Moments of solidarity have punctuated Zoya’s first year of motherhood. Photo: Zoya Patel.
It’s no secret that being a first-time parent can be an isolating experience.
Where once you may have spent time in the workplace or community surrounded by other people, now the days are long and punctuated by the needs of the tiny human you’re suddenly responsible for keeping alive. It’s incredibly rewarding, but it’s still a big shift in mindset.
Add to that the fact that getting out of the house is way more complicated – packing the nappy bag, coordinating the car seat/public transport, managing the pram, locating the parent rooms – and the entire experience can be discombobulating. But the other side of the coin is the way having a baby opens you up to an entirely different community that you may not have been aware of beforehand.
As I reach the end of my first year of parenting, one of the things that stands out to me is the amount of solidarity and support I’ve received from complete strangers. Babies are a magnet for conversation, but it goes deeper than a casual comment here or there – at times when I have felt my most overwhelmed, it has often been another parent who has offered me the exact words I most needed to hear.
Whether it’s the older woman who paused as we passed each other on an early morning walk – me, frazzled with a tiny baby strapped to my chest – to smile and tell me I was doing a great job, or the fellow mum who leapt out of her chair to open a door for me when she saw me struggling to coordinate my pram and the step into a restaurant, it’s been small moments of solidarity that have punctuated my experience of motherhood.
I remember one day, in particular, when I realised that mothers had suddenly become more visible to me. Before I started wheeling a pram around myself, I barely ever noticed parents in public spaces. But in those early months of maternity leave, I often found myself at the shops mid-morning, walking my baby around in a sort of sleep-deprived haze.
When I looked up, I found myself surrounded by other women doing the exact same thing. We would make eye contact and exchange smiles, noting the similarity of our experiences. To the outside, we may have just looked like women enjoying a stroll through the shops on a weekday, but our reasons for being there were likely more stressful.
Sometimes, I went to the shops because we desperately needed things at home, and despite feeling exhausted at the thought of getting my baby and myself out of the house and into the car, I couldn’t put it off any longer. On other days, the thought of being at home caught in an endless cycle of feeding/changing nappies/getting the baby down for a nap made me feel crazy, and the shops felt like an uncomplicated way to get out of the house. Often, I just wanted to be around people, and my friends and family were all at work.
On this day, I was tired and achy, and my little boy was sleeping peacefully in his pram as I went to take the lift at a shopping centre. Another mother was waiting with her child, who was absolutely beside himself. She was trying to pull a bottle together with one hand while rocking the pram with the other, and she had just managed to pass her baby the milk as I rolled up. He gratefully sucked on the bottle, and I could see the adrenalin flood out of my fellow mum’s body as she sighed in relief.
We caught each other’s eye, and I smiled. “You’re doing a great job,” I said, and she smiled gratefully, even though her eyes looked watery.
“Thank you,” she said. “You too.”
We rode the lift in silence, our prams parked next to each other, and the atmosphere was one of respite before we both headed back into the throes of parenting.
Now that my son is a bit older when I see new parents out in public, I make a point of smiling or passing a kind word on. It was the kindness of strangers that got me through some of my tough days. The least I can do is pay it forward.
Original Article published by Zoya Patel on Riotact.
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