I’ve been thinking about Lucy Jones’ wonderful piece in the Guardian last week, which shone a light on perinatal loneliness and the associated shame. She writes,
It feels shameful to admit, but new motherhood was the loneliest time of my life. This took me by surprise. While I had a supportive partner and co-parent, family and friends, access to a library and baby groups, and a tendency towards introversion, the isolated arrangement of modern motherhood was a shock. One study found that more than a third of new mothers in the UK spend eight hours a day alone with their babies, and this was often the case for me.
My baby was spectacular, as they all are, but not talking to adults for hours at a time, most days of the week, was a peculiar experience. It gnawed at me. I lost social skills and confidence. I fell silent and, for a while, withdrew. I struggled to ask for, or accept, help. I didn’t know how to talk about the chaos of childbirth, the effect on my body and mind – which I’m sure contributed to periods of depression and anxiety.
I thought there was something wrong with me. Wasn’t this supposed to be the happiest time in my life?
It resonated. Hard. I too had a solid support network, access to daily baby groups, and the funds for regular cafe trips and, when breastfeeding got really bad, to pay for private assistance. But still felt isolated. It probably didn’t help that I was living in / out of ‘regular’ time and, therefore felt out of synch with much of the world most of the time.
Reading Lucy’s piece immediately took me back to an afternoon during my first maternity leave, standing in a street of Victorian terraced houses, baby napping in the buggy and me sobbing down the phone to my partner who was at work just three miles away. He may as well have been on the moon.
It wasn’t that unusual for me to send him messages throughout the day, sometimes even a phone call. I could easily admit to the boredom of breastfeeding or hallucinogenic head-fuck of going to Asda on two-hours of broken sleep. I could tell him when I’d like him to try to get away early because the relentlessness of the baby’s cries were wearing me thin.
But I was so ashamed of telling him what had led me to call him, weeping, that afternoon.
It was such a trivial and embarrassing admission: I had seen three women pushing their babies together, having a nice chat. And that had brought all the loneliness I felt into such sharp relief I couldn’t breathe. Winded, I could barely stand as I snivelled and sniffed as gently tried to comfort me.
When my first baby arrived, I had a wonderful support system already. And I went out and met new mums, struck up conversations at baby groups, pushed myself to make connections. And I did alright. I made some friends and we pushed our babies around the park and went to mum & baby cinema sessions and talked about centiles and weaning and, sometimes, we’d say ‘this is all really very hard’ or ‘I envy my partner when they get to leave for work in the morning’.
Sometimes we’d say, ‘this is fine. We’re ok’ and our ambivalence was honest.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Weaver with Joanna Wolfarth to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.