When my daughter was born and I was thrown into motherhood, it was like a haunting.
I went into hospital to give birth in the middle of the night and emerged some time later in daylight blinking – stunned and shellshocked, completely speechless as I gazed at the tiny bundle swaddled in the car seat in soft blankets. Driving home with her for the first time, the weight of love and responsibility was so heavy on my shoulders I almost couldn’t breathe.
It was crushing – a horrifying, all-consuming, atavistic love. The kind of love you almost can’t bear to look at. The kind that roots you to the spot; that makes you wake up every twenty minutes in a blind panic to check that they are breathing, that they are still here, that you didn’t dream them. It is the kind of love that walks hand in hand with fear; that leaves you upright in a chair at 3am at “witching hour”, sleep-deprived and feeding. At those times, it feels like you are the only one in the world awake and it is both isolating and frightening, particularly when your baby is premature or unwell, as mine was.
Having to return with my daughter to hospital multiple times made me anxious and lonely, but the trouble is, you don’t feel able to talk about feeling anxious and lonely. You can’t admit it to anyone in case you sound mad, unable to cope or risk being branded a “bad mother”.
Yet now, Princess Beatrice has lifted the lid on that kind of love – that terrifying, obliterating, panicked, lonely mother-love – and parents like me can finally feel seen.
The royal, who is the daughter of the disgraced former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, has revealed she felt “incredibly lonely” before the premature birth of her daughter Athena Elizabeth Rose, who was born in January several weeks before she was expected. Princess Beatrice, who has joined forces with the premature birth research charity Borne, said she also felt pressure to be “perfect”. “I think so often, especially as mums, we spend our lives, you know, feeling we have to be perfect to do this,” she told The Borne Podcast on Monday.
“And sometimes, when you are faced with that moment of learning that your baby’s going to come a bit early, it can be incredibly lonely.”
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She’s right. My daughter wasn’t born terribly premature, but my niece was. She arrived three-and-a-half weeks early, before my sister-in-law had even started to pack her hospital bag. A close friend’s son was two whole months early; another friend’s daughter was premature and spent weeks in a neonatal intensive-care unit. According to statistics from pregnancy and birth charity Tommy’s, every year in the UK alone, 60,000 babies are born prematurely, which equates to one in 13 births. And while I can’t identify with the unique sense of chaos and fear that come with having a premature baby, the word “lonely” I can fully identify with, particularly when you have an unwell child and have to spend days each month in intensive care. So, why don’t we ever talk about it?
It shouldn’t have to come down to Princess Beatrice to lift the lid on the darker side of motherhood; to break the mould of the “stiff upper lip” secrecy of the other royals. We all witnessed Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, standing on the top step of the Lindo Wing at St Mary’s Hospital in central London, smiling and waving moments after giving birth, her face a perfectly unreadable mask. We also saw Princess Diana doing exactly the same thing with Prince William and Prince Harry in the 80s. Only Meghan Markle broke the royal routine: she waited two full days to present Archie and Lilibet to the world and kept their hospital departure private.
But now that Princess Beatrice is telling the real, authentic mother-truth, women might actually begin to feel the weight lifting from their shoulders. In saying that her favourite thing about being a mum is that it is “like a secret club of sharing stories”, Beatrice is giving us permission to admit that becoming a mother feels a lot like being struck by a truck – that it’s nothing at all like we are encouraged to pretend that it is.
Because the lonely side of motherhood, you see, isn’t talked about all that often. We hear mostly of joy (and there is lots of it), we buy cards saying “Congratulations!” and make jokes in supermarket and doctors’ surgery queues about how tired we are, “but don’t worry, it only lasts the next 18 years!”
Behind closed doors, we are often weeping – yes, with the sheer glory of the first smile that feels a little like winning an Olympic gold medal, the dazzling iridescence of hearing that first word, the heart-thundering pride of witnessing that first, wobbling step, but with the ache of being lonely, too. Of not knowing what on earth we are doing, yet having no choice but to “do”. Of spending hours and hours alone as a single parent with nobody to pick up the slack, or of waiting for a partner to return home from work to hold the baby, just so we can rest, just so we can shower.
We weep because of the mind-numbing boredom and domestic tedium that comes with raising a child, because of the way your world shrinks when you swap a busy career for nursery rhymes at the local library, because the highlight of the day is simply managing to get dressed and go out for a short walk or a coffee. We weep because it is joy and pain, all at once. All too often, new mothers weep alone because we, too, are “incredibly lonely”. But maybe – just maybe, thanks to Princess Beatrice – we won’t be, anymore.
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