Oh, the relief they felt after their screaming sessions, was simply unparalleled.
Being a mother is a full-time job that entails a lot of physical and mental labor. Motherhood is hard work and as if all the juggling to make things happen was not enough, the pandemic has made it way harder for them.
Moms are cooped up in homes, with their kids and spouses all dependent on them. It's only more chaotic if she is a working woman with a profession and career of her own. Honestly, it is only natural for women to feel so frustrated, right? But it's never a good idea to keep all your anger bottled up inside, it's only a matter of time before everything boils over and creates a big explosion.
Moms with children aged 12 and under, spent, on average, eight hours a day on child care, about three hours more per day than fathers, while at the same time working an average of six hours per day in their jobs, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Well, this is why a group of uber-frustrated moms decided to create a group, and just scream. The group, which is the brainchild of Sarah Harmon, a Boston-based licensed mental health therapist and mom of 3 and 5-year-old daughters, began gathering to just let it all out and it's been rather successful, mind you.
According to Good Morning America, the group's first screaming session took place in March 2021 and it saw around one dozen moms show up on a dark, freezing night in Boston to scream together.
The second session took place on January 13, 2022, and it saw double the number of people that turned up for the first one. All of them gathered around for around 20 minutes to scream.
"There are days you just want to scream and it's not healthy to do it with your kids or your spouse," said Lauren Thompson, a married mother of two and small business owner in Boston who attended both scream sessions. "Having a space to go do it, it took a weight off my chest to just get out and feel like you’re in a safe space."
Tess O'Brien is another mom who attended both sessions, too. She was pregnant during the first year of the pandemic and spent the second year trying to balance working remotely while caring for two children who are both too young to get vaccinated against COVID.
O'Brien and her husband both have full-time jobs along with the kids, and no child care, given the situation. It's been a hard time, to say the least. "We're all so depleted," O'Brien said. "We're mentally exhausted from the constant risk calculation and from trying to do our jobs and parent at the same time. We're emotionally exhausted because we're not filling our own cups and we're trying to care for these little humans who are navigating this world with masks on all the time."
"The scream was this hilarious opportunity to let go," O'Brien said. "It was a moment of release and escape in this crazy, constant survival mode that we've been in for two years."
Founder Harmon was several months away from launching a program for moms, called The School of MOM, in March 2020, when the pandemic hit. Seeing the toll it was taking on moms, Harmon decided to speed up the process and conduct sessions virtually. She noticed that people were really frustrated and needed an outlet for their emotions.
"I was talking a lot about that, and kind of casually in sessions saying, 'Ah, we just all need to get together to a field and scream it out,'" recalled Harmon. "And my clients and in group calls and moms at school and other women were like, 'Yeah, let's do it.'"
Oh, the relief they felt after their screaming sessions, was simply unparalleled. "Moms have been hit hard during this pandemic, but also a lot of dads are experiencing much of the same and taking on a solid share of the load," O'Brien added. "We chose to have kids, but we certainly didn’t choose to do so under these extreme circumstances."
"One mom said it so well, that it just felt good to feel out of control for a second," said Harmon. "A scream feels very primal and uncalculated, and we've been so calculated. Everything has 19 steps, like just a decision to go to the grocery store, so to have a time off from that overthinking is huge."
Now, even if you don't have a group of people coming together to let out a scream, you know what you need to do to feel better, at least slightly.
References:
https://www.hamiltonproject.org/blog/mothers_time_use_update
Cover Image Source: The.Schoolofmom/Instagram
