'I didn’t recognise myself anymore': The truth about the loneliness of motherhood 

“I always wanted to be a mother,” says Gillian Phelan 45, whose daughter, Elliah, was born prematurely when Gillian was 40. In fact, she was someone who wanted a large family, but struggled with infertility, and Elliah was conceived through IVF after multiple failed attempts. 

Gillian, who lives in north Dublin, trained and worked as a birth doula, assisting pregnant women during and after labour. She was certain she was prepared and knew what to expect. She had planned all the details of a water birth at home, until she gave birth prematurely while admitted to hospital for a checkup. 

“That was the moment I became isolated, when I knew I had to do it all on my own.”

Due to complications, Gillian had to undergo an emergency C-section, signing consent forms while being rushed to the operating theatre, while her husband, unaware, slept at home. Nearly five years on, and she says she is still living with the trauma of that experience. Elliah was diagnosed with Down Syndrome several weeks later, when finally released from hospital.

When the pandemic hit and the country went through waves of lockdowns, they came with a bag of mixed feelings for Gillian. On the one hand, it was almost a blessing, to have a legitimate excuse for not having to leave the house, while Gillian attempted to fall into a rhythm of motherhood. “Elliah wasn’t a particularly sociable child, so it suited us.” However, she lost out on the opportunity to build that proverbial village around them.

Even after things began to return to normal, it has taken Gillian several years before she finally found “her people”, other mothers of children with special needs, who understand her and to whom she can talk to. “And even at that, I probably have two friends now.” 

I emigrated to Ireland in 2015 from India, and we had our daughter 10 months before the pandemic. Even though my experiences were different from Gillian’s, a lot of the extreme emotions were the same. I was separated from my family, my ‘village’, and even though my husband’s family is in Ireland, they were in a different county. The lockdowns prevented me from attending parent groups and making friends, and while my husband went to work each day, I was stuck at home with a baby I was underprepared and ill-equipped to look after.

The sense of isolation and loneliness a woman experiences in those early years as a new mother is amplified by a feeling of loss of self too. “I am not the same person I was before Elliah was born,” Gillian tells me.

Chaitra Jairaj, formerly a consultant perinatal psychiatrist at National Maternity Hospital Dublin and currently at The Coombe Hospital, works with women struggling with mental health difficulties during pregnancy and postpartum. She believes there is a need to raise awareness and have more conversations about the struggles women face during these life-changing periods. The common theme she encounters with her patients is a “feeling of guilt and shame, when a woman may be struggling to experience the joys of motherhood that society expects from her.”

Chaitra advises her patients to actively make time for themselves, to do something pleasurable that could serve as a reminder of what their lives were like before they became mothers. However, this might not always be practical. Today, families are scattered and nuclear, both parents work, mortgages and childcare expenses are high, and yet the way parents are expected to raise their children seem to follow traditional methods. Resources and help available are limited and haven’t seemed to have adapted to the times. Gillian’s parents, who live in France, are in their mid-70s.

The longer women wait to have children, their parents get older too. She believes her parents would have been more involved and active as grandparents if they were younger. Like Gillian, this is a logistical roadblock many mothers face on a daily basis; where it’s nearly impossible to take time out for themselves when there is nobody to mind the baby.

Sonya Logan, 34, who lives in Co Offaly, believes Ireland has a lot of catching-up to do. She gave birth to her son, Luke, in Australia five years ago, and felt more supported there than she did upon her return to Ireland. “In Australia, I was assigned mother-and-baby-groups right after birth.” These groups would have helped them form early bonds and friendships. They had to move back to Ireland when Luke was five months old, and here, Sonya was forced to find help on her own.

“Ireland is cliquey,” Sonya says. Having lived abroad for seven years, she returned to find that she had lost old friends who had moved on with their lives. “People tend to stick to their own friends they’ve had since primary school. Being involved in GAA is an easy in, if you don’t have that, it becomes doubly difficult.” I encountered this too, as an emigrant. As difficult as it is to make new friends when you’re out of the education system, even more so for me since I didn’t have a traditional office job, by throwing a baby into the mix, it became nearly impossible.

“Luke was a terrible sleeper as a baby.” Sonya, who is a second-level teacher, still remembers those months of going to work on little to no sleep and breaking down with exhaustion in the staff room. She was told by her co-workers ‘sure, all babies are difficult and it’ll be grand’. She felt as though the reality and difficulties of motherhood were glossed over and better left unacknowledged by society ... that nobody wanted to discuss the everyday struggles mothers face.

“Everybody kept saying that as long as the baby is healthy everything is fine, which is absolutely true, but what about me?” 

She compares herself to her own mother’s experiences, who had nine children, and sees a massive difference in the kind of support that was available to women in older generations. “My mother had to hand-wash all our nappies, yes, but she had a community of friends and relations she could drop off the children to without notice.”

There is no denying that in older generations, women were primed for motherhood. Now, women experience years of independence, financial freedom, and nurturing distinct personal identities, and there is a loss of some of these aspects once they become mothers. This can lead to feelings of being unprepared and helpless. Chaitra agrees with the generational changes, that there is a difference in the way women handled motherhood previously. 

“The societal stigma against speaking openly about the struggles of motherhood can be very isolating for a woman.” She believes it is important to acknowledge and normalise these feelings.

Sonya finds there is a lot of work to be done with regards to having honest conversations about mental health. Despite the recent trends in social media, a lot of the time people are disingenuous when they claim they are open to having honest conversations. She finds it difficult to bring up her struggles with her friends. They tend to clamp up and become disinterested in discussing details. Almost as though everyone is more interested in keeping up an appearance of perfection.

Chaitra sees this often with her patients; women putting pressure on themselves to be perfect at all roles —the best mother, the perfect partner, a reliable hardworking employee. Comparing themselves to the women they see on social media, or to the romanticised version of motherhood portrayed in films and books.

She reminds her patients of the phrase ‘the good enough mother’ which was coined by British paediatrician and psychoanalyst DW Winnicott. Chaitra believes this is the standard all mothers should strive for, to be a good enough mother to their children. This could set healthy boundaries for their children for cognitive development, to expect less than perfection not only from their mothers but from the imperfect world they live in.

Sonya, who has eight siblings, recalls being sent to school every day with ham, cheese and a Kinder Bueno. Now, as a mother herself, she not only has to hold down a job, keep the household running, be physically and emotionally present for her children, but doesn’t think it’s good enough to send a simple well-balanced lunchbox to school, “the sandwich has to be star-shaped too”.