Committee for Children Blog

Anatomy of Anger

by Emilie Coulter

Something happened this week that made me very angry. I won’t go into the gory details. It’s enough to know that it was a letter from my children’s elementary school about a new initiative the district was rolling out without allowing parental involvement. Here follows my step-by-step process of Getting Angry.

1. Bewilderment. My kids and I were about to walk out the door to go to school when my son did the old “Oh, Mom, by the way, here’s a form you have to sign.” Blindsided, I told him I wouldn’t sign it until I had more information. Cue: son’s meltdown (“I’m going to be the only one who can’t …”). Address meltdown, head off to school. Everyone sad.

2. Mom meltdown. Say good-bye to kids, see friends in school parking lot, shed angry tears on their shoulders. Discuss situation. Try to regain composure.

3. Cold fury. March into principal’s office clutching objectionable permission form. Get turned away by obviously frazzled principal: “Make an appointment.”

4. Hot fury. Start to drive to work, pull over, and call smart friend. Rant together for half an hour, make plans.

5. Dispiritedness. Work all day with puffy eyes and a churning-burning in my chest.

6. Inspiration. Write a long, passionate letter to principal using words like “distressed,” “angry,” and “disappointed.” Hit send. Immediately forward same letter to small group of smart friends, who write back, cheering me on.

7. Grim determination. Spend the next few days talking with like-minded people, researching offending initiative, and making notes.

This is as far as I’ve gotten, but the next step will be to present, with my friends, a well-ordered collective response to the school initiative that we feel overstepped family boundaries. I’m not sure if this presentation will be to the school board, the superintendent, or the town listserv.

I’m struggling to keep my energy up. Taking action like this does not come naturally to me, and the feeling that is quietly holding hands with my anger is fear. It scares me to confront “authority.” I grew up in the kind of family that did not believe in lashing out or weeping copiously. Consequently, when my passion finally reached the surface, I tended to explode in fits of upended chairs and flung board games.

As I grew up, I learned how to more steadily release the hot steam of emotion by talking to friends, writing, crying, running, being funny, and yes, even expressing those emotions loud and clear.

This would be a good opportunity for me to model all my stages of anger for my children, show them how anger in itself is not a bad thing, but what one does with it makes all the difference. (After all, it was not calm passivity that defeated Hitler. And where would we be if citizens hadn’t risen in anger against slavery? What were suffragettes if not angry?) Unfortunately, my son is still so angry about me not signing the form, I haven’t been able to pull him along with me on my journey through my own anger. But I do plan to find a quiet moment when we’re tossing a baseball to try to encapsulate what’s been going on. My hope is that some of my words will lodge in his mind and heart so that he can return to them later when he’s ready.