Two days later

I feel better, more balanced, more calm — but I am still struggling.

Yesterday I did something I haven’t done in years. The baby was next door with her abuelos and I was feeling lonely. Since I deleted my Facebook account two days ago, I didn’t spill out my loneliness in a whiney status update and wait for a sympathetic sad face from someone I haven’t actually spoken with in more than a decade. Instead I went to my telephone list in my agenda (which is a little Moleskin planner … since my iPhone 4 stopped working 6 months ago I’ve been blissfully cellphone-free). And I went down the list of the people I actually know and care enough about to write down their phone numbers and started calling. I got my sister on the phone and had a great conversation until it was time to go get the baby for dinner and bedtime.

So, so much better.

I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on loneliness. With Luis two countries away working, my local friends either away or busy with their lives, and feeling the full impact of solo parenting a toddler (is there ANYTHING lonelier? I doubt it…), I’ve been reflecting a lot on how my culture isolates and individualizes people. We always talk about how it takes a village to raise a child, how we as mothers and women need a tribe, and yet even living in a country where extended family is actually a thing (and my in-laws live right next door), I still spend most of my time alone with my baby. And everywhere I look around me I see how interconnected my Mexican neighbours are: they are with family and friends ALL the time. In this small town, almost everyone is related. And that means that even the youngest, singlest mama of them all (and there are lots of those around) probably has relatives and/or friends in the double digits around ALL the time.

Yesterday, needing some way to fill the evening after a very late nap, I decided to try driving over to the next town to go to the department store to look for earrings for A. The first time I tried last weekend, she got sick about 5 minutes into the drive and ended up puking all night. Yesterday we made it there… just as the store was closing. So I turned around and drove back home, noticing everywhere how babies and small children are constantly surrounded by people, all the time. It’s rare to see a mother and child travelling alone, anywhere. There is almost always another adult, likely multiple other children — travelling together on scooters, in overloaded cars, in the back of pickup trucks.

I wonder, what is it like to be that immersed in a community of people, all the time? Not as a foreigner … like I will always be, outside of the conversations, struggling to follow along, struggling to understand what is going on, exhausted by the effort. But to be born into it: parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins — so, so many cousins. I admit, I am jealous of that connection. I want to never feel so alone that my soul breaks into little pieces, that it happens without anyone noticing because there’s no one here. Because that’s how I’ve lived most of my life. No matter how hard I try to find community, partnership, any kind of closeness in my daily life, it eludes me. What the fuck, WHY?

Of course, it’s circumstantial. My (very small) extended family is distant, physically and emotionally. My immediate family is one of the best, but it’s a total of 5 people living thousands of kilometers apart. My adult children have their own lives, also thousands of kilometers away. I spent most of my adult life as a single/co-parent living in an incredibly socially closed city. After living there for more than 15 years I could count my close friends on one hand and still have fingers left to flip the bird to a city that never welcomed me, never made me feel any sense of belonging or home. My current partner has a job in the bush, and we need money so he is away working. I have a small circle of lovely friends who live very, very far away. Some of this is by choice, but a lot of it is by necessity. In place of real community, I have animals and gardens and a small child who need me and who I love very much. But caregiving is not the same as community.

Perhaps loneliness is a part of the human condition. But I know it’s also cultural. I come from white Euro-diaspora Protestant settler stock. Is there any cultural group more fucked up, depressed, and isolated? We have all the privacy and freedom and privilege we know what to do with, but what is that worth without connection? Without roots? Without home? There’s more to think about there but right now I’m just exhausted by trying to keep myself together, fighting off the fog of isolation and despair, one day at a time.

I’m grateful for the connections I do have, even though they are far away. And for an unlimited long-distance telephone plan, which I intend to start putting to good use…