We Have to Get Comfortable with Being a Burden

It was only day two of being alone with my daughter that I realized I’d sunk into a depressive state. I tried not to show it to her; any time she was awake we were playing and going out to cafes or for walks. When it was too hot outside, I walked her up and down my apartment building’s halls, taking breaks to look out the windows at each end of the building. But inside my head, I was searching furiously for some way out of this isolation.

I feel like a total baby even whining about this past week when I was alone with my daughter every day, because by “alone” I mean that my husband was at a soccer camp from about 7:30am to 4pm, and well, wouldn’t ya know it, that’s about a full-time work schedule that many other stay-at-home parents deal with regularly. We’re lucky that my husband’s job is so flexible, especially during the summer, and so we’ve been spoiled in working together to meet our daughter’s needs.

I planned for the week terribly, only making plans with one (1) friend for Tuesday and tentative plans with my sister-in-law for another day of the week. On Monday night, my friend rescheduled for Thursday, and so, as it happened, I was alone with my daughter for three days in a row. This shouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but I am still working on the acceptance phase of grief while mourning the life I expected as a mother. I thought I’d be back to work at this point, and it’s taken me longer than I hoped to settle into my life as a stay-at-home mom, even if I appreciate the extra time with my daughter, who is still so, so, so small.

Before actually experiencing being a parent, I had this kind of utopian view of community while mothering. I pictured bringing my baby to friend’s houses, taking turns watching kids and working, or just mothering off to the side while they worked. In theory, most friends agreed that this would be an ideal setup. In practice…we’re just literally out of practice for this type of community.

The last time I felt this level of comfort—to just be with people, no activity necessary, a family-like solace in proximity—was when I was in college. On our campus, it was normal to keep our dorm doors open for anyone to come in and chat, visit, do homework together, etc. Even if my main friend wasn’t home yet, I would go hang out with their roommates until they were. This was not weird. Everyone was on board. We were all so excited to meet new people, to forge new connections, to create some sort of family structure after leaving our families behind in our respective hometowns.

Nowadays, I run into neighbors on walks and we chat for a bit, but eventually they might say, “Well, I don’t want to keep you…” while I’m thinking, “Please keep me.” Even before I was a mother, I was thinking, “Please keep me.” I know logically that we all have jobs, lives, responsibilities to attend to—I guess I’m saying I’d like to be involved anyway. Take me to Trader Joe’s with you. Come with me to buy new moisturizer. Sit with me while I type up this email, or play with my daughter, or vacuum the floor.

I know I’m not alone in missing this familial feeling. Especially post-Covid, our propensity for isolation has increased even as we know it’s bad for humans to be alone for too long. Study upon study upon study shows how much we’re suffering as a people because of our chosen separation. Maybe isolation is just part of being an adult. Maybe it’s specific to Washington, DC’s culture. But I find myself planning months in advance to get together with even some of my closest friends. How can this be?

Somewhere down the line, we started worrying about burdening each other. That’s what’s underneath the phrase “Well, I don’t want to keep you…” at least when I say it to someone else. I feel like I’m burdening them with my presence, even if we’ve accidentally met up. Or the inverse, feeling burdened by others based on our own made-up expectations of ourselves: Having people over at our houses feels like a big affair now, where everything must be clean and tidy, snacks and drinks available. But not everything has to be this curated.

Ever since becoming a mother, I keep imagining this community from the past, the “village” we try to conceptualize in our modern world. I picture a few small dwellings in a circle, people gathered in the center attending to daily needs—cooking and creating and watching children. When I visited my family in Utah back when my daughter was only two months old, I felt this type of community. Even if I had to leave my parents and siblings and nieces and nephews to take my daughter to nap, I knew that right when she woke up, we could go back out to the living room and join the community once more. Back in DC, when I put my daughter to bed alone, I long, earnestly, for people to be in the next room over—not even just to help me, though that would be nice, but to witness me, too.

“I feel like I don’t exist anymore,” I said to my husband after day three of being alone.

What fresh hell. Why have we done this? I felt this way before becoming a mother too; if I was working from home for a couple days in a row all by myself, I’d start to feel untethered to reality. But the United States considers this isolation a sort of privilege. There’s talk on the internets about this home that was featured in the Utah Parade of Homes, an event where people can go and tour some of Utah’s most innovative architecture. One of the houses getting the most buzz belongs to the Crumbl co-founder, and it’s a full-on compound. It features ten bedrooms, ten bathrooms, an amphitheater, a private soccer field, an enormous pool, a fairytale-style playground, and an indoor basketball court, among other spoils. The family would never have to leave; all that they “need” is on their huge piece of land, separated from the rest of the world. To me, that’s not a haven, unless it also houses all the friends, family, and animals I hold dear to me. It’s more like a fancy prison.

On Thursday and Friday of my week “alone” with the baby, I knew I had to force myself to get out of my own little haven/prison. But with isolation comes inertia. The longer I’m alone, the more depressed I feel, so the less I work to change my current situation. Still, after my baby’s morning nap on Thursday, I fed her, changed her, and put her straight into the stroller. No matter that riding the Metro to my friend’s house would take up the better part of her wake window. I couldn’t think about that. The farther I go down the sleep schedule route, the more chained to my apartment I become.

And what do you know? Everything was totally, completely, gloriously fine. Of course. My daughter has never given me any evidence to the contrary based on every other outing we pursue. She becomes an inquisitive, observant creature, fascinated by all that’s going on around her, and she rarely shows any signs of malcontent. I know this, but anxiety isn’t quieted so easily. We arrived at my friend’s house and chatted for a bit, and then I took my daughter upstairs for a nap. I felt exactly as I did when I visited family: comforted by the mere presence of others outside of our little room. And when my daughter woke up, we went downstairs and hung out with our friends—a relief, I think, for both me and my daughter, who is also a person who needs breaks and novelty.

Here’s where it unravels: the next day, my daughter was in the worst mood I’ve ever witnessed. She is normally one of the chillest babies I’ve ever met, but on Friday it was like she was possessed. She screamed and cried for a full hour before we were supposed to leave to my sister-in-law’s house. She refused to eat, but she was starving. I started to panic: what if she continued to scream and cry for the full half-hour drive instead of napping like I planned for? What if she wouldn’t sleep at my sister-in-law’s?

The panic turned to obsessive thinking, a pattern I’ve experienced often postpartum. I started to wonder if she was overstimulated from going to my friend’s house the day before. Had abandoning our usual routine actually spurred long-term consequences? As she screamed and cried, I tried all my usual tactics. Nothing was working. I went out to the living room and screamed into a pillow. I had underestimated how difficult it is to listen to a screaming, crying baby for long periods of time.

Finally, she ate. Afterwards, we looked at each other, both of us with exhausted eyes. “What was that?” I asked her. And then I said, “I’m sorry.”

I put her in the car and drove to my sister-in-law’s house, and she slept the whole way. She was still fussy and did scream and cry while we were there, but I could handle it in a different way now that there were witnesses. I’m not really allowed to scream into pillows when other people are around. I’m not really allowed to have a breakdown. It’s not socially acceptable when you’re outside your own little bubble. But I also never felt like I was even close to a breakdown when I was with them. Outside of my loneliness vortex, I stopped spinning so fast. It’s like my brain reconnected to reality. I simply had a task to do and I was going to do it, knowing that later, I could hand her off to her cousins and her aunt and let them take over for a bit.

“She’s just a baby,” my sister-in-law said. “Sometimes they have bad days.”

My sister-in-law is a mother of four. She’s an expert, having been through it all multiple times. I tried to relax and feel how I’d been begging to feel when around loved ones: cradled and understood, supported and relieved. In the “village” I imagine from hundreds of years ago, I’m sure babies were crying all over the place, and people took turns taking care of them. I can’t go into these situations as if I’m meeting neighbors in the park. I can’t say, “Well, I don’t want to keep you…” when someone is trying to soothe my daughter. If I’m complaining about a lack of community, I can’t reject it when it’s offered. I—and our larger society—need to be comfortable with sometimes being a burden.

Anecdotally and based on real evidence, I know I’m not the only one craving this feeling and this shared, communal reality. And so I want to do something about it. For the next year or so, I have some goals:

1. Make more parent friends, especially with people who live close to us

   1. And then work on hosting them for dinners/playdates often throughout the week, creating a come-over-whenever-you-like atmosphere

2. Move closer to the friends I have now when we’re able to move (this seems like an inverse of the above, but I hope they can go hand-in-hand)

3. Create and host weekly get togethers with all of our friends (more on this soon)

4. Get outside every day and experiment with “keeping people” longer than our anxious selves usually allow

Hopefully eventually, none of us will feel like a burden. Like maybe presence itself can be positive, or maybe even a thing we barely consider at all.