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I remember that soul-destroying business of feeling like an outsider as a new mum. You feel like you are on the outside of a bubble looking in. You wonder if you will ever truly connect with all the other mums…who already seem to have connected with one another. For me, feeling like an outsider as a new mum was one of the most depressing things about new motherhood.

Recently, I was sent a preview copy of Bubbles: Reflections on Becoming Mother – Laura Bissell’s honest and compelling account of pandemic parenting. It was the chapter “Other Mothers” that really caught my attention. She summed up that sentiment of feeling like an outsider as a new mum desperately yearning for your tribe so perfectly that I wanted to share it all with you here.

This extract is dedicated to every new mum feeling like an outsider, and to let you know – that so many other mums feel this way too, and you are most certainly not alone.

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Other Mothers

At baby yoga we would sing ‘Wind the Bobbin Up’, ‘Oh The Grand Old Duke of York’, ‘See-Saw Margery Daw’, ‘Round and Round the Garden’. As I remembered all of these rhymes from my own childhood, it stuck me how little had changed in the years since I was a baby. The same bright colours and simple rhythms are key to all baby activities. My own mother was reassured that the things that she did instinctively are now government-sanctioned policy. Hold your baby. Read to your baby. Talk to your baby (not just in a baby voice). Touch your baby. Sing to your baby. Look at your baby. My mum had sung ‘Boogie Woogie Baby’ to my sister and I when we were small and now my daughter experienced the same exercise regime, her arms and legs being pumped up and down to my mother’s energetic singing.

Back in their size eight leggings and neon workout tops, the other mothers would chat before class. ‘How was the birth?’ ‘Really easy. Only took me 90 minutes.’ ‘No bother at all.’ While this relentless positivity is admirable in some ways, it can be ostracising to those of us who were not able to ‘birth’ in the traditional (vaginal) sense, or for others, like one mother I meet at baby yoga, whose 42-hour labour could not be described in any way as ‘really easy’. This may also be typical of West-of-Scotland women – putting a brave face on things that are actually very tough.

Feeling like an outsider

Often I am the outsider. At baby yoga, one mum made a joke about how her son had missed his wake window. Everybody laughed. I didn’t know what a wake window was. I looked around the room; everyone looked young, they were all wearing Lycra, thighs trim and toned, their pink fluorescent tops and grey exercise gear clinging to flat stomachs. There were no saggy mum tums apart from mine, which still looked like a sack tied loosely in the middle, a mysterious dent having appeared between my upper and lower abdomen. Their breasts were pert and when they lowered their bra to breastfeed their breasts didn’t flop out and descend another four inches as though fleeing the brassiere.

How were they doing this? I thought. Full faces of make-up, lipstick glossy and freshly applied, babies beautifully dressed and sleeping through the mum yoga bit so they all get to focus on their own bodies for a while. Some would wake their babies up for the baby yoga section where they lay docile and giggling, other mums would put on a lavender eye mask and indulge in some me time. How were they doing this? Apart from me and one or two other women, you would not know this group of slim, manically positive women had just entered motherhood. There were exceptions, of course: the GP I met at baby yoga who confessed to feeling stupid about phoning her health visitor thinking ‘she should know what to do’, the mum who wanted to drink a glass of wine while breastfeeding without judgement.

Outcasts together

My circle of mothers expanded. We debated when to take them swimming, those that had done it able to pontificate on which pool was warmest and how long to stay in for. The local leisure centre runs a drop-in class called ‘ducklings’ for £4 while a nearby hotel runs ‘Water Babies’, which is £170 for ten classes and a complimentary photoshoot. One of the mums admitted to me that the free photoshoot is caveated with the statement that to buy the photos it is £199 for three. Granted they are underwater shots (I immediately thought of the Nirvana Smells Like Teen Spirit album cover), but the crass commercialisation of these first moments made me feel uneasy. By constructing a full itinerary for my daughter I convinced myself that she was doing enough activities to aid her development. But did I just buy into the baby-money-making machine? Was I just another unsuspecting consumer who played into the hands of capitalist forces?

This transient set of relationships was the first substantial group of new people I had met in years. A friend who was internet dating bemoaned the fact that when you reach your mid-30s, you rarely meet new people. Unless you take up a new hobby or evening class (as I have done in the past), you tend to stick with the old faithfuls – friends from school or university, some cool work colleagues that you have enough in common with to make time to see them outside of work, and family. Who has time to meet new people? And how do you do it without the buffer of everyone being in the same boat (new at secondary school, new at university) or bound together by the shared experience of a workplace? How do you even make friends anyway? I realised that for the clan of new mums I have met, we were all bound together by this newness. We had been cast adrift on the good ship motherhood and were novice sea-women trying to work out how to steer the vessel.

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Can you relate to Laura’s experience of feeling like an outsider as a new mum? Do share in a comment below….

Baby photo created by freepic.diller – www.freepik.com