“A culture that fears women's anger is a culture that knows it is guilty.”

When I think back on all the beautiful lessons I learned from my mother- there were so, so many- I still remember clearly the heartfelt apology she gave to all her daughters as she lay dying, that she knew she had failed in one major area- she never taught us to stand up for ourselves against those who were unjust to us.

She admitted in her last days that she couldn’t teach us what she didn’t know how to do, herself.

Born into a more gentile class- now a dying breed in the world we live in- it was unheard of for a woman of her upbringing to do anything but smooth over social difficulties. My entire childhood is full of memories of her making uncomfortable situations disappear as best she could by doing what a woman of her breeding did best, quietly, skillfully, adeptly making apologies, accommodations, and calming trouble down. It was a skill, but also a curse, I now see.

Because those rules only work when everyone plays by them. What about when others don’t care about them?

What about when others use your kindness or your silence as an opportunity to further exploit or abuse?

In her 2018 book “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger”, Journalist Rebecca Traister examined something women have been taught for generations to suppress.

Rage.

She argued that women's anger has repeatedly identified injustice and supplied the energy required to confront it.

Yet women often pay a price for expressing it.

Traister has described how female anger is dismissed as irrational, hysterical, infantile or is pathologized as something dangerous. That creates an impossible trap.

Experience something unjust. Get angry about it. Then watch the conversation shift from what happened to whether your anger is acceptable.

And that shift matters. Because telling someone to calm down is easier than confronting what made them angry.

There’s a reason miners used to take canaries in the mines with them- the birds paid the ultimate price for toxic fumes by succumbing before the miners did, but, in so doing, they exposed what was going to end up killing everyone, without that sacrifice.

That’s why miners loved and cared for the birds with genuine affection, because they knew that the birds were their source of protection, and they were grateful for them.

So, as I see it, when we look around us at a world full of injustice and suffering, and we see those who are distressed, upset, even outraged by what they see, we have two ways of seeing it- we can get frustrated by the hullabaloo they are causing, seeing it as an inconvenience or a frustration to our daily lives if we aren’t directly affected by what they are upset about.

Or we can be curious as to what they may be seeing and feeling, and try to understand why they feel that way. Because, just possibly, their anger is like a canary in a mine, telling us there’s something for us to be worried about before it gets out of control and hurts us or those we love, too.

So, in my adult life, realizing that my choices are my own, not the mere product of what I was taught to think or do as a child, I decided to take those childhood lessons about courtesy, social niceties, and combine them with the realization that when something harmful doesn't get exposed with directness and candor it tends to persist- I now choose a middle ground.

I try to continue to speak with courtesy and respect, whenever possible, but no longer at the expense of the truth.

There’s just too much at stake not to.

My mother doesn’t owe me any apologies. She taught me good lessons, just incomplete ones.

The rest of the work was up to me.