I got angry with my mother on Tuesday and I've felt sick about it ever since. Does everyone do this?

#1stephen_58(Joined May 2026 · 5 posts)June 11, 2026, 11:41 pm

I have typed this out three times and deleted it twice so I am going to post it before I lose my nerve.

Tuesday evening. Fourth time in about twenty minutes she had asked me the same question. I had been up twice the night before, I had had a bad day at work, and I shouted at her. Not a raised voice. Shouted. And then, because apparently that was not enough, I said something about how I had given up most of my life for this. She went quiet and looked frightened of me, and by the time I had calmed down enough to apologise she had forgotten the shouting but not the frightened part, so I got to apologise to someone who did not know what I was apologising for. That is the bit I keep replaying.

I am not a shouter. I have never raised my voice to her in my life before this year. I have felt physically sick since Tuesday and I have not told a single person, which is why I am telling strangers at half eleven at night.

So. Does everyone do this and nobody says so, or have I found the line and crossed it?

#2dee1972(Joined Apr 2025 · 24 posts)June 12, 2026, 6:58 am

Everyone does this. The ones who say they don't are lying or they've only been at it a fortnight.

#3tomsdaughter(Joined Jan 2025 · 31 posts)June 12, 2026, 1:24 pm

Mine was a door. Slammed it hard enough that a picture came off the wall, then stood in the kitchen shaking and telling myself I was a monster while she called through asking what the noise was.

What I have never been able to explain to anyone who hasn't done this job is that the anger is not aimed at her. It arrives at her because she is the only one in the room. The people I am actually furious with are the ones who never rang back, the office that lost the form twice, and whoever decided that this is a thing one person does for free with no training. But you cannot slam a door at an office.

The forgetting cuts both ways too and I still don't know how to feel about that. She forgot the door within the hour. I have had it for two years.

#4Maura KinsellaAdmin(Joined Sep 2024 · 168 posts)June 13, 2026, 10:07 am

Stephen, thank you for posting it. I am going to answer this in two halves, because I do not think the honest answer is one thing.

The first half. Yes, this is the ordinary experience of the job, and the reason you have never heard anyone say so is that it is the single thing carers are most ashamed of. Of the carers who responded to Carers UK's State of Caring survey in 2025, 74 percent had felt stressed or anxious and 40 percent said they felt depressed, and 65 percent said they found it hard to get a good night's sleep. That is not a representative sample of everyone and I always say so, but the shape of it matches every conversation I have ever had with another carer at a kitchen table. Sleep is usually the thing underneath. Broken sleep turns you into somebody with a much shorter fuse than the person you actually are, and then you judge yourself as though you had been well rested. I have written what I know about this in guilt, resentment and anger, and the short version is that feeling it is not the same as failing at it.

Mine, since I am asking you to be honest and it would be cheap not to be. Some time in the second year I said something to my mother in a tone I would not use on a stranger, over a cup of tea she had put down on a letter. A cup of tea. I went and sat in the car for twenty minutes. What I told myself afterwards was that I was tired, which was true, and that it would not happen again, which was not.

The second half, and this is the part I would want said to me. "Everyone does this" is true and it is not a plan. The thing that actually changed it for me was not resolving to be a better person, because I had already tried that and I am not one. It was that I finally accepted help in the house, roughly a year after I should have, on the grounds that admitting I needed it meant I had failed. It did not mean that. In the same survey series, 65 percent of carers responding said they had felt overwhelmed because they had not been able to take a break, and 77 percent had not had a carer's assessment in the previous twelve months. Those two numbers sit next to each other for a reason. Respite explained covers what a break actually looks like and how it is arranged where you live, and the pattern in that piece is the one I lived: the people who plan it before a crisis get it, and the people who wait for a crisis do not.

And the line, since you asked directly. What you have described is a bad Tuesday at the end of a bad week with no sleep in it. Snapping and being appalled at yourself is the ordinary end of this. What is different, and what I would not want to soften, is when it stops being a feeling and starts shaping what you do: handling someone roughly even once, withholding help or company as a response to behaviour, hostility that has become the tone of the house rather than an incident, frightening her, or a real fear that you might hurt her. That is not a forum question and it is not a character question. That is a conversation with your own doctor, and the sentence that unlocks it is "I am an unpaid carer and I am not coping". You go into it as a patient rather than as somebody's son. This board can tell you that you are not unusual. It cannot see you, and it is not a substitute for someone who can.

One more thing, and I nearly left it out. A change in her that arrives over a day or two, new agitation, new refusal, new confusion, is very often not the relationship and not anything you caused. Carers absorb a fortnight of that as their own fault every day of the week. If anything about her has changed suddenly rather than slowly, over a day or two rather than over months, get the medical explanation ruled out before you accept the emotional one. That is a same day call to her own clinician, and the urgent line for where you live if they are not reachable, rather than something to sit with.

#5ron-at-home(Joined Aug 2025 · 17 posts)June 15, 2026, 8:12 am

I am going to be the awkward one here.

When this happened to me everybody told me it was normal and I found that genuinely comforting for about a fortnight, and then I noticed I had used it as permission. Normal became an explanation and then it quietly became an excuse, and it happened twice more before I did anything about the actual cause, which in my case was that I had not had a single evening off in five months.

So take the reassurance, you have earned it. Just do not stop at the reassurance. Nothing changed for me until something in the week changed, and no amount of feeling awful about it counted as a change.

#6stephen_58(Joined May 2026 · 5 posts)July 2, 2026, 9:30 pm

Three weeks on and I do not have a tidy ending for this, so I will just say what happened.

I did not ring my doctor. I meant to twice and did not, and I notice I am doing the thing Maura describes about being slower to take the advice than to give it. I did ask at work about going down to four days, which was easier than I expected and which I have been putting off since January.

And it happened again on Sunday. Smaller. A sharp tone rather than shouting, over the same question asked for the fifth time. Nobody was frightened, nobody slammed anything, and I noticed it happening while it happened, which I suppose is something. I do not know whether that counts as progress or as Ron being right about the permission thing. Probably both.

Thanks anyway. Reading that other people have sat in cars has helped more than I expected it to.