I am sitting here at a local eatery quietly writing. Unintentionally, I’m observing the people around me. Here’s a fascinating observation about the world we live in.
Directly in front of me is a mother of a 1 year old interviewing a babysitter so she can go back to work. It’s pretty clear that this married mother of a one year old needs someone to talk to. For the last hour she hasn’t stopped talking. She has shared with this stranger all sorts of personal information dating back to getting pregnant with Elliot. I keep thinking, “Does this babysitter need to know all of this? Does any of this have anything to do with her role as a babysitter?” Of course it does. This mom wants to know that her babysitter understand her. She wants to know that she is hiring a co-parent. In a way, she is hiring a friend. She needs to know that this person is trustworthy. And for this lady, being trustworty includes listening to her yack for ours at a time.
More importantly, my observation is that there are a lot of lonely new mom’s out there. This mom needs a playgroup, she needs a Bible study, she needs a church family, and most importantly… she needs to get a life outside of Elliot.
The reality is that if people don’t have someone to talk to on a regular basis, they’ll go crazy. God created each of us to connect with others, we crave human interaction that is empathetic and just says “uh huh” 200 times per hour. It’s kind of like sleep… when we don’t get that on a regular basis we just data dump on the nearest person who will listen. In this case it’s a babysitter. But it could just as easily be her cable guy, the checkout person at the store, or a random person at Starbucks.
What can we all do to help this happen for new moms?
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