legs similarly standing at attention, but I have trained myself to stay perfectly still when this bodily response occurs, though every instinct I have is calling me to my feet. In slow motion, as if she will hear my eyeballs moving in their sockets, I shift my gaze downward to my baby. Her breath is light and warm against my chest. I have been holding her for over an hour, trying repeatedly to lull her with milk into a deep enough sleep that I can carefully — so, so carefully — rise from the reclining chair and take the six steps across the room to her crib, where I will attempt for the fourth time in an hour to place her like a piece of unexploded ordnance, not daring to breathe during the operation.

From the patio, I hear the noise again, and I recognize it immediately: the legs of our wooden outdoor furniture are dragging as N gets in and out of a chair. From my place in the noise-controlled, blackout-curtained nursery, where I am one sneeze or hiccup away from having to start the entire process over from scratch, the scraping sounds like a muffler dragging on the highway. My skin is hot with rage, which is just a cover for the deep despair that swells my whole body. My baby won’t sleep unless I am holding her. I am many many months past the breaking point of going without sleep, and without respite, without my body being under my own control. Under these circumstances, anything that threatens to wake the baby up feels like a direct “f*ck you” to me and my labor, and I know he is out there, my boyfriend, love of my life, inadvertently scraping the f*cking chair on the patio while I die of exhaustion and boredom in here.

The anger and powerlessness snake up my throat from my belly. The baby stirs — whether from the sound of the chair or from my sudden energetic shift, I don’t know — and I know this means I will have to reset my inner countdown at least another 30 minutes. Tears spill down my cheeks, hot and fast, splashing down onto the baby’s face, at the same pace that the rage crests inside my body and rises, like vomit, through my gullet. It wants out. It wants to scream. But I am the parent, not the baby, so I clamp my hand over my lips and try to let it noiselessly into the chamber of my mouth.

I was ready for PPD. But it didn’t come — at least not the way I was expecting it.

“Rage is an unmet need,” a friend often reminds me when we talk about our experiences — shared, but different — of postpartum rage. She’s a provider of mental-health services to perinatal people and the operator of the Mom Rage Art Studio, so I take her words seriously. They feel right. This language came up in all my conversations about postpartum anger. I wish I’d had their clarity.

For me, it was the noise. For other new parents, it might be something completely different, like perceived or real incompetence at taking care of the baby. For others, it is beard hairs in the sink or a chronically overfull trash can or the way he pronounces the word corduroy. Sometimes it’s the way she just gets up and leaves the house when she needs something. Or, most damning of all, simply his face, existing. Postpartum rage triggers are as diverse as they are affecting, but remain remarkably consistent in their targets: the near and the dear.

When I had my baby in 2020, I was well armed for the fight against postpartum depression. PPD is a predator you can see coming — it’s even got its own acronym! — so I assembled my defenses accordingly: therapist, postpartum group, partner, family, Expecting Better, some mindfulness sh*t I bookmarked on YouTube. I took a dutiful series of classes and handouts with the precise vibe of a D.A.R.E. class that taught me the things to watch out for. Sleeping too much, crying too much (how much is too much? No one can say), “persistent sadness,” and thoughts of self-harm. In other words, a version of the treatment-resistant major depression I have managed for most of my life, except now there’s a baby. I was on Prozac by the time Prozac Nation came out. I can clock a generic versus name-brand Zoloft, Paxil, and Lexapro on sight. I was ready for PPD. But it didn’t come — at least not the way I was expecting it.

I did not spend any of my days resting beatifically in bed, cradling my sadness like a Faberge egg.

I was imagining the kind of postpartum depression in the pamphlets, the ones where a gently mussed but otherwise beautiful woman rests dully in bed, the side of her unlined face pressed against the pillow but not giving her a weird double chin like I have in all my bed selfies. This woman is sad — we know this because she doesn’t meet our eyes — and the implication is that she has become persistently sad. This woman doesn’t want to play with her baby, doesn’t even want a croissant, and experiences all her feelings as if through a gauzy swaddle sack. She is sad, and it is so elegant.

I did not spend any of my days resting beatifically in bed, cradling my sadness like a Faberge egg. My regular schedule involved sobbing until I vomited and impulsively setting up dodgy legal trusts so that my kid would have money if I suddenly died. I was crusted at all times with milk and blood, forgot to eat for hours on end if my partner didn’t thrust food into my hands, and spent so much time screaming into a pillow that I worried the neighbors were going to call the cops.

Not one person or organization or text prepared me for the onslaught of emotions — some driven by hormones, others by circumstance — that I would experience in the early postpartum period. Rather than sadness or depression, I felt a profound and relentless overstimulation, to the point that it often felt like I was straddling a line between reality and psychosis, peering into an abyss that beckoned with promises of relief from the constant, impossible demand for my presence, my attention, my touch. It does not feel at all dramatic to say that I was fighting an unspoken battle every day, with the stakes being my sanity and very survival. I was unable to articulate that I was having a very bad time and that nearly anything my family did sent me to an 11. (I remember being in the midst of this, when my baby was a few months old, and thinking “Damn, I really dodged a bullet with the PPD.”)

In a way, though, my anger felt like the thing that kept me from leaning too far over the side of that particular ledge. It tethered me to the present and material world, where invariably someone was doing something loudly that they could nearly as easily have done quietly.

Because he was the only other adult, and because I tried mightily to not focus the energetic thrust of my anger onto our children, a lot of this landed on my partner. Whenever I read accounts of postpartum mood disorders, like Sarah Hoover’s excellent and aggressively honest takedown of her husband’s myriad failings in The Motherload, I am always scanning for who the asshole is. And in some narratives, like Hoover’s, it is obvious. I interviewed a parent whose partner decided to take up endurance running during their postpartum period, leaving the birthing parent alone for long periods with a newborn and a healing C-section incision. These situations are clear-cut. But what about more benign crimes of partnership?

“The smallest things would set me off,” Kelleigh Beckett told me. Beckett, who blogs about parenthood at Imperfect Homemaking, listed off her husband's crimes: “Breathing too loudly. Leaving dishes by the sink. Taking a ‘long’ shower when I hadn’t even brushed my teeth that day. It wasn’t just anger — it felt like fury.” This brought me back to the titanic power of my rage when my partner would, say, leave the house to pick up food. (For me!) I wanted the freedom to be able to leave, which is something many of the parents I spoke to echoed: that it was the feeling of being stuck in the domestic sphere, coupled with witnessing the freedoms of others, that triggered a sense of being trapped in rage.

Postpartum anger, just like the rest of women’s anger, is threatening and uncomfortable because it has demands — it’s rooted in unmet needs.

Nearly every birthing person I spoke to talked about being completely unprepared for postpartum rage. When asked what they knew about the phenomenon, I heard “I knew virtually nothing,” “not a lot,” “never heard of postpartum anger,” “I knew zero,” and “I had no idea postpartum rage was even a thing” or “I’d heard of postpartum depression… but postpartum rage? PMAD? Not at all.”

Anna Rollins, a parent in West Virginia, told me that she remembered saying to a friend “I think something’s wrong” — with her mood — “but I am not sad. I am mad.”

For myself and for many of the birthing people I spoke to, shame snaked alongside rage, making it that much harder to name and to address. What I was experiencing was so mismatched with the warnings or the pamphlets that I understood it to be a personal failing. It felt urgent that I “work on” (read: squash and vanish) my anger quickly and quietly before it harmed my family. I had a sense that my experience was somehow unmaternal, that it made me in some way a failure as a parent. I was meant to radiate warmth and smell like sugar cookies. Who was this feral, adult-shaped raccoon screaming into a pillow in the carport?

“An angry woman is dangerous, unpredictable, uncontrollable,” Lilly Dancyger reminds us in her essay collection First Love. “She must immediately be punished, shamed, or medicated back into complacency. Anger aims outward, disrupting systems and inconveniencing those in power.” Well, f*ck. Was this why we all find the sight of a suicidally depressed woman more palatable than that of an angry woman? Does she not make for a more elegant pamphlet?

Postpartum anger, just like the rest of women’s anger, is threatening and uncomfortable because it has demands — it’s rooted in unmet needs. My anger was screaming (literally) for a radically different standard of care. To start, federal paid parental leave, robust and proactive postpartum health care, and for someone to find the person who first wrote “sleep when the baby sleeps” and give them bedbugs. I needed time and space and silence and to have nourishing food delivered to my bedside. I needed someone to sit with me and to help take care of my baby without speaking. I needed my clothes cleaned and folded for me. I needed the work emails to stop. I needed money. I needed my partner’s full and undivided attention. I needed to not have to fight for or even ask for these things. I needed someone to anticipate my needs.

The degree to which these basic needs are unmet is so high and so pervasive, and to meet many of them, a lot of things would have to change. Systems must be disrupted; people in power must be inconvenienced. Perhaps the fact that many of us are wildly unprepared for postpartum rage is perhaps less perplexing than I thought. Perhaps we are scared of rage because it demands a conversation.

Margo Steines is the author of Brutalities: A Love Story. Her writing has been named Notable in Best American Essays and has appeared in The Sun, Slate, The New York Times (Modern Love), and elsewhere. A native New Yorker, Steines lives in Arizona with her family, where she teaches creative nonfiction writing classes and seminars.