The Irish Times columnist Nadine O’Regan recently wrote about her positive experience of finding a “mum friend” when a brave fellow new mother knocked on her door and introduced herself and her baby.
Friends don’t often, quite literally, come knocking, especially during such a charged and exhausting time as early motherhood.
Nadine’s story prompted a huge response on social media, with other women sharing their thoughts on the relationships they forged with other mothers or, on the contrary, how lonely they may have felt during the first few months of caring for a baby.
We asked our readers to tell us about their experience of loneliness – and of finding community – during early motherhood. Here is a selection of their responses.
‘It’s not that I didn’t try, it’s just I felt that some circumstances went against me’
“The first baby I’d probably ever held was my own,” says Avril Keane from Mullingar, Co Westmeath, who is a writer and mum of three children, now aged between seven and 11.
“So, when the midwife handed me this tiny little pink thing, I was like, ‘What do I do?’
“A lot of it was very, very basic. It was: How do I breastfeed? How do I hold her? How do I make sure she’s not choking when she’s drinking the milk? How do I know when she’s finished burping? I’m looking at my baby, asking her, am I doing it all right?”
Her own mum was living close by and was on hand to help, “but there was part of me that felt I had to get on with it, particularly when my daughter wasn’t sleeping”, says Keane. “I thought I just I can’t keep calling my mum up here every day. That’s just not how it works.”
Following her mother’s advice to get out of the house, Keane tried to connect with other mums in mother-and-baby groups, but it didn’t quite go to plan. “My neediness shone through in my too-big smile, my too-bright eyes and my eagerness. I didn’t make any new friends,” she says.
‘I don’t have a wall around me, I have an electric fence’
“I was wired. It was lack of sleep, it was probably too much caffeine, and I was probably running on adrenaline because I’d managed to put the baby in the car seat, get us into the car and drive to the place that I wanted to get to.”
Keane didn’t have much luck meeting other mums during the early years of caring for her other babies either, she says, as she shut out the world when she suffered facial paralysis due to Bell’s palsy around the time when her second child was born, and she was supporting her mum through illness the third time around.
“I think what’s important is not to get bogged down in [making friends]. I’m able to look back and give myself the credit and say, it’s not that I didn’t try, it’s just I felt that some circumstances went against me and it wasn’t easy,” she says.
After her second child was born, Keane decided to leave her job at a pharmaceutical company in Dublin as she felt it wasn’t working for the family any more, especially as she had to commute five days a week from Mullingar. She now works part-time locally and has made new friends – many of whom are mums – through her interests of writing and running.
“I’m at a sweet spot now, where the kids are healthy and they’re enjoying school and they have friends and there’s a certain amount of independence with them. And I have my time back now; I’m living my life again.”
‘You just have to be in the house for a good portion of the day’
“There are so many fantastic groups for kiddies, like the baby sensory groups, swimming, baby massage, but it’s just the inevitable, mandatory amount of time you end up being in the house,” says a Dublin mum of a baby and a toddler, aged eight months and three. “You cannot really escape that you just have to be in the house for a good portion of the day.
“Despite all the recommendations to go out for your walks, join classes, meet moms for coffee etc, even when you do all those things, there is just a huge portion of your day that you have to be in, sterilising bottles or feeding or doing the dishwasher, doing the laundry, doing the cooking,” she says.
“Even if you do have a good support network, you have to be alone with this little person a lot. I can’t imagine what it’s like if you’re actually physically isolated, if you are more rural and just don’t have those options, or you don’t drive.”
She gravitated towards old friends who had babies of a similar age and met some new ones at baby groups, she says. “With my second one, I don’t feel as inclined to join all the groups because I kind of know a little bit more about the flow of things.
“But other mums come over to your house with their babies, or you go to their house because it’s easier, just because the acoustics in cafes, you never really know how it’s going to go with little ones.”
She decided to resign from work after her second child was born but says she is “itching” to get back once the time is right. “It can feel like the world and careers are going on without you while you’re in the ‘bubble’,” she says. “In terms of the wider world, I like to listen to the radio, but sometimes you’re kind of concerned about what’s going on; you want to keep an ear to the world, but it’s also so depressing.
“Your world can become quite small because you’re totally focused on keeping these little people alive.”
‘Our only rule was no baking and no hoovering’
“I had an amazing public health nurse and she put me together with two other girls who had children at the same time as me,” says Anna Phillips, a working mum with three children from Baldoyle in Dublin. Her eldest child is now 15.
They were lucky, she says, as Cuidiú, a national parent-to-parent voluntary support charity, was running local groups such a breastfeeding group and a toddler play group, where they could connect with more women in the early days of motherhood.
“We started with us three girls and then from the feeding group in the library we’d pick up a few more. And even from going out for a walk and seeing somebody else with a buggy, you might say: ‘Which way are you going? Do you mind if I walk with you?’”
Phillips and her fellow new mums started a WhatsApp group to arrange meet-ups at each other’s houses every Tuesday morning for a cup of tea and a chat. “We would take turns to host, and our only rule was no hoovering and no baking. It was a ‘take me as you find me’ kind of thing.
“And we’re firm friends 15 years later. We would vent, but we would also support each other. And there were two moms in who were second-timers, and they were the goddesses who knew everything.
‘Loneliness and isolation are among the most alarming challenges young people now face’
“We would swap tips and swap equipment. There was one travel dining seat that I remember was particularly popular – we’d be booking it for weekends away.
“It was great to find this tribe, who are going through the same thing that you’re going through, that you’ve never been through before, when all your friends are at work so you don’t know if you can ring them and ask them ‘what do I do here?’. It’s like a support group – with biscuits.”
‘In all my stages of life it would have probably taken me longer to make friends’
“My sister had her kids ahead of me and she had a whole new social group and I was like, that’ll happen to me, but it took me longer,” says a mum of three from Mayo, who has lived in Dublin since her college days. “I recognise now that that is because everybody is different, and in all my stages of life it would have probably taken me longer to make friends.”
Because she had been so busy working before her first pregnancy, she didn’t know many people in her local area, she says, but she found some connections at a toddler play group.
“Our local one was run by the Catholic Church and the kids were singing hymns. I had the choice of sitting at home or singing ‘He’s got the whole world in his hands’. Myself and my unbaptised child sang the hymns. It was only for an hour a week, but it was a good place to connect,” she says.
Her eldest son is now 16 and she keeps in touch with some of the other parents she met at that time.
‘I realised I wasn’t this strange person people didn’t like. I just hadn’t found my people’
“And I met people through the creche, when eventually you start going there, you start meeting other parents with kids in those environments. But when you have a baby, you don’t have the interaction,” she says.
She found it difficult that her own mother was all the way in Mayo during the early days. “I’d be out and I’d see other women and the three generations would be there: the granny, the mum and the baby. And it did make me feel lonely.”
Her first son was later diagnosed with autism at age 10 and she began to realise that may have contributed to the difficulties she had as a first-time mother. “You are born with autism, so that would affect lots of parts of a child, like their sleep and how they interact, so it is harder. I did find it really hard and I used to think, ‘God, what is it?’
“By the time I had my second child I had established good local friends, my days had structure and I did not experience the loneliness that I had after having my first child.”