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Wednesday 29 August 2018

Do I have the right to feel this way?

How many times have you felt a negative - or even positive - emotion and thought "but I don't have the right to feel this way..."? I experience this a lot, and from various chats I've had with friends, I know I'm not alone.  Whether it's worries about money, partners, kids or our homes, I have lost count of the number of times I've heard the phrase "Still, worse things happen at sea," (or some variation thereof) followed by an apology for "going on about it."

Now this is in part because most of my friends are British, and downplaying emotional experiences is a particularly British trait. Yet I also think the modern middle-class obsession with 'checking your privilege' increasingly plays a role.  While it is undoubtedly important to remember the clean and polished lens through which us more 'socially favoured' types view the world, I also think there is a degree of privilege guilt in action that can lead us to feel unnecessarily bad about feeling bad.  I mean we have lovely lives on balance.  We have no right to feel aggrieved, resentful, sad or disappointed, do we?  Obviously, people still treat us like shit sometimes, and loved ones die, and our kids get ill and we get made redundant...  But if we can still afford to shop in John Lewis from time to time, does any of that really matter? (N.B. yes,it does.)

A similar sense of guilt can plague motherhood.  It started for me in pregnancy.  Having had a couple of previous miscarriages and being a bit circumspect by nature, I frequently felt like I didn't have the right to be excited or hopeful about having a bun in the oven when I was pregnant with Duckling. Yet I also felt awful for not being more grateful and enthusiastic about this baby I was meant to adore from the moment of conception.

The trend then continued after after birth. Resentful at having so little time to yourself? You chose to have kids lady. Frustrated your baby won't sleep through the night? Pff, at least they're not waking every hour like Sarah's, or refusing to nap like Claire's. At least your husband lets you have a twenty minute "lie in" on a Saturday. At least you have a husband. And (the standard riposte to moaning Mums) at least you actually HAVE a baby when so many others who want one do not. What right do you have to complain?

Now trying to be more positive and grateful for what you have is not necessarily a bad thing. One of the cornerstones of cognitive behavioural therapy is the idea that thoughts are not reality and that your mental state can be improved by identifying and diverting harmful thought patterns and substituting them with more positive ones. Yet there is a difference between accepting our THOUGHTS as faulty and rejecting our FEELINGS as unjustified. If a "love yourself", "think positively" or "look on the bright side" attitude is taken to extremes, it can become an internal monologue that perpetually tells us we're ungrateful when we have any kind of negative feeling at all.

Because I am both middle-class, and a mother, I am definitely a victim of that monologue at times. Take bag-gate, a ridiculous and on balance trivial example from my holiday this week with my in-laws. My father-in-law, who is lovely but a tad over solicitous, insisted, every time we went out for the day, on taking my nappy bag off my shoulder as I got the kids out the car and saying, "here, let me carry that for you, you'll have your hands full," before wandering off down the road. Helpful? Well yes, on paper, but it drove me bonkers the whole holiday. I am strong, fit(ish) and in my 30s while he is a septigenarian with a terribly bad back. I have to retrieve baby wipes or snacks or toys from my bag at least every ten minutes so I prefer to have it with me at all times, a fact he seemed oblivious to, even when I pointed it out.  


  • Was my annoyance justified when he was genuinely just trying to help? I fretted over this for some time before eventually deciding a better question would be, "was my reaction justified?".  Had I frustratedly hit my father-in-law over the head with my bag, that would have been entirely unjustified behaviour. Conversely, using him as a pack pony for the rest of the holiday would have been shitty too. As it was, when my attempts at disuasion failed, I let him carry the bag for a while before finding an excuse to reclaim it, which seemed like a reasonable response as it let him feel useful, and relieved me of a burden for a few minutes each day.

So I'm trying not to beat myself up about how I feel, and focus on making sure my reaction is proporionate. Admittedly, it is hard to change my feelings about, err, my inability to change my feelings, but if I can rewire my thoughts a bit by repeating the mantra I use with Duckling: "It's OK to feel how you feel. Just use your WORDS to express it, not your FISTS," then that's a start. I just hope my father-in-law didn't hear me whispering that under my breath all week...

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