The Coux

First-time motherhood in particular is daunting and sometimes, completely isolating and even if you have the best people around you, you can still wonder where to turn.

Within our own communities, there are probably thousands of mothers around us. One in the apartment next door, the house across the street, the woman who serves us at the shops.

I often wonder about these women.

Are they facing the same things as me?

Is the woman selling me a dress also a mum trying to find work/life balance? Is the stay-at-home mother I live across the street from at home looking for a way to express her creativity and stimulate her mind too? Is she struggling with the day-in and day-out grind that is a life at home with young children?

I’ve often thought about these women, so I’ve decided to write about them.

I’ve felt really lonely as a mother from time to time. So lonely, that I once wrote a very honest piece for The Coux (which I never shared) called ‘motherhood: how to lose friends and alienate people’.

I decided not to share it because I found out I was pregnant the day after I wrote it and it was probably the hormones talking but it was coming from a place of isolation. A time in my life when I was working full time and coming home to place that never felt like home. It came from a place where I was doing EVERYTHING, yet I didn’t feel like I was doing anything WELL.

Fast forward and thankfully I’m in a much better place (no more pregnancy hormones) and I started writing about something called ‘The every woman project’ a little while ago.

There are plenty of websites, blogs, Instagram accounts and magazines interviewing celebrities, entrepreneurs and perhaps more privileged mothers. Sometimes it can feel more isolating than it needs to just reading about them. I know they’re real women too but it seems idealistic and can be disheartening when you too want to be in a place where you are living out your dream.  PLUS, social media doesn’t exactly make you feel like you’re doing a good job a lot of the time.  

So what about the women on the brink?

What about the one typing away her business plan for an idea she had even before she had kids? What about the one studying, working and trying to maintain a home while dreaming of her future and the future of her children?

What about the one painting in her backyard, working away at her dreams in the hopes that she will get her break?

What about the one just coming out of the fog of early motherhood trying to work out what her goals and dreams are?

I want to talk to them and ask them these questions. I want to write about them on this site so that we all know we’re not alone, in fact we’re in the company of so many amazing women on so many different journeys.

We may not have everything figured out but we’re getting there, we may not have accomplished our goals but we’re chipping away.

I'm going to start sharing interviews with just some of these women, some I know, some I don't, some are family, some are friends and some I'm yet to meet. 

These are the ‘every woman’. They are you and I. I want to hear from them and I hope you do too.