Is There Anything Lonelier Than Parenting When You're Doing It Differently?

I suspect some of you may feel a tightening in your chest just reading the  headline above; perhaps a memory rising of a morning that felt impossibly heavy or an evening that ended in frustrated tears.

Let me say it gently: parenting can be lonely. And while there are certainly people who go days without seeing another person – and that kind of isolation is deeply painful – there is another kind of loneliness that is far more subtle and much harder to articulate unless you have lived it.