This Mother’s Day, All I Want Is Some Alone Time

I’m sitting in my car perched on Mulholland Drive, around the corner from my home in the Hollywood Hills, conducting a telemedicine call with a patient. As a psychologist who specializes in reproductive and maternal mental health, COVID-19 has been a particularly busy time for me. The stress and anxiety many expecting and postpartum mothers are feeling right now means that my schedule is overloaded, especially as I am working not one full-time job, but two: My son and daughter, aged 11 and 6, are among the 95% of American children out of school, which means in addition to talking women through pregnancy loss as well as perinatal and postpartum mood and anxiety disorders, I am also supervising piano lessons via FaceTime; overseeing virtual basketball workouts and class meetings on Zoom; and trying to get my kids out of the house in between calls with patients while my partner—a writer—also works from home. I realize I am extremely fortunate to even have these options to stimulate my children, who live in a safe home with a reliable food supply. But I have also never felt more overwhelmed, not to mention “touched out.”

My children constantly want to be around me—to hold onto me, to pull on my clothes, to talk to me from an uncomfortably close distance, and to ask me unending questions. My daughter, who is currently going through a “Mommy phase,” is particularly unrelenting. Which is how I found myself in my car that afternoon, in a desperate attempt to get some much-needed alone time. But it was short lived. Just as my patient began to detail the anguish of her recent miscarriage, I turned my head to find my daughter looking at me through the car window, like she used to stare at the animals at the Los Angeles Zoo. I had been discovered.

On one hand, it is, of course, incredibly endearing and a personal source of importance that she wants to hang out with her mother, not her father—especially when moms and their unpaid labor are notoriously overlooked. She wants me to tuck her into bed, not dad; she wants to shower with me, have me tickle her back, and sit on my lap as we watch Top Chef together. But as many states, including California, enter Week Seven of stay-at-home orders, I don’t crave the human touch so many people report missing. I just kind of want to be left alone.

I’m not the only one. Even before shelter-in-place orders, a 2017 study published in Frontiers in Psychology revealed that 13% of parents feel burnt out from the constant supervision of their children. Now, as we add forced isolation to this equation and the increased neediness of our kids as they, too, adjust to this new “normal,” that number has more than doubled: According to a report from the Kaiser Foundation, 32% of mothers say their mental health has gotten worse as a result of the pandemic.

There’s a fine and unforeseeable line between loving the touch and connection of another human being—especially a human you grew inside your body and brought into this world—and suddenly feeling like you are constantly coming second to yourself. At times, it has felt as though the walls are closing in on me, leaving me with an overwhelming amount of guilt and self-loathing. While I know my children need me and I want, with every fiber of my being, to be there for them every second of every day, especially these days—I am desperate for some time to myself, time that culturally, I have been told I am not owed; time that makes me selfish; time that makes me a “bad mom.” As a mental health professional, I know these messages are false; that doesn’t stop them from creeping in. But as mothers take on more and more of the parenting and household duties, it is crucial that we all find ways to give ourselves a break—a break from e-learning, a break from Zoom meetings, and a break from the surprisingly strong, groping arms of a 6-year-old.

Which is why I am making it a priority to carve out “alone time,” however I can. While practicing social distancing, I go on long walks in my neighborhood every evening, where I can breathe in fresh air and feel my body moving as the Eucalyptus trees sway in the wind. If anything, the current pandemic has made this necessity all the more pressing and, in a way, allowing myself these kinds of simple indulgences has also made me a better mother. Yesterday, after back-to-back telemedicine calls and a long walk that I negotiated with my husband while he agreed to watch the kids, I returned to my bustling kitchen. My daughter ran up to throw her arms around me, and, feeling revived from just those 30 minutes alone, I held her close in a prolonged embrace. I breathed in the intoxicating, soft smell of her head, and reminded myself that, in so many ways and even in the face of an unprecedented global health crisis, I am lucky. We are lucky. We are all trying our best.

Originally Appeared on Vogue