The Loneliness of Motherhood When You're Never Alone
There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes with motherhood, and I don’t think we talk about it enough.
It’s not necessarily about being physically alone. You can have a loving partner, supportive friends, family nearby, and a baby who needs you almost constantly, and still feel incredibly lonely.
I think part of that loneliness comes from the realization that motherhood is not always what we were led to believe it would be. We spend months preparing for a baby, reading books, talking to other mothers, and trying to understand what life will look like. Yet there are so many parts of the experience that we don’t really understand until we’re living them.
And when our experience doesn’t match what we expected, it can leave us wondering why nobody told us what it would actually be like.
Why Didn’t Anyone Tell Me?
I hear this sentiment often from mothers, especially in the early postpartum period.
Why didn’t anyone tell me that breastfeeding might be incredibly difficult? That I could do everything to prepare for childbirth and still have an experience that felt entirely out of my control? That I might need help from a lactation consultant just to figure out something I assumed my body would know how to do?
Or that sleep doesn’t necessarily get easier once the newborn stage is over. For some families, a three-year-old’s sleep can be more challenging than anything they experienced with an infant.
We hear plenty about sleepless nights and how much life changes after having children. But I think those descriptions often fail to capture the emotional reality of becoming a parent.
Of course, no one can fully prepare us for motherhood. Our pregnancies, births, babies, relationships, and personal histories are all different. What comes easily to one woman may be incredibly difficult for another.
But when we aren’t prepared for that variability, we can begin to assume that our experience is somehow unusual.
We look at other mothers and wonder whether they are struggling as much as we are, whether they feel as overwhelmed, or whether something that seems so difficult for us is simply easier for them.
The problem isn’t necessarily that other women are hiding the truth. Sometimes they are sharing their experiences, but those experiences are genuinely different from ours. Sometimes the difficult parts become less vivid with time. And sometimes women are reluctant to talk about feelings they worry will make them seem ungrateful or inadequate.
Whatever the reason, the result can be a sense that we are navigating something enormous without feeling fully understood.
My Two Very Different Postpartum Experiences
I had my first son during COVID, and I found that period incredibly difficult.
Becoming a mother for the first time is already such a significant transition, but doing so during a pandemic added another level of isolation. The usual opportunities to connect with other mothers and develop a sense of community were much harder to access.
It was an awful period for me, and looking back, I think the loneliness was especially difficult because I was trying to understand a completely new version of myself without many of the connections that might normally help.
By the time I had my second son, my experience was very different.
I loved being able to go on walks with friends. I had more perspective about the postpartum period and understood that the intensity of those early months would change. I also had a better sense of what I needed and how much connecting with other mothers could help.
But even with all of that, I still experienced moments of loneliness.
I think that’s what makes this experience so difficult to describe. Having people around you doesn’t mean they can fully understand what you’re going through. Even another mother who has been through pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum recovery has had her own version of those experiences.
And while sharing stories can help us feel connected, there are parts of motherhood that remain deeply personal.
Sometimes we just want someone to understand exactly how we’re feeling, and that isn’t always possible.
When Everyone Needs Something From You
Another part of this loneliness, I think, comes from how accustomed many women are to paying attention to the needs of others.
Long before we become mothers, many of us have learned to be accommodating, anticipate what other people need, and make sure everyone around us is comfortable.
For some women, this can become a deeply ingrained pattern of people-pleasing. For others, especially those whose earlier relationships required them to manage the emotional reactions of people around them, it can resemble what we sometimes call a fawn response, where maintaining connection or avoiding conflict becomes more important than expressing our own needs.
Motherhood can intensify these patterns considerably.
Now there is a baby whose needs genuinely do require a great deal of our attention, and it can become easy to justify putting ourselves last.
We tell ourselves that we’ll take care of our own needs when the baby sleeps better, when breastfeeding becomes easier, when we return to work, or when the children are a little older.
And sometimes we even take pride in how much we can manage without asking for help.
There is a strange kind of recognition that comes with being the mother who handles everything. We may feel valued because we’re dependable, capable, and constantly available.
But being needed is not the same as feeling cared for.
When so much of our attention is directed toward everyone else, we may lose touch with what we need, or feel uncomfortable asking for it. And over time, that can create a sense of loneliness even within relationships that are otherwise loving and supportive.
The Difference Between Having Support and Feeling Understood
I think it’s important to distinguish between having people who support us and feeling emotionally understood by those people.
A partner might help with nighttime feedings, take care of household responsibilities, or recognize that we’re exhausted. A friend might regularly check in or offer to watch the baby so we can have some time to ourselves.
These things matter tremendously.
But sometimes what we’re missing is the opportunity to talk about how we’re actually experiencing motherhood.
Maybe we feel disappointed by our birth experience, even though our baby is healthy. Maybe we’re struggling with breastfeeding and feel embarrassed by how emotional the experience has become. Or maybe we’re finding motherhood much less enjoyable than we expected, despite loving our children deeply.
These can be difficult feelings to share, especially when we imagine that everyone else is grateful, happy, and managing things better than we are.
And sometimes we don’t even know how to explain what we’re feeling because we’re still trying to understand it ourselves.
Motherhood changes our relationship with our bodies, our identities, our partners, and the people around us. These changes aren’t necessarily negative, but they can leave us feeling unfamiliar to ourselves.
When we’re still trying to understand who we’re becoming, it can be difficult to feel fully known by someone else.
Finding Connection Without Expecting Someone Else to Understand Everything
I don’t think the answer to maternal loneliness is simply to tell mothers to get out more, join a group, or spend time with friends.
Those things can be incredibly valuable, and I know from my own experience how much a walk with a friend can change the emotional tone of a day. But the loneliness of motherhood is more complicated than a lack of social interaction.
Sometimes it requires acknowledging that this transition has been harder than we expected. Or recognizing that we’ve become so focused on taking care of everyone else that we’ve stopped paying attention to ourselves.
I think there is tremendous value in being able to tell another mother that you’re struggling without immediately reassuring her that everything is wonderful. Or admitting that you love your baby but don’t particularly enjoy the newborn stage. Or saying that you’re lonely even though you know you have people who care about you.
We don’t necessarily need someone to have experienced exactly what we’re experiencing. But we do need opportunities to be honest about it.
For some women, that connection develops through friendships or conversations with other mothers. For others, therapy offers a space to begin understanding feelings they’ve had difficulty expressing, particularly when loneliness is accompanied by anxiety, depression, or unresolved experiences surrounding pregnancy and birth.
I also think we can do a better job of asking mothers how they’re doing without assuming we already know the answer.
Instead of immediately offering advice, perhaps we can spend more time listening to what their experience has actually been like.
Making Room for the Mother, Too
One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about motherhood is that the experience continues to change. What feels overwhelming with a newborn may look very different a year later, and the relationships and communities we develop along the way can make an enormous difference.
But that doesn’t mean we need to wait for things to get easier before acknowledging how difficult they feel right now.
I think part of addressing the loneliness of motherhood is recognizing that mothers need more than help caring for their children. They also need opportunities to be cared for, to be seen as individuals, and to have their emotional experiences taken seriously.
We can be deeply connected to our children and still long for more connection with the adults in our lives. We can feel grateful for our families and still feel lonely. And we can have a tremendous amount of support while wishing someone understood us a little better.
These feelings don’t mean that something is missing from our love for our children or our appreciation for the people around us.
They are part of the complicated experience of becoming a mother, and I think we make that experience even harder when we expect women to navigate it without being able to speak honestly about what it’s like.
Sometimes feeling less alone begins with realizing that we don’t have to make our experience sound easier than it actually is.
Remember always – you are strong as a mother.
