At the same time, being a full-time working mom, often we feel lonely as being parents, because we rush out of the door from home in the morning to get to work as soon as we can, so that we can make our hours or do our job. Then head home quicker than our hitting the mall as a teenager after school. Once at home, we will switch our role back to being a mom, a cleaner, and a cook, so that dinner gets served and kids are fed on time, followed by some quality time, playing with them as we miss out the hours that staying home moms have with theirs. That quality time may well be shortened because of them being tired from a day spent in the daycare or wherever, so we go straight to the bathing routine. By the time the kids are in bed and hopefully also staying in bed, we still may need to do more cleaning up or other things. Then eventually we are selfishly enjoying the "ME" time, whether that is playing with our tablets or smartphones, or watching TV, we always end up hanging on the couch much longer than we should, so that the next morning when the alarm clock goes off, we would regret having stayed up longer than we should. We swear each morning to go to bed earlier that evening but that hardly happens.
My daughter barely sleeps through the night, and she is 16 months old. She wakes up and cries each night for about 1-6 times in general. I can imagine frequent night wakings are hard for any kind of moms, but when my daughter does it during the weekdays but not as often in the weekends, I can't help to wonder if I have done anything odd.
As a full-time working mom, the only network I can have with other mothers lately is Facebook. That keeps me being in touch with them. Because of my job, I cannot join most of their play-dates. Also, my daughter struggled quite a bit in her first 12 months with some health issues, and we are still having our good and bad days, but that prevented me getting out with her. So in that sense, I feel often lonely as being a mom.
I can imagine some staying home moms may think full-time/ part-time working moms are less lonely because those moms get to have a network that does not involve kids. Working moms get to speak in non-baby related subjects and act again as a normal person. However, the reality is being working moms, being surrounded by people without children or being less involved with children, we then feel not being supported or understood. If we run home because we need to pick up a sick child from the daycare, they would say we are getting the benefit that people without kids are not getting.
We live in a time of intensive parenting, sarcrificing everything in order to take care of our children's each and every need. Modern parenting, or crunchy parenting are the words you easily find on parenting sites or on facebook mothers' groups. Often women are now expected to do good as mothers, wives, and employees, or at least they feel they are being expected to. So at the end of the day, we end up stressing ourselves out. We feel having failed in being a crunchy mother, losing our cool, and ending up feeling lonely in this.
With our daughter having some health issues in her first year, things have gotten more intense for us all in the family. It was hard for others that have not dealt with similiar issues as my daugther has had to understand or imagine what we went through, and what kind of support we needed. I urge often these days people to ask people around them not only "how are you?", but also "what can I do for you to make things a bit easier?". Not saying anything because you don't know how to offer help is as bad as leaving someone at his/ her own dispair. I went through certain degree of postnatal depression and I know how hard and lonely one can feel even if there is a smile on the face.
So far, I have only mentioned about the role of mothers while parenting does often involve both mothers and fathers. I should then think I am NOT lonely in this parenting journey, right? Well, it is not that simple. It is not because my husband is not a dictated father. He does feed our daughter almost every morning her breakfast. He has most of the time more patience than me on our daughter, maybe a bit less on my son, his stepson but that is because he has higher expectation on my son. He does most of the household things I ask him to help with, he does go get groceries and make me happy by getting cakes that I love. He has been standing by my side when we struggled with our daughter's health issue while some or most doctors sent us home. He is a good husband and a good father, but he is a man, and that makes it sometimes lonely for me on this parenting path. He does not read as much literature on parenting as I do, and when he does, he does what he calls speed reading He comes from a different childhood background than mine, and he somehow is stuck to that parenting style which to me it is too old fashion. Our parenting style crashes totally, while we love each other as a couple. So how do we do this as a family?
Yet, even though parenting is lonely sometimes to me, I am thankful for everything I have, my family! I am sorry for my meltdowns and taking my frustrations out on my hubby, and my kids. Yes I complain about the lack of sleep I have, the postnatal big belly I have got, the messy dinning table we have, the lack of freedom, etc. It is easy to believe we were more in love with each other as a couple before we had our daughter. We could go out on dates, dining, slept in each other's arms, or even had nice longer sex sessions. That was love, but now we have real love as a family. Choosing to keep on going and giving up on certain things, to give everything we have no matter how exhausting that is, and often none of that is romantic, but we know this is true love as a family. And that will bring us being good parents. We will continue making mistakes as we learn each day.
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