Being a Stay-at-Home Mom Can Be a Lonely Place

Being a stay-at-home mom can be a lonely place - that is, if you are a social person. I went from always being with people, in one way or another: school, working in engineering, working in a library, but always surrounded by people, regardless of whether or not we were in constant communication. In school, you are being intellectually challenged, interchanging ideas, debating, learning. And while staying at home is the place where I have learned the most, it is not intellectually challenging, it is mundanely challenging, we are not interchanging ideas. Mothers are trying to get our ideas to be done, but yes, we are debating, always debating. While in school we least receive grades that tell us how we are doing, passed, failed, passed with flying colors, congratulated, and finally, we graduate knowing that we have done a good job. As mothers, we never get graded, there are no pats on our backs, no one says you screwed up - that is, until your child is a grown up and he/she goes to counseling and they call you to tell you that you have messed them up for life.

Then there is work. Even when I worked in a male dominated cable monitoring company surrounded by 100% male engineers and one other woman, we still communicated, talked, and being a girl, I got to know them fairly well. After all, this is where I met the love of my life and husband. After that I became and worked as a reference librarian in a a very busy public library. My job was to answer questions for my patrons, look up information for them, etc. It was the most social setting I have every experienced. Going from this to 5 months of strict bedrest, you can imagine how I felt.

So I tried to change how I viewed the world and tried to adjust. And while it took me months, I did it because I had to. So when Liam was born I decided to stay home and provide the best environment for him. And while I don't regret this decision for a minute, because being with him is the most marvelous gift my husband has ever given me, I have to say that it's been lonely quite a bit more than I anticipated. I blogged once about not being able to really do the mommy play date thing because of Liam's personality so I won't reiterate that, and when you have kids and your friends don't, or when you work and all those people keep working and now your job is at home, you become isolated. Or you isolate yourself, despite your best efforts to try to meet people.

And so I've tried over this stage in my life to find the beauty in it, like nursing my baby, making his baby food from scratch and feeling proud of that. But for some of us, homemaking is not what is natural and that is okay too. So I have enjoyed it for three years but now it is time to return to doing what I, Adriana, loves to do, being a librarian and helping people on their way to obtaining information, find books they can cherish, learn more about everything to satisfy my voracious appetite for information and knowledge, and still come home to the two loves of my life, feeling fulfilled in a way that is meaningful to me.