When he was in elementary school, my oldest child, a serial lollygagger, was never ready for school on time. While he dawdled, my eyes would scan the breakfast dishes and jelly smears that still dirtied the countertop. My mind would race over everything I needed to get done that morning before I taught my classes. With one white-knuckled hand on the doorknob, I would bellow, “Come ON,” or “How on EARTH do you not have your shoes on yet?!” while my younger child, typical type A, would wail, “We’re going to be LATE!”

I would fume and sigh, slamming the back door behind us on the way out. On the two-minute drive to school, my temper would escalate further in my attempts to mediate backseat arguments over whose elbow was taking up more space on the armrest.

Later, with both kids at school, I would sink into shame. Why did I yell? Why did I slam? Was any of it really that big of a deal?

“Rage is faster than reason,” says Minna Dubin in the first chapter of Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood. According to Dubin, “Before a mom reaches rage, irritation and stress have been slowly building inside of her, possibly for hours, days, or even weeks.” I recognized myself in her words immediately. I felt myself exhale a little further with each new chapter of the book.

Dubin’s vulnerability and wry openness about her own feelings of rage will engage readers from the very first page. Perhaps this is just a phase, she thought during her son’s infancy, but she says, “two years into motherhood, I was still slamming car doors, screaming at my partner outside Target, and working to keep my hands busy while the rage ripped through me so I wouldn’t touch my son in a rough way.”

While Dubin’s own story is a predominant thread, the book also includes anecdotes and testimonies of numerous other mothers gained through extensive interviews. Early on, she catalogs the diversity of these moms in terms of race, geography, religion, and economics, but also in terms of how they came into motherhood and how they experience it. There are working moms, stay-at-home moms, single moms, foster moms, stepmoms, and adoptive moms. Some of the anecdotes Dubin includes are small, like that of Sheila, who “used to hide her rage by screaming underwater at her local public pool,” while other stories are much more developed. These women’s voices are a testament to the range of circumstances mothers experience in their everyday lives and show that Dubin’s experience with rage is not singular.

“The house of mom rage” is a recurring analogy throughout the book. While life is happening on the main floor, Dubin says, “mom rage’s basement is packed floor to ceiling with dusty boxes, each one stuffed with evidence of the different ways mothers are disempowered in the home and by the culture at large.” It is this overstuffed basement that triggers the rage that bursts out on the main floor, and it holds things like inadequate partner support, insufficient childcare, and structural inequities related to gender, race, class, and health. It also contains what Dubin calls motherhood’s “PR team,” reminding moms that they are “so blessed” but concealing the invisible and unpaid labor required for them to meet and perform the public expectations of their role. She says, “The care infrastructure in the US is ‘Money or Mommy.’” When the expectation is that mothers are always there by default, of course childcare and summer camps become “extra” costs, not to mention the additional means required to support kids with special needs or health circumstances. While mothers are expected to manage the caregiving, there are few systems in place to care for them.

The demanding culture around motherhood and an insufficient infrastructure are key parts of mom rage, but biological and neurological changes play a part as well. Matrescence, for instance, is a neuroscientific phenomenon that Dubin discovered through her research. She says, “Both adolescence (the process of becoming an adult) and matrescence (the process of becoming a mother) are all-encompassing life phases that result in physical, social, cultural, psychological, and neurological changes.” Dubin notes that while there are numerous rituals to usher young people safely into adolescence, the same support does not exist for mothers. Similarly, she includes a chapter exploring “The Mom Rage Cycle,” a series of five phases fueled by physiological responses to things like sleep deprivation, which “turns us into instinctual animals – sensitive, irritable, and quick to roar.”

Although the evidence behind mom rage is substantial, Dubin’s book is so much more than a just condemnation of unfortunate systems and circumstances. She offers her mother-audience the tools to understand their own rage and to actively address it, both independently and with the support of partners or therapists. In one of the later chapters of the book, she suggests that readers “invite [their] rage to tea,” giving mothers practical steps for addressing their rage. And her “woo warning” sustains the engaging, down-to-earth tone that she uses throughout the book. She even includes sections specifically dedicated to working with a parenting partner.

Dubin’s skillful weaving of personal narrative and research offers a triumphant validation of the everyday reality of motherhood and an invitation for moms to see themselves plainly and without shame. She pulls back the curtain to reveal the ubiquitous systems and practices that marginalize all mothers, whether they leave for work every morning or stay home, have one child or four, are partnered or single. She shares story after story that will have moms saying, “So it’s not just me?” Dubin’s book should be required reading, not just for moms prone to slamming doors or screaming underwater, but for anyone who seeks to understand and change an unfair system that affects us all.