When British blogger Gylisa Jane became pregnant with her first child in 2015, she didn’t excitedly start searching for local playgroups.
“I had a preconceived idea that mummy groups were vicious cliques,” Jane began in a recent Facebook post. “I hadn’t been in one at school — and I didn’t plan to start now.”
In the post titled ‘I Never Wanted Mummy Friends,’ the 25-year-old explained that she had no desire to discuss things such as postpartum stitches, diapers or “different colored s–t” with a bunch of strangers. “I didn’t need them anyway, I had my soul mate — my baby daddy. The man I had chosen for this journey,” Jane wrote. “He would be there for everything. I didn’t need anyone else.”
But everything changed when Jane and her boyfriend, Ryan Evans, welcomed their daughter Lily, now 2. “[Ryan] didn’t understand me anymore. He was trying to figure out his Dad Role. He didn’t understand why I was crying about putting the kettle in the fridge. He didn’t know why I’d forgotten to take the [packages] to the post office,” she wrote. “He didn’t know why I had no love left over for him.”
That’s when Jane realized she needed mummy friends after all. “The ones that had been there, done that. The ones that were fumbling through for the first time — just like me. The ones who had had every argument you can imagine with their husband,” Jane continued. “The ones proving you didn’t need to lose yourself along the way. That you’ll find a new you as you go . . . So I didn’t want mummy friends. I needed them.”
Her message has been liked more than 22,000 times so far, with hundreds of women tagging their mom friends.
Jane credits her mom friends for saving her from what she calls “the black hole” of postnatal depression. “They helped in a way that my partner and health professionals just couldn’t,” she tells Us Weekly. “There’s something invaluable about feeling like you’re not the only one.”
The blogger suggests finding an online community. “In the early days while trying to understand breast-feeding, surviving on no sleep and wondering why the hell I’d done this to myself, I logged on to find 10 other women feeling the exact same way,” she tells Us. “In that moment I knew I’d get through it, just like all the other women that had done it before me.”
