Tantrum

by Rachel Eve Moulton

every morning I wake up wondering why I’ve trapped myself in this hellish loop of motherhood and marital bliss.

It was self-destructive, but when you give up drinking for love and babies, people tend not to object. They congratulate you. Tell you how envious they are. They help you sell your house. “You found a good one,” they say with a dreamy look, as if I’ve hit three cherries at the casino. As if marriage is the end of a story and not just the boring-ass beginning.

The older my boys get, the less I understand why my mother was ever allowed to be a mother.

But a narcissist can also make their life very, very small, getting the admiration they need from themselves and the people they’ve trapped in their world with them—family, most often. It was me, and now she’s after you!”

yet I still get sucked in sometimes.

My husband may see it, but he doesn’t recognize it as dangerous.

I look down at her, and I see that she is a child too or becoming one again. We grow needier and needier by the day. We are born. We are uncomfortable. We wither.

I wanted my origin story—like Catwoman, who fell out the window breathing her last breath as she was nibbled to death by felines. Dr. Harleen Quinzel dumped in a vat of chemicals only to be blanched white and dredged up insane. I obsessed on how to get my mother to tell it to me, to trick her into saying more, but she never caved.

“What if all our memories are really just the stories we’ve been told over the years?”

Female rage is hardly a rarity. We are all about to burst—a simmering pot of violence that the world has yet to know.

He knows no fear. He runs and jumps and smiles and laughs. He has tears for a scraped knee or a desire not met, but he knows nothing harsh.

She is a girl with a mother who is unsure what she is made of. A mother who raised herself but did so too early and without a guide.

I weaned myself of childhood and stepped away from anything that felt like need.

You, their mother, are their everything. Their everyone. And how could someone so small, so sweet, be at fault, be ignored?

my past is made of haunted houses—Amityville

“Pain cures all wounds.”