They just asked for sunscreen. So why did I feel completely unhinged? This voicenote is about invisible labor, quiet rage, and the real reason I was feeling so much resentment.
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Transcript: I Was SO Tempted To Throw My Kids Off The Boat
I had the most infuriating experience recently on a family vacation. We were on a boat. It was me, my five kids, my husband, two friends—and of my five children, all five of them asked me to put sunscreen on their back.
“Hey Mom, can you put some sunscreen on my back?” It seems like such an innocuous thing, but I felt myself feeling enraged.
So anger is an interesting thing, right? Because we all kind of think it's bad and that we shouldn't feel angry, or that being angry is bad—that we should somehow manage or repress our anger.
But anger is actually amazing. Anger is actually sort of a physical sensation that arises in our body, that we recognize, that tells us that something's wrong—that tells us that some boundary has been crossed.
Think about it: when you are angry with someone, it's because something they have done is not okay with you.
And what happens is the reaction to anger, or the way we act when we're angry, can sometimes be destructive—not productive, not helpful—and so we either do those things and then regret them and have to clean them up, or we sort of deny the anger altogether and repress it.
Which is what I did for a really long time, because I was kind of taught as a little girl—you know, it's definitely not attractive to be angry. So for a long time, I was like, I don’t have any anger. Maybe I have irritation.
So, irritation is like an early stage of anger. So okay, maybe I wasn’t angry. I was definitely irritated when everybody told me to put sunscreen on their back. And you would think, you know, what’s the big deal? And that’s actually another clue, right? When your reaction is disproportionate to the offense.
Like, I was so annoyed and so irritated, and what was it telling me? Somebody had just asked me to put sunscreen on their back. No big deal—actually, kind of not even a bad thing.
And so really looking at that anger and saying: Okay, what am I learning? What can this irritation, what can this bubbling up of resentment and anger tell me or teach me?
And what it basically taught me was that there were five kids, two friends, a husband, and me—and the default person to ask to put sunscreen on their back was me.
Which also—okay Vanessa, why are you making such a big deal of it? It's because the default person to ask for everything is me.
“Hey Mom, can you make me a dinner reservation?” “Hey Mom, can you change my dentist appointment?” “Hey Mom...” I mean, the number of “Hey Mom” requests I get in a day is pretty over the top.
I was hanging out with a friend. We had gone out to the Hamptons for a couple of days, and we were sitting there, and my phone just kept buzzing. And I was relaying to her all of the requests and questions I was fielding from my various kids—who were, to be fair, in transit and in airports and doing a lot of things.
And she sort of said—because we were hanging out all day and she'd never really spent that stretch of time with me, with no one else around—she was like, “I didn’t really realize how much you're fielding on a constant basis from your kids, from your family.” And I was like, “Yeah. This is my life. Every day.”
And again, it’s not that I am not willing and happy to do those things. My kids, for the most part, are still at home. The one who’s out is 18. I'm here for them. I love my job being their mom and teaching them and helping them.
But I recognized and realized—in that request to sunscreen their back—that I’ve trained them to depend on me. To rely on me. And to come to me and look to me for everything.
And now that they are teenagers and independent and no longer three years old—where I have to tie their shoes for them and give them baths and feed them—obviously I don’t do those things for them anymore.
But the continuum is continuing. To mean: I need them to be more independent. And I need to do less for them.
And so I have two choices. I can either get really, really annoyed and still do it. I can continue to do it and continue to get more and more and more irritated and annoyed until I snap at them—which, I mean, to be fair, I do do sometimes.
But I blow up at them, and then I feel bad because they're like, “Mom, why'd you just scream at me for asking you to put sunscreen on my back?”
Or I can sort of redirect and start to retrain them—to understand that that's becoming less and less and less my job. And it's becoming more and more their responsibility to figure those things out by themselves. Knowing that for the big things, I'm always here.
So each of them, as they came to me, I said, “Hey, what about your friend standing right next to you? Can she do it for you?” And then my son—I was like, “Well, what about your sister? Can she do it for you?” And then my other kid—I was like, “Well…”
So I gave them an alternative of somebody else who could do it for them. Trying super hard not to be irritated in my tone of voice—which I probably wasn’t that successful at.
But I'm finding more and more, in tiny, tiny ways, the fact that I am the default person to do everything is not sitting well with me anymore. I am too tired. And they are perfectly capable.
And it’s a little bit on me. I’ve been very capable. And I’ve done everything for everyone. And I’ve done it well. And I’ve trained them to be this way. But I can train them out of it. I can shift things and reorganize them.
And so every time I get that little irritation, I try really hard to pause and think:
Okay, how can I not just react to that irritation, but figure out what needs to change?
Figure out how this all needs to change. And sometimes it’s a simple redirect, like, “Well, maybe somebody else can do that for you.”
Or sometimes it’s a conversation, where I sit down and I say: “Hey, I know I’ve done this for you in the past, but I’ve got a lot on my plate. And you’re very capable. And I want you to do this in the future. I want you to figure this out and try before you come to me to help with it. And I’m here to help you—but you need to value my time.”
Frankly, you know, it’s this thing where—it’s okay to say to your teenagers: You need to value my time. That I’m just not completely available for you all the time. Like—I don’t work for you. You're not gonna pay for this.
So yeah, I wonder if you can relate to this. I imagine if you are a mom, you can relate to this—particularly if you're a mom of teenagers. And if you aren’t, you maybe can relate to this in some other way—in some other relationship in your life. Maybe it’s your parents, or your sister, or people at work.
Gosh, this happens so much at work—when women just take on the little things. And then they're just expected to do them, even if it's not their job, or it’s too much. And there's this conscious need to train people out of expecting us to pick up the pieces.
That's a whole other Voicenote—about the discomfort we feel when things are about to be dropped. And so we swoop in and pick them up, rather than deciding whether it’s really our job to do that.
As always, thank you for being with me. All my love.
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