My Battle With Anger in Special Needs Motherhood Is Never Going Away
By: Stephanie Ulrich
Tags: Grief, Autism, Anger, Special Needs, Parenting

Anger, is a real emotion that mothers are not allowed to express, not only mothers but special needs mothers. Anger is simply the outward expression of hurt, fear, and frustration. Every time my child gets set back or gets sick and has to stay inside of a children’s hospital for 3 weeks I get angry.

I’m not angry at my child, I’m not angry at anyone I’m just angry, I’m just mad. I am mad that it’s my child, I am mad that I have to sit in a room and help a nurse hold down my child while she threads a catheter down his nose and into his bronchial tubes because he can’t get rid of his own secretions.

I am angry that my child has to work five times harder to find the courage to look someone in the face and say hello because autism gives him so much anxiety with communication that he completely shuts down and stands behind me until I finally just say another day. Next time, you’ll get it next time.

To tell anyone about this anger, about the anger I feel would be like walking into a room full of critics. It would be like walking into a room full of the most judgmental people I have ever met and have them all tell me what kind of awful mother I must be to feel angry about my children’s disabilities.

Being angry doesn’t mean that I don’t love my children, or that I won’t walk through a pit of open fire for them. It just means that I am angry that they will not get to experience life as easily as other children, that they will have to work harder to get to the same finish line other children will run thru so much easier then they will.

Watching them struggle is like a pit in the bottom of my stomach, it hurts me to my core because I can’t fix it, and I’m their mother. I am supposed to be able to fix all of their problems, but I can’t.

I’m left standing there helpless…

I’m standing in front of them watching them struggle, watching them cry and hurt and there is nothing that I as their mother can do to help them and that makes me more angry then I have ever been in my entire life.

I have no where to put that anger, so I sit with it until it becomes my best friend just waiting to come to me in all of those days when I am once again helpless.

You can’t talk about that anger because then you become ungrateful for the life you have created. Because, “It could always be worse and God never gives us more then we can handle!” Those words will run thru my head every day over and over keeping me quiet in my anger for days, weeks, months.

I have become one with my anger in special needs motherhood and I still don’t know where to put it or what to do with it. Maybe, if I talk about it i’ll find that other mothers feel the same.

Maybe just maybe I won’t feel so alone in the anger of my every day life of special needs motherhood.

Maybe just maybe, one day, I won’t be so angry if I talk about the real reason i’m angry.

Maybe, I feel like I failed my children, because I can’t protect them from the struggle and hurt they are facing.

Maybe, I’m angry at myself…..

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