Unmaking is a kind of making

Notes from my visit to the rage room

A friend invited me to a rage room last week— a local business where you go, don protective equipment, and break the sh*t out of stuff in a cement room. I was 100% down.

Fun fact about me: I’ve been enthralled with the idea of a “rage room” since I was a teenager. I remember telling people that I wanted to start a business where people could come, choose their implement, and have free range to break things inside a protected room. People always laughed, but I was serious—it was a good idea.

Imagine my surprise when, a few years ago, I found out this was now an actual thing. I’ve been biding my time until I could finally visit one.

I was never someone who broke bottles in parking lots—mostly because I’m not someone who would leave a broken bottle in a parking lot (and who wants to spend time cleaning up broken glass?).

I’m also not someone who throws dishes, or hits walls when I’m mad, or even gets outwardly mad that often.

Given all of this, it seems like I wouldn’t be a good candidate for a rage room.

But it’s because of all of this that I needed the rage room.

There’s a lot of reasons why women are socialized to suppress their rage. To shove it down like crude oil until it ignites somewhere far beneath the surface.

But there’s something about becoming a mother that shatters everything that doesn’t allow for your full humanness.

There’s an ancestral thrum that starts when you birth another body from your body. An unstoppable force that claims—I will not be only part of myself anymore. Every emotion must felt. Every avenue of aliveness, taken, seized, cherished.

Watching your child grow, and wanting a life for them in which they feel safe to be in their own fullness, it’s inevitable that you end up coming back to the parts of yourself that you were taught to tie down and, once and for all, break them lose. I will not be anything else but my own wholeness.

There’s such a tope of the mild-mannered mother in our culture. The mother that is nothing but generosity and patience.

But now that I am a mother, I feel more comfortable with rage than ever.

Rage at the state of the world.

Rage at what I must prepare my daughter to confront.

Rage at what I’ve had to experience.

Rage at what is, versus what could be, if we were all just willing to be our own full-throated, full-hearted selves.

The kind of rage that is meant to break the world apart, so it can be put back together again.

I remember watching my daughter when she was a baby and first started interacting with the world. I’d take her outside for long circular walks in the garden when nothing else worked and she’d reach out for the green things of the Earth. She’d hold them, and touch them—and then she’d tear them. Yanking them from the limbs of trees, shredding them in her hands, tearing them apart as she cherished them.

I realized, watching her break the world around her, that learning, living, being alive requires destruction.

It’s a fact of life, as natural and fragile as the round of birds breaking from their eggs.

Life requires death. New beginnings require endings. Creation requires destruction.

The opening of a pelvis, the grinding of stone into pigment, lava seeping like dragon scales from the earth to create new land.

To unmake something is a kind of making.

Everything begins when we allow the falling apart to finally happen.

I thought about this as I picked up wine bottles by their necks last week and hurled them with the entire force of my body to the cement floor to watch them shatter.

As my friend tossed delicate tea cups up into the air for me to smash with a bat.

As I took a sledge hammer to a table of plates and watched them become shards, become mosaic, become dust.

I repeat it to myself now as I allow more and more of my rage to unmake me, to make a new pathway in my own consciousness— and as I teach my daughter that it’s okay to feel her own fire.

I see the anger rise in her when she get frustrated. When she can’t stack the blocks exactly how she wants to or get her socks on by herself.

I see the rage in her when things are not quite right…and she knows it.

And so I don’t tell her not to feel it. I let her rage and I reflect back to her what I see—you are mad, and that makes sense.

I let myself feel everything that’s within me, and I reflect back to myself what I see.

You are mad, and that makes sense.

We are mad—and that makes sense.

Rage isn’t something to force beneath the surface. It’s something to hold with both hands. To cherish as the shatteringly sacred thing that it is. To place with adoration on the altar before you and then, with pure holy love, take a hammer to it and let it become shards, become stardust.

Our rage is how we unmake the world we’re living in.

Our rage is how we make a new world for our children.

This reflection feels like it’s tied, in mirror-like fashion, to this piece I wrote before I had a child. I am trying my best now to teach her to be a kind woman (who is allowed her rage), instead of the nice girl we were all raised to be.

I had a lot of fun building a playlist for my rage room experience. Here is the one song I knew had to be in the mix: