QOTD: “I sat with my anger long enough, until she told me her real name was grief.”-Isaac Rowe
We had a meltdown today amongst the teens in the house. They don’t happen often but when they do, they are spectacular and a bit loud. The trigger was something innocuous – it usually is. My initial reaction, as the sole parent in the house at the time, was to chastise both the inflamer and the inflamed, and harshly.
After the fireworks subsided, I was profoundly sad; there was no way for me to know the true root cause of the flare up or how I could help in the management of the very obvious pent-up anger. Shortly thereafter, the quote of the day appeared in one of the many social feeds I have open on my work desktop. Got me to thinking about the outburst in a completely different way.
Grief. Anger is a natural response to grief. It is also a natural response to fear. There is so much to grieve, as well as fear, happening in the world at large. There’s also a lot going on in the immediate world, too. In just a couple of weeks, each of the teens will be in their respective places away from home. The one with today’s short fuse will be away for the very first time, and it is surely weighing on him heavily. His routine is about to be disrupted in a way that none of us can really anticipate. Even if it’s a half-measure and with known quantities, it is still away. I imagine there is a powerful mixture of fear and grief happening – fear of the unknown and the grief on leaving the cocoon.
I got to thinking about what has been happening in the world, too: COVID – the death toll, the restrictions, the unemployment, the slow vaccine rollout, the death toll; politics and the attempted coup of last week, the upsurge in angry, white (mostly male but not always) mobs; the effect of all this remote everything on everyone’s psyche. Everybody’s on the anger spectrum somewhere. Does this mean that we’re all grieving? I believe it.
What we are grieving, though, really depends on who you ask and how this period of non-stop upheaval has affected them.
I’m grieving the inevitable in life: my children are growing up and becoming their own people, my country is not what I envisioned it was, my neighbors may not be who I thought they were, places we thought of as safe are really not. Whatever soft illusion I was living in has been unceremoniously ripped away, and I grieve the loss of that illusion.
I will try to remember that anger is often the mask that fear and grief wear to trick the viewer. Certainly, if violence comes to call, don’t wait around to ask what its grief is about – get the hell out of its way as fast as you can. But, maybe anger can be asked. And then maybe some empathy and understanding can come from it.
Ever the optimist.