Three recent articles have highlighted the loneliness of new motherhood and the impact that parental pressures have on the mental health of parents. No freaking kidding, writes Emma Clifton.
Welcome to our series, The Motherhood Diaries – a safe space for you to share your experiences, advice, hopes and heartbreaks. We’ll be hearing from industry experts giving practical advice alongside Capsule readers (You!) sharing your firsthand experiences. We’re looking at everything from fertility, trying to conceive, pregnancy, the fourth trimester, newborns, toddlers, children’s mental health and teenagers, fertility issues and everything in between!
You know how you read one article on an interesting topic, then a few more come through and before you know it, there’s obviously a theme to the internet that week? (See: how perimenopause became the middle-aged version of ‘brat summer’ in the space of about a month).
Well, in the past fortnight, three articles about the loneliness and anxiety of early motherhood really struck me. The first was from author Lucy Jones, who wrote the best-selling Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood. In an article titled The Profound Loneliness of Modern Motherhood, she wrote about how lonely the early days of having a baby were for her, how removed they were from the expectations of what she had.
I sent it to one of my best friends, herself a new mother, because we had just been discussing the relentless nature of having to entertain a tiny baby for hours on end while home alone. “All these otherwise privileged women, walking around alone with their babies for hours and hours,” my friend replied.
My young family and I were luckier than some – we had one set of family living in the same city as us, but as wonderful as they are, they still work either full or part-time. My husband was giving nine weeks parental leave by his company – the best policy our OB Gyn had ever heard of – but once he went back, I was in the same position as most; home alone with a baby for anything from eight to 12 hours a day. The loneliness was staggering, and with all the empty quiet space to fill, like so many, I filled it a lot of it with stress, which was the theme of the next article.
In the seemingly light-hearted piece, What Over-the-Top-Precautions Did You Take as a New Parent?, the writer, postpartum with her second child, wrote about falling back into the trap of fear with a new baby. The 300+ comments underneath run the gamut of funny to devastating, of all the different things these mothers had once been afraid of. Reading through the comments, I was reminded of how visceral the fear of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) was for me when my son was small.
Every morning when I went to check him – and multiple times throughout the night – there was a large part of me that thought, ‘is he going to be dead this time?’ and I thought that – without exaggeration – every single time I approached the crib. And I know that not only am I not alone in that, I am probably part of the majority. It just becomes part and parcel of the new parent experience – which is utterly, overwhelmingly sad when you think about, that such a level of fear is not at all normal, but completely common.
The combination of these stories was the reason that the third story seemed like such a no-brainer. If you have experienced parenthood, or any kind of caregiving, you will not be at all surprised to learn that the US Surgeon General this week put out an urgent public health warning that parenting is hazardous for your health. Dr. Vivek Murthy has a name that might be familiar to you from all the Covid years, because his job as US Surgeon General was to put out the official stances on things that are dangerous for the general population – like pandemics, and now, it seems, parenthood.
The fast-paced nature of modern life, a total lack of village, many households requiring both parents to be in paid work and the pressure of parenting means that, as Dr Murthy writes, “many families feeling exhausted, burned out, and perpetually behind.”
Consider what it says about parenting – one of the most prized and least supported roles in the world – that it now comes with a health risk. One of the biggest reasons in the study? The “disproportionally high levels of loneliness that compound the day-to-day challenges [parents] face.”
Loneliness is brutal for anyone, and as a society we’re experiencing more of it than ever. Working in a late-capitalist society, the realities of the fabled ‘village’ that wrap around a new mother simply do not exist, with high-pressure jobs, and spread-out families meaning that the community ties that existed generations ago – or still do in many non-Western communities – fail to materialise. Time is money, and people do not have enough of either.
The risks are worse for different parts of the community – suicide is the leading cause of death in Aotearoa for pregnant people and new mothers, and for Māori Mamas, those rates are significantly higher. Parents of disabled children are currently experiencing a huge shift in government funding, making a vulnerable population even more at risk of isolation and mental health issues. Loneliness can be catastrophic for some families, and the ever-thinning resources of the social fabric many rely on are seeing more and more families fall through the cracks.
Because my husband and I were older when we started our family – 38 and 41 respectively – we at least had friends who had done this dance before and knew how to help us. I can still remember so vividly the meals that were dropped round – the ultimate gift being warm food to eat and someone to hold your baby while you did so, and it is a pattern I have tried to repeat for those who have had babies since.
But I worry tremendously for people who do not have this support and also do not have the financial means to build their own village. Daycare, for our family, has been a financial punch in the face but also a saving grace so profound that I have to stop myself from telling the team that I love them every time I see them. (But I honestly do love them so much).
Before I had a child and I would see women pushing their babies in prams along the street, I was probably jealous that they didn’t have to go to work. Now, I know better. Because while a lot of the times it actually WAS much better to be pushing your sweet baby in a pram then it was to be going into an office, there were a lot of times where I was walking because I truly didn’t know what else to do and the thought of returning to an empty house with a baby for nine straight hours was too much to handle.
Maternity leave is not not all coffee catch-ups and activewear; sometimes it is staring into the abyss with a heart full of love for your baby and a tired mind full of chaos at the thought of the day ahead.
That surgeon general’s warning is there for a reason. Check in on your new mums and new parents, because they need someone to hold their new baby and to hold onto them.
