The Rage-Guilt Cycle Many Mothers Don’t Talk About

Why parenting teens can feel harder during perimenopause & menopause, and what actually helps.

So Tuesday was a tough day. 

I was late for my second meeting because I completely forgot I had it, which is so not like me. But somehow I missed seeing it on my calendar. I hate forgetting things; something I seem to do all the time recently, and I really hate being late to meetings. So you can imagine, I was already working overtime to keep myself together as the meeting started, only to find out that my colleague had decided to completely disregard all the agreements and plans we had worked through the week before. I was livid. Irate. Honestly stunned by the intensity of what I was feeling because I do not usually get that upset, and certainly not about work. Work can be annoying, sure, that’s why it’s called work, not fun, but this was different. This was a full-body kind of anger that flooded every inch of me and refused to let go.

I probably did not leave that meeting wearing my most professional game face, but I knew I needed to excuse myself before I said something I regretted. Back in my office, I turned on my nature screensaver, crashing waves rolling onto an empty beach. I had read somewhere that even watching nature can help regulate the nervous system. As I sat there sipping water and staring at the waves, I could feel myself slowly crawling back toward calm. Not calm exactly, but safer. Less combustible.

Seriously, what is my deal lately? When did I become this temperamental?

At lunch, I decided to revisit some articles I had bookmarked about perimenopause, wondering if maybe this was part of what was happening. What a revelation. Just understanding how much my wonky hormones could be messing with my mood made me feel a little less crazy. Certainly, work is stressful, but suddenly I could see why I might be flipping from perfectly fine to absolutely furious in a matter of seconds. I can get angry. I have definitely been frustrated at work before. But this helped me understand that my hair-trigger reaction, that instant emotional detonation, might actually be connected to estrogen spikes, drops, and the neurological chaos of this transition.

I already knew I was perimenopausal, but this felt huge because until I started reading about how it can show up emotionally, I genuinely thought I was either losing it or slowly becoming a really crappy human being.

So take this new awareness and fast-forward to later that same day.

I am home, music playing, making homemade granola, and prepping dinner. Dinner prep is my decompression space. I love the rhythm of chopping, stirring, measuring, being alone in the kitchen doing my own thing after a long day. Enter my daughter. Fresh from practice and starving. She drops her bag directly onto the counter in the middle of my ingredients and cutting board, swings open the fridge, again, right in my space,  and starts complaining that there is nothing to eat.

Can she not see that I am literally making breakfast and dinner?

I imagine you can guess what happened next.

The switch flipped.

And just like that, I was right back to irate.

Not mildly annoyed. Not frustrated. Instantly flooded with an all-consuming rage that felt so fast and overpowering it was almost physical. Before I even fully realized what I was doing, the storm exploded out of me. Words flew out of my mouth that should never have been said, at a volume that was completely uncalled for. Thank God we both stormed out before I swept everything off the counter and straight into the garbage because, in that moment, that was exactly what my rage was screaming for me to do.

It was awful.

Afterward, the guilt hit like a tidal wave. I was ashamed of how I acted and sick over the things I had said.

What was that?

Who was that?

How had I let myself get to that point? Why had she been acting so damned selfishly? What am I doing wrong?

The crazy part for me is, we have finally started hearing about menopause and all the bizarre ways perimenopause can mess with us, from wrecking our sleep to making our ears itch,  but what people are not talking about nearly enough, if at all, is what happens when we are riding the emotional rollercoaster of the menopause transition at the exact same time our kids are moving through puberty. This double transition under one roof is real, and it can create some seriously volatile, emotionally charged, deeply messy moments.

My daughter’s self-absorbed focus on her immediate needs is developmentally appropriate. I understand that adolescent brains are under construction well into their twenties and that teens naturally default to the emotional centers of the brain. I KNOW THIS. I know their impulsivity can be nerve-wracking, and their black-and-white thinking can be unbelievably irritating. I have read the books. I attended the middle school parent sessions. But nowhere along the way did anyone mention that I might also be navigating my own hormonal upheaval at the exact same time, an upheaval capable of eroding my ability to access all that insight and calmly apply it in the moment.

What I realized afterward is that the rage is only half the story. The other half is the guilt spiral that comes crashing in afterward. The self-interrogation. The shame. The fear that maybe you are damaging your child. The harsh internal narrative telling you that a good mother would have handled that differently.

Instead of drowning in that spiral and tearing myself apart for losing control, I did the awkward, uncomfortable work of owning what happened. About an hour later, because that’s how long it took for my nervous system to settle and for my thinking brain to come back online, I went to her room. I apologized. To my surprise and relief, she apologized too. I shared some of what I had learned about perimenopause and how it might be influencing what I was experiencing emotionally. We both could identify that feeling when our brains seem to go offline and how scary it can be.

And honestly? It felt good to talk about it openly. Trust me, that is not always how these conversations go.

Knowing that we are both moving through transitions that affect how we think, feel, react, and regulate ourselves does not magically make any of this easier. It does not erase the hard moments or excuse hurtful behavior. But it does soften the shame a little. It helps me understand that what I am experiencing is not a personal failure or proof that I am incapable of handling motherhood. There is chemistry involved here. Neurology. Hormones. Nervous systems under strain.

That matters.

It helps take some of the sting out of the story I immediately tell myself about being a bad mother or a broken person. It reminds me that I am a messy, emotional human navigating a massive transition while trying to parent another messy, emotional human through hers.

I know I need more information and far more strategies going forward because we could easily have years of this ahead of us. But taking action, learning, understanding, talking about it, repairing after the hard moments, feels a whole lot better than sitting alone in guilt and spiraling.