It has been six years since my mom passed on. In the days before her death, she was in real great pain. The morphine somehow gave her some relief, but not completely. Her cries of agony echoed all over the hospital room. Sometimes, I couldn’t help but pray that God would end her pain so she can be at peace. True enough, she passed away a couple of days later. While I and my siblings were inconsolable when the hour finally came, we couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief knowing that she has been freed from her suffering.

Six years later, we couldn’t help but feel that she should have had more years with us.

Then again, that is a common feeling when you’re missing someone you have been close to for most of your life. As a child, I often helped her tend to her garden at home, and this gardening thing is helping me deal with my current anger issues. As my therapist said, picking up gardening as a hobby had a lot to do with memories of my mother, and she was absolutely correct. As I tend to my vegetable garden, my head is often filled with thoughts of doing everything with my mom by my side. I miss my mom, and I wish she would tend to this garden with me.

So I finally went to see a counselor for my anger issues. I have already tried those breathing techniques and meditation exercises that I have read in countless websites, all of which have hardly worked for me. I admit that actually talking to a real person about the things that make me angry was a bit better than most things I tried. I also consider myself fortunate to have a professional who sounds like she was actually interested in what I have to say, and listened intently as I ranted on and on in her office.

She actually offered me a lot of sensible options to help control my anger. She said that she knew someone who had the same problem. What that person did, according to her, was to pick up a hobby that would get his mind off things that make them angry. I am not much of a hobby guy, but then I thought of my mother and the countless times we spent together tending to bother her rose and vegetable garden. My mother seemed very much at peace when tending to her garden, so I thought it would do wonders for me as well. So here I am, without much knowledge about gardening, trying to grow vegetables in my backyard. And you know what, I think it’s working.

Gardening is no easy work, in case you’re thinking it’s a walk in the park. It involves patience and hard work. I periodically pull my cart with a collapsible wagon through my backyard carrying my tools and fertilizer. To know more about how to grow and tend to certain vegetables, I read a lot of articles on the Internet and applied all of them.

Watching them grow made me feel so much better about things. Even my wife has noticed the change. She says that whatever it is I’m doing, I have to keep at it. When my plants started bearing fruit, I was ecstatic. According to my wife, it’s the happiest he’s seen me in years. True enough, I started to rant less and less. Every time I see something on TV that usually ticks me off, I just think of my garden, and I would just shrug it off.

I believe that the garden has done a lot to help me deal me with my anger issues, but I believe there’s something deeper involved here. My counselor said maybe because gardening reminds of my mom, whom I was close with. And you know what? I think she’s right.

A lot of people call me grumpy, and ill-tempered even. And they’re absolutely right. I have a problem controlling my anger. Even the most trivial things drive me to ranting about them. My wife actually does not like me watching the news because she knows all those reports about dirty politicians and whatnot would send me seething in anger as usual.

Many people who know me the best have been wondering why I always have this anger within me. They know that I am a good friend and otherwise nice person deep inside, but I do have this tendency to flare up when something really irritating presents itself to me.

Truth be told, there are so many reasons why I am always angry. One of them is the fact that I am frustrated with my job. Calling the company that I work in a snakepit would be an understatement. Sure, I have my set of friends there, but most people who work in that office have certain qualities and are capable of doing things that will help them advance their careers. I have personally witnessed one of my colleagues flirt with my very much married boss. The fact that she got promoted a few weeks later would tell you how that turned out. Backstabbers also abound in the office, all of whom would never miss the chance of whispering to the boss about something bad they hear about other people at work. With these kinds of people working with you, who wouldn’t be angry most of the time?

Then there’s this one thing that has been bothering me for a long time: a bad back. I wasn’t always this angry up until two years ago, when this problem with my lower back started. I have no idea how this pain started, but I suspect it has something to do with sitting for far too long whenever I work. We are supposed to have ergonomic chairs at work, but somehow they don’t seem all that ergonomic to me. If they were, I probably wouldn’t be doubling up in pain every time I stand up. For now, I’m giving this inversion therapy thing a try. My wife recommended it to me, and she actually bought the best inversion table she could find. Every day, I strap myself onto this table then get turned upside down. This supposedly stretches my back muscles through gravity.

Hopefully, this thing works, and might help lessen my anger problems a bit.

Let me say it up front: I have anger management issues. Never a day goes by when I don’t rant about anything I find obnoxious or annoying or offensive. One minute, I could be ranting about a neighbor who just lets his dog poop on my own front yard. The next, I would be making such a racket over another neighbor’s daughter playing any sort of music by Justin Bieber over and over again. When I turn on the TV and watch the news, I always feel the anger welling inside of me whenever I hear reports of injustice, murders, rapes and crooked people in government.

My anger wouldn’t have been a problem if my anger problem stayed that way, which was not causing other people distress. However, that isn’t really the case with me. Once, I yelled at a sales clerk who has been a bit of a jerk with me when I asked him where I can find an mini crib bedding for my niece. I was yelling my head off for minutes that terrified the sales clerk so much she had to call security. Thankfully, I wasn’t arrested or anything. Security staff of the department store just escorted me out of the building.

I don’t want to be like this, being angry all the time. I really need to do some anger management, or I’ll end up one of two things: dead at the hands of people who might react violently to any outburst I may have, or dead from a stroke or a heart attack, which are common among angry people like me. Being angry causes a lot of stress, and stress leads to hypertension and heart disease, among other illnesses.

Truth to tell, I have already taken anger management classes. Although the things discussed there often made sense, they didn’t seem to work on me. After those classes, I still was as angry as ever. My long-suffering wife has been begging me to go back to anger management, but for me, there’s no point in wasting my time there. I have to try something else.

I’ve been thinking about doing Yoga or perhaps meditation. I have read some articles about the subject and was particularly impressed with the way it gives you inner peace. I plan to do that next week, but somehow I’m worried. What if both do not work on me as well? Will I be angry forever? Now there’s a scary thought.

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