The first time someone asked me what I’d been reading, I genuinely couldn’t remember the last book I’d finished. I stood there in the doorway of the church hall, holding a glass of warm white wine, and my mind was completely blank. Not because I hadn’t read anything. Because I hadn’t done a single thing for myself in so long that the question felt like it was meant for somebody else.

I’d had my son eighteen months earlier. And somewhere in those eighteen months, I’d quietly vanished.

The disappearing

I love him more than I have words for. I need to say that first, because what comes next can sound like a complaint and it isn’t. It’s just the truth nobody had warned me about.

From the moment he woke up to the moment he finally, finally went down, I was Mum. The feeds, the naps, the endless small logistics, the worry that runs underneath all of it like a current. And in the gaps, I was tidying up the evidence of the day so the next one could begin. I wasn’t unhappy exactly. I was just gone. Rachel, the person, had been folded away somewhere to make room.

People kept telling me to “make time for myself,” as though that were a thing you could simply decide. A bubble bath while he napped. As if a bath could find the woman who used to have opinions about films and stay up too late arguing about books and feel like the main character in her own life.

The loneliness of it surprised me most. I was never alone. I was touched, needed, climbed on, all day long. And I had never felt so far from another adult who saw me.

Two hours, first Wednesday

It was another mum at the baby group, of all places, who mentioned the book club. First Wednesday of the month, at the library, free, “and honestly I go mostly to drink wine and be a person for an evening.”

Be a person for an evening. I almost cried right there over the soft play.

I nearly didn’t go. The guilt was enormous. Two whole hours, and my husband perfectly capable, and still I stood at the door with my coat on inventing reasons. What if he needed me. What if I had nothing to say. What if I’d forgotten how to talk about anything that wasn’t sleep schedules.

I went. I read the book in stolen ten-minute bursts, on the floor beside the cot, in the bath after all, one-handed at 3am during a feed. And on the first Wednesday I sat in a room with eight women and we talked about the book, and then about everything, and not one single person asked me how the baby was sleeping.

They asked me what I thought. About the book, about the ending, about whether the character had been brave or just reckless. I had thoughts. They came rushing back like blood into a foot you’ve been sitting on. I talked. I laughed at something and the laugh sounded like my old one.

I walked home that night and it was dark and cold and I felt, for the first time in a year and a half, like I had edges again. Like I was a shape, not just a service.

Coming back

I haven’t missed a first Wednesday since. It is two hours a month and it has held me together more than I can explain to anyone who hasn’t been that tired and that erased.

The strange, lovely thing is that being Rachel again made me a better mum, not a worse one. The guilt told me the opposite. The guilt was wrong.

If you’re disappearing into looking after someone, here is what a paperback and a room full of women taught me:

  • Wanting time for yourself is not a betrayal. You are allowed to exist as a person and not only as what you provide.
  • A book club is a perfect lifeline, because it asks nothing of your exhausted brain except an opinion. There’s always the book, so you don’t have to perform being interesting. Look for relaxed, social and beginner-friendly book clubs, and don’t worry if you didn’t finish.
  • You will not have forgotten who you are. She’s just been folded away. She comes back faster than you’d think, the moment someone asks her what she thinks.
  • Two hours is enough to start.

I thought I’d lost myself. It turned out I’d just put myself down somewhere to carry everything else, and I was allowed to pick myself back up.

If you’ve forgotten the last thing you did purely for you, start small. Find a book club near you or browse clubs by your borough. Two hours. First Wednesday. Go and be a person for an evening.