Babylune

Two Degrees of Isolation: One Solution?

by kate baggott on June 21st, 2006

I don’t know how many of you reading this are on maternity leave and how many are longer term stay-at-home mothers, but one of the things women at home with children often come up against is loneliness and isolation. Especially, if like me, your husband comes home from work tired and more capable of grunting than stimulating intellectual conversation.

Now, I don’t want to cross into the GenBetween’s territory of combining childcare and eldercare, but an idea came to while I was reading an article in the Christian Science Monitor this morning. You and your baby are a team and maybe the two of you could do some good in the world as dynamic volunteering duo. If there is one group of people who are more isolated than stay-at-home mothers, it is old people with limited mobility. Perhaps we could be solving each other’s problem?
The CSM article describes some new, informal organisations in which people drop by on shut-ins just to chat.

• As one way of easing that loneliness, an informal network of “friendly visiting” programs is springing up around the country. Bearing names such as Befrienders and Caring Neighbors, they match each older individual with a volunteer, hoping to establish a long-term relationship. Despite the growing need, most groups operate on shoestring budgets and with minimal staffing.

• “There are always more people than we can begin to think about serving,” says Marty Guerin, executive director of Little Brothers - Friends of the Elderly in Jamaica Plain, Mass.

• Some isolated older people have children or relatives, but they live at a distance or rarely visit. Others never married or had children, or they’ve outlived their children.

Maybe there’s someone in your neighbourhood who would love to visit with you and your baby? My children and I recently visited an 85 year-old friend in a rest home and, while we were there, two other women, one aged 102, came in their wheelchairs to see the baby. I knew we’d made their day. And their admiration of little girl made my day too.

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POSTED IN: Mental Health