My husband was unwell with tonsillitis recently and had to spend a whole weekend in bed while he waited for the antibiotics to kick in. I felt for him but as it dawned on me that I’d be 100% in charge of our three children while he recovered, my main feeling was sheer, utter dread.
Let’s get the seemingly necessary caveat out of the way; I love my kids more than anything in this world and I love spending time with them. And yet… the thought of being alone with them all day fills me with fear.
It’s a feeling that stems from my early days of motherhood. I’ve got three daughters - a 10-year-old and 2-year-old twins. Back when my eldest was a baby, I was totally unprepared for the change of pace that maternity leave would bring. It was as if someone just plucked me from my busy life, zipping around a buzzing office, popping to Zara in my lunchbreak and grabbing sushi on my way back, then heading out after work to meet a friend for dinner… and plonked me into this alternate universe where I was alone, in my house, with a tiny crying baby, with only daytime telly for company. Day. After. Day.
Yes, I had ante-natal group friends nearby and we’d meet once a week for coffee and a solidarity-filled moan about how hard breastfeeding was or how little sleep we were getting. ‘They don’t seem lonely,’ I’d think to myself, looking at my friends as we tried to juggle sipping a gone-cold latte with rocking a baby to sleep. They seemed to be coping just fine with the adjustment to motherhood and unlike me, who would count down the minutes until my husband arrived home from work at 5.45pm, they didn’t seem to mind the time at home alone with their baby. Some of them even relished it.
I soon found myself become needy of their company (and no one likes to be the needy friend). There are only so many times you can send a faux-breezy text message, suggesting meeting up before it becomes obvious that there are undertones of lonely desperation. I hated reaching out to a friend for company, knowing that their response could make or break my day. Gradually, I stopped reaching out as much, having come to the conclusion that the rejection (as I saw it – in reality, they were just busy with their own lives) was worse than the loneliness.
This is a common reaction to loneliness, according to psychotherapist Philippa Perry. In her book The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Readshe says it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Feelings of loneliness trigger a state of hyper-vigilance for social threat and rejection, making us super sensitive to possible rejection or coolness. And when we expect social threat we can behave in ways that are more likely to get us rejected. Even though we may feel on the edge, we fear putting ourselves back into the centre again in case we are rebuffed and therefore we pull ourselves even further away from people.”
Something in my brain overrides logic and I’m flooded with fear
As my maternity leave drew to an end, I felt positively giddy at the idea of going back to work. Of course, I played it down to my ante-natal friends who were all feeling sad that their jobs were about to interfere with their new much-loved role as mums, but inside I was jumping for joy. People to talk to again! Chatting to my desk-mate Sarah about last weekend’s X Factor! Making rounds of tea before a meeting! A meeting with people!
But I was back at work for just three days a week, and I found myself dreading those two days that I was at home with my daughter. I muddled through, miserably, with coffee dates here, a music class there, but those days still felt incredibly lonely. So when, six months later, I was made redundant and then offered a full time job at another company, I breathed a sigh of relief and accepted the job. It was my escape route from loneliness. I was far happier working full time and my daughter thrived in her nursery.
Fast forward to present day - that daughter is now ten and she has toddler twin sisters. The house is hectic and noisy with Peppa Pig blaring from the TV, a teenager shouting from YouTube on the iPad, while my three girls screech and laugh while they make a den with cushions and a blanket. There’s far less chance of me feeling lonely these days. My eldest is actually fun to hang out with now, enthusiastically telling me about the latest thing she’s building on Minecraft and showing me dance routines she’s made up to an Ariana Grande song.
And yet, put me in charge of my kids for a whole day, and it feels like I’m right back where I was, ten years ago. Alone and lonely. I tell myself it’s fine – I can do this! But something in my brain overrides that logic and I’m flooded with fear. Will I ever get over it? Who knows. But it shows how powerful and deep-rooted that loneliness was, if it’s still got such a strong hold on me today.
So why am I sharing this? To garner sympathy? No. It’s because (ironically) I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. In a 2020 survey, 50% of new mums said they had experienced loneliness and with it being even harder to meet friends, baby groups being closed and support from family members being harder to access during lockdown, the problem is only getting worse.
There’s stigma and shame attached to loneliness but there really shouldn’t be. So if you’re reading this and it sounds familiar to you, don’t do what I did. Resist that urge to further isolate yourself. Pick up your phone, and send a WhatsApp message to some friends: “Walk in the park one day soon?”