There’s a fire living inside of me. It crackles up my spine, sets my hair ablaze and destroys everything in its path. It’s my anger.

I was not allowed to get mad as a child. Instead I learned to squelch, squash, and suppress. My role models were my father – a squelcher – and my mother – someone who spewed her anger with vitriol, not caring upon who it fell. Quite frankly, I don’t know how to be mad in a non-pathological manner.

Well-managed forests (or those that are truly left to Mother Nature) burn periodically. Slowly and methodically. It clears the garbage out, but leaves the trees intact, tall and majestic. Some trees even need fire to open their pine cones and allow new growth. Forests need fire, just like humans need anger. It is possible to do this in a healthy way.

But I am a forest choked with undergrowth, grown wild and riotous after years of fire suppression. I am a raging inferno waiting to happen. And happen it does. In the blink of an eye I’m engulfed in flames, they consume me and go looking for new fuel, scorching the ones I love.

I have not yet learned how to make this fire my friend, how to make it work for me and bring health and new growth. Instead I am still seeking to control, suppress. It’s the only way I know and most of the time I’m successful. I fail when I’m tired, when it’s the middle of the night, when I’ve had 3 hours of sleep.

M bears the brunt. Sophie isn’t even 3 months old yet. Of course she’s supposed to wake up during the night, although she sleeps remarkably well for her age (not sleeping through the night at the moment, but I’m hoping that’s due to the 3 month growth spurt and she returns to it shortly). M, on the other hand … well, let’s just say I’m not nearly so magnanimous with her. She’s almost 3 years old. She has always fought sleep, but has gone for long stretches where she sleeps through the night 95% of the time. That is not happening now and I have no idea why. At least half the time she wakes in the middle of the night and starts screaming. It is not night terrors, although she may have had a bad dream. One time, after a lot of detective work on my part, I deduced that her hand had likely fallen asleep. She is unable or unwilling to tell me why she is awake, why she is screaming, why she sometimes won’t stop screaming, why, once she has stopped, she often resumes again whenever I or Mr. Gearhead try to go back to bed. And the screaming, jesus christ the screaming. It makes my hair stand on end, my heartbeat quicken, the adrenaline start to pump. It is positively crazed and I’ve never heard anything like it before. It sounds like someone is trying to kill her.

I don’t like this screaming. I don’t like it one bit. And I especially don’t like it now that I have a baby who I’m trying to keep asleep. It is the spark that sets off the inferno. I squeeze her shoulders with my hands and whisper through clenched teeth for her to stop screaming. I shake her a little and say it louder. Soon I’m screaming that she has to stop screaming. And I am horrified to admit that on two occasions I have spanked her because she wouldn’t stop screaming. Something I swore I would never, ever, ever do, under any circumstance.

When I am in the clutches of this fire, I am not myself. I don’t know myself. I look at myself and what I see is my mother. I see the rage in her eyes and the absolute need to bend me to her will at any cost. That is what I see in myself and it makes me sick.

The one difference is that I apologize, admit my fault, tell her I was wrong. Not that this makes it okay … far from it. But I still make myself do it. It’s something my mother never did. When she hit me it was because I had done something wrong, because I deserved it. That is what she taught me.

The last time this happened I sat and held M and thought of how I felt when my mother dominated me, forced me to conform to her wishes, using physical force when necessary. I remembered how powerless I felt, and how much I hated her in those moments. I thought of what I had just done and it hurt my heart to think M might be feeling that way about me. I knew that I would not, could not, walk the same path as my mother, no matter how angry I was. Especially in those moments of anger. So I made a promise to myself and to M that I would never hit her again. Ever. I had to sit there and think about it for a while before I opened my mouth and spoke. I was actually reluctant to make this promise, because I was not certain I would be able to keep it. In fact, I technically broke it just the other day when she smacked me hard with a wooden spoon (after telling me she was going to do so, and I told her not to), and I snatched the spoon out of her hand and smacked her right back. In the blink of an eye, the inferno was unleashed, consuming me before my brain could even take a breath and realize what the hell was going on.

How fucked up is all of this? I taught her how to hit, and now I’m hitting her to teach her not to? I am at a loss. Truly at a loss. All I know is that this cannot go on. It is absolutely, positively unacceptable. But I don’t know what to do with my anger. Suppressing the fire is not the answer, it’s how I got here in the first place. I’m certain there is another way, but I am currently in the dark, waving my hands around, stumbling face first into one wall after another, unable to find the door that will lead me into the light of understanding.

I trust that I will get there. I just hope it happens soon.