I’m just going to go ahead and say it: The hardest thing for me to deal with as a newbie mom is the pain of loneliness.
I resent many people in my life for “leaving me” this way and I already know how silly it is. Most of my loved ones are still around, and the ones who aren’t probably wouldn’t have been anyway; the demands of motherhood have more to do with me fading off the scene. One day I woke up and realized I lost myself somewhere between trying to be a good mother and keeping a good head on my shoulders. Now that she’s gone I don’t know who I am and I’m surprised at how much of what I thought was ‘me’ is a lie.
It sounds like the makings of an epic enlightenment story. The spiritual part of me thinks it’s a great practice to peel back the layers and free yourself from these identifiers that we desperately cling to, but offer our lives no real value. It’s okay to be raw since most things are not worth preserving. However, the human part of me finds this process painful and wants no part of it. I’ll be honest I’m a toddler myself . . . kicking, screaming and biting when things don’t go my way because I can’t understand why.
This loneliness is not unique to me either, most women feel this way when they become mothers and the ones that don’t at least feel the pressure of the demands in maddening ways. I’ve recently begun to open up about it, mostly because I can finally name what “it” is. I was shocked to find out how many others felt the same and how admitting it to each other offered no relief. These are all women I talk to regularly and share similar life experiences with. It seems to me the answer is simple: lonely person A and lonely person B come together and are no longer lonely. But no matter how many play dates we have, stories we relate to, or cliffs we talk each other off of, we still feel alone. How can we all be so lonely, so consistently together?
But what if our loneliness is bigger than the longing for companionship? What if instead it’s the result of our old selves being taken from us so suddenly? It’s as though we’ve been jilted by this person we were all these years, standing alone at the altar with this new life that comes with having a child. What we are experiencing may be grief for the person we lost and everything we liked about her that only feels like a memory now. And why can’t we be that person anymore just because we have kids?
There’s something about becoming a mother that shakes you to your core. And there’s something about being at your core that makes you feel so alone. I wonder if it’s designed that way, so that you become so sure of who you are in that moment that you can never go back to pretending to be the person you were pretending to be (not skillfully at least). After all, we tend to recall our most painful experiences in life as sagas that have gifted us all the honor we possess.
Motherhood is the most beautiful thing I’ve experienced and I often wonder how something so magnificent leaves me feeling so empty and consequently alone. I cycle between the two states of being like a sleepless coffee-high zombie, finding myself overwhelmed and exhausted one minute and changing my mind to be high off love the next. Most of it feels out of my control because I’m in too deep to pass over any of this experience, no matter how hard I try.
I do think often of old Leah: how cool, energetic and hygienic she was. She never wanted to be those mom-types. You know, the moms who are all about their kids all the time and have no life. How lame is that? I thought about how she would have handled everything and the answer was clear. Old Leah was there the day after Baby was born, with all her expectations and judgments and it took about a week for her to shrivel up and die – she just couldn’t hack it. I had to become someone, or something else to survive. The remnants of my dogfight have left me disoriented so far. I don’t know how to talk to my friends anymore, how to be a wife or a family member, and it requires deep thought for me to answer the question “have you showered today?” My emotions feel brand new, they are more intense across the good and bad ends of the scale. The scary part of it all is that now, I have to start over.
I admit, this starting over sounds like an exhausting self discovery project that I haven’t been in the mood for the last two years. I reason that it must not be time. Instead I’ll try to be with the loneliness and feel it until it breaks, if it ever does. I’m not even sure what to say about it except that I am. And that it makes me sad.
For all the lonely mothers out there – I wish I had a quote or something that sounds really good but I don’t. I wish that I could drop everything and be right there with you in person or in spirit but I can’t. I know that it probably wouldn’t matter anyway. In the end it’s you and your love for your children, the heartache you feel when you’ve given them every part of you and it still doesn’t feel like enough simply because you love them so much it could never be. Maybe it’s okay to lose yourself in them, because the old you couldn’t hack it anyway. Maybe you can become something better, even if it’s only for survival or only for a while. Maybe if you gave the new you a chance, you might even learn to love her. . . just the way she is.
And maybe then we won’t feel so dang lonely.