So, the iceberg graphic is wrong, wrong, wrong. Am I right? Icebergs are about 90% below the surface, which is NOT what the picture shows. Regarding the first article, preset timeouts? I think when two people are losing it, that may go by the wayside. My strategy is, “I have to use the bathroom.” It might take a while if I am really upset and want to rip the sink off the wall. But, it lets me cool down, cool off and not say terrible things. Let them stay inside my head until I am calmer and realize how stupid and nasty I wanted to be.

But let’s think about cauldrons, yes? A stew of emotions? Our culture still has little respect for emotions. Just think if we were all nice on the surface all the time and never showed any other emotion. Bunch of AI robots, I think.

Cauldron

It’s not so surprising to look up the emotional cauldron
and have it be about anger. Anger in couples, but the cauldron itself
brings up witches and therefore women. Women in black
women with cauldrons, women boiling angry.

I vacillate between thinking that black men are treated the worst and then, no,
women are treated the worst. Assumptions, useless, toys, pretty, be nice,
true that women don’t get shot as much, but our country found a black man acceptable
in the white house, but not a woman, black or white.

Anger is not nice, I am told. But anger is appropriate at injustice, when people
are discriminated against, treated badly, pushed from homes, jailed, hung and shot.
Much of our country reveres guns to protect homes, a man’s home is his castle,
and what is left for women? Not the workplace, the public, the home.

How dare they take the cauldron as a symbol of anger stewing?
The truth is that men fear women’s anger and rightly. They fear the people
who are enslaved, discriminated against, shot and dismissed, rising up.
Rising angry, anger not in a cauldron, but hot as lava and righteous.

A sermon about fear and abuse and the minister says, this is where anger can be understood
and is right. Anger at the abuse and at the fear, letting people break free.
Energizing a person to leave abuse, to leave an intolerable situation
and no reconciliation without the abuser taking responsibility.

What the cauldron really holds is greed, the people who think they deserve
more than others, more money, more women, more adulation, more more more.
Greed, gossip, lust, and all the other sins. Anger at mistreatment is not wrong
though it may not be safe to show it. Let it be conscious even if not expressed

and fight on.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: emotional cauldron.

The photograph is my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway, in 1945. She was seven. I have photographs of my daughter and me with the same expression. Not anger, thought. I cannot credit the photograph because I don’t know who took it.

And to lighten the mood, both sexes are profiled.

Not all anger is right, though, and it’s often because of different interpretations, different frames of reference or misunderstanding.