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The scream session had all the trappings of parenthood today, including O'Brien being a few minutes late because she was busy doing laundry and other moms joining virtually from home because they were quarantined due to COVID exposures.

On the other side of the screams, the moms said they felt a new emotion, peace.

\"It was a release and you laugh afterwards,\" said O'Brien, who said she has learned the lessons of compassion and non-judgment through joining moms in the scream sessions.

\"Nothing is simple anymore and we have to be able to hold two opposite truths at the same time,\" she said. \"You can be really exhausted and tired of parenting and also love your kids an incredible amount, at the same time.\"

\"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.\"

Harmon said she been struck by the attention her most recent scream session has attracted, including coverage by radio station WBUR and The Boston Globe and requests from people across the country asking how they can do it locally.

\"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.\"

Screaming out loud and in community is after all doing what so many moms have for so long suffered through alone, noted Thompson, who is featured in Primal Scream Portraits, a photo series started by another mom, Alice Donovan Rouse, who attended the first scream session.

\"PHOTO:
Alice Donovan Rouse/Alicephoto.co
PHOTO: Lauren Thompson appears in a photograph in Alice Donovan Rouse's Primal Scream Portraits series.
>

Thompson said after she was featured in the Boston Globe article, an aunt reached out and opened up to her for the first time about her own experience feeling alone in her early years of motherhood.

\"My aunt happened to see [the article] and told me, ‘I’m so proud of you. I wish I had this as a young mom. My safe space was my car where I could go and scream,'\" said Thompson. \"That was a conversation my aunt and I would never have had had this not been out in the world.\"

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