This is How I Became Wrath

And why it's not such a deadly sin after all

Photo by Elijah Potter on Unsplash

Parenting teenagers is a balancing act — a tricky business in this day and age when we seem well past “spare the rod and spoil the child” as a philosophy for raising well-rounded humans. In fact, if you have ever dabbled in trying to make strict, concrete rules for someone north of ten but south of twenty, you likely know it’s a losing approach.

Mom set the tone for how we were parented.

My younger sister and I didn’t have a lot of rules, but we had routines. As teenagers, we had curfews but they were often later than our friends’, and our parents didn’t bother us much about what we were up to when we weren’t at home. Such were the days before pocket tracking devices. Occasionally, though, my attitude caused a throwback reaction in my dad.

One morning, before school when I was thirteen, my mom asked me to take some signs to junior high and put them up on the walls. She’d volunteered to run the supply store and was tasked with advertising it. I didn’t want to because I was thirteen and putting up signs was embarrassing. EVERYTHING was embarrassing when I was thirteen. Being noticed, at all, in any capacity by peers that weren’t my closest friends was something to be stringently avoided.

So I gave my mom lip about it. Dad chimed in something to the effect that I could do this small thing for my mother and shouldn’t complain about it. I then directed my pushback at him. At the end of our exchange, when I grudgingly consented to putting up signs with a dismissive “yeah,” he said, in his best stern father voice, “You say ‘yes sir’ to me.”

I almost laughed in his face.

Almost. I wasn’t quite that stupid. My dad had never, in my thirteen years, insisted we address him as “sir.” It was such a swerve from our family’s informal manner, it was comical. I didn’t laugh, but I pulled myself up to my full height, looked him in the eye, and said…

“Yes.”

Holding eye contact, daring him to insist on the “sir” part. He did not.

I have a couple other similar stories of my dad reactionarily falling back on the parenting tactics of another era, of his father and my defiant refusal to go along with it. When I was nineteen and home for Christmas from my freshman year in college, I told Dad to “FUCK OFF!” during a heated argument about a phone call he’d brashly interrupted — one with an ex-boyfriend who happened to be in jail for murder. Though I was ready to run after the expletive shot out of my mouth, Dad said nothing.

Oddly, those few times I went to the mattresses with Dad, the times I stood up and insisted, “This is bullshit, and I will NOT comply,” his combative manner fell away. He was, to my surprised relief, defused of his stubborn, fiery anger.

The last time I yelled at my dad was May of this year.

It was a perfect storm of difficulties. My parents had been in New York visiting my sister when Mom fell and broke the shit out of her ankle. I flew back home with them to help. Many, MANY things made the trip challenging. Mom was in a wheelchair and could not walk at all. Dad was very hard of hearing, suffering the pains of late-stage prostate cancer, and very cranky. There were several delays with the flight, the coup de gras of which was when we turned around after having been in the air for AN HOUR, to go back to JFK because of unspecified technical issues we were assured were not of an emergency nature.

Mom had over thirty fresh screws in her right ankle and a severely sprained left ankle. Not ideal.

By the time we got back to Mom and Dad’s house in Austin, it was after two in the morning. We’d been traveling since 9:30AM. We’d maneuvered Mom on/off a plane four times. We’d been issued three useless complimentary food vouchers, Dad had pissed of six airline employees, and I’d apologized to eight of them — just in case. We were all dead on our feet/wheels tired, having suffered seventeen other minor setbacks and indignities in addition to what I just detailed. Then, Dad shut the door on me as I was lumbering up their garage steps with armloads of luggage, and I. Lost. My. Shit.

I threw suitcases. I screamed, primally, at the top of my lungs.

I leveled my outstretched, accusatory left index finger at my father, and said, “I have put up with your shit all day long, and I am SICK OF IT!” There was more. There was lots more. My anger poured out of me in a cascade of sentences, unedited.

And again, when my ire had trickled away, had ceased boiling over and fallen into a sweaty, teary, gasping simmer, he said nothing. The tension fell away from the room and all that was left was exhaustion.

A few days later, I went back to my parents’ house, and Dad apologized for his behavior that day. I appreciated it, but even better, he was reflective. He had begun to wonder, Why do I act this way? And even though he didn’t have an answer, asking the question meant a lot. I related. I’d asked myself the same one time and time again throughout my adult life.

I have spent a lot of my life thinking about anger, avoiding anger — other people’s and my own. Trying to find a better way to handle disappointment and frustration than my dad did. That’s what I’d been working that entire travel day from hell — trying not to yell at Dad, not to make a scene, not make everyone else in my family and in that airplane uncomfortable just because I was annoyed. Then, it all piled up against that door my dad closed, and my anger broke it down like the awesome power of churning floodwaters pushing aside dam like so many concrete matchsticks.

Days later, after I had recovered and processed that night, I too became reflective. While I never want to be the person people are afraid to give the news to, lest I start screaming, perhaps anger and its expression have a place. That night, after I boomed like Zeus from the mountaintop that my dad’s bullshit would not stand, sweat leaked out of my pores, and it smelled like anger. So much so, the first thing I said to Jason when I stumbled through the door at home was, “I need a shower. I stink.” My anger reeked of some odd combination of stale popcorn and raw hamburger meat on the edge of rancidness.

My anger is powerful.

I think my dad needed it. When I was thirteen, nineteen, forty-eight. For whatever reason, he needed someone to push back, someone to give him a boundary, and ironically, it was me, the quiet daughter, who gave it to him. I think, in those moments, he held a bit of awe and wonder for me. He was both surprised and proud.

It took a lot out of me. That night exhausted me for days. It’s not the kind of power and energy and I can muster on a regular basis. And maybe, now that Dad has passed, I won’t need to again. But it is there, that wrath. I can feel it inside of me, waiting patiently in case it is needed. Like a giant hulking, knuckle-cracking bouncer who, when I face possible confrontation, will elbow me and ask, “You want me to rough ‘em up a bit?” Usually, I say, “No, I’ve got this.” I have a lot of other, less destructive, tools to deploy — instruments of precision and gentleness instead of a blunt-force sledgehammer.

That anger, like my dad’s, comes out in defense of intense unfairness or injustice. That is what he’s given me — a part of him I have after his departure. And since we all hope our kids will inherit our best qualities and put them to better use than we did, I know he’s proud of me for this. But then again, I don’t need his fucking approval. He’s proud of me for that, too.