moms...you NEED (yes, need) this
why motherhood is the loneliest it's ever been in human history (and no, a bubble bath isn't gonna fix it)
Let me paint you a picture.
You’re hanging out at the playground with your kiddies. And other kiddies and parents are allll over. You are technically surrounded. And technically, not alone.
And yet…
There is this aching, persistent feeling of being completely invisible Of going through the motions. Of nobody—not really, not fully—seeing what’s actually happening inside of you right now. Of feeling wildly and completely alone.
And while this seems kinda ridiculous, it’s not.
You are a mother living in the loneliest era of motherhood in all of human history. And your nervous system is desperately, biologically, and urgently CRAVING something that modern life has almost entirely stripped away from us.
The village.
And I know, I know. Everyone and their mom talks about it.
But I’m not talking about it as this cutesy, trendy topic. I’m talking about it as a literal, physiological need that your body was wired for long before you ever became a mother.
the science of “tend and befriend”
You’ve probably heard of fight or flight. The stress response. The thing that kicks in when your body perceives a threat and floods you with cortisol and adrenaline so you can either punch something or run away from it.
But guess what? That research was conducted almost exclusively on men. SHOCKER.
For decades, the stress response was studied in male subjects—male animals and male humans—and the findings were presented as universal. As just...how humans work under stress.
But then in 2000, a UCLA researcher named Dr. Shelley Taylor published something that changed everything.
She noticed that women under stress don’t just fight or flee.
They tend and befriend.
When women experience stress, their bodies release oxytocin—the bonding hormone —alongside cortisol. And that oxytocin doesn’t just make them feel warm and fuzzy. It actively drives them toward other women. It compels connection and makes them want to gather, talk, be witnessed, and witness others.
So when you’re feeling uber stressed and feel the desire to connect with someone who really GETS IT, it’s not you being “too emotional” or “too needy” or whatever else you’ve been told about your need for deep connection.
This is your BIOLOGY. This is your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
When women actually respond to that drive…when they connect with other women, when they talk it out, when they gather…their cortisol levels drop, their stress response regulates, and their nervous system literally calms down in a way that isolation just can’t replicate.
SO, repeat after me, “Connection is not a luxury for women. It is a physiological NEED!”
we were never meant to do this alone
Go back far enough in human history—like, waaay back—and you’ll find something really interesting.
Mothers didn’t raise children alone.
Not even close. The idea of one woman, in one house, primarily responsible for the raising of her children with minimal support from her wider community was UNHEARD of. That is a brand spankin’ new invention and a blip on the timeline of human existence.
For most of human history, across most cultures on earth, motherhood happened inside of a village. Women raised children together. They shared the labor, the knowledge, the feeding, and the holding. Elder women passed wisdom to younger women. Children were watched and held by many hands, not just two. And mothers had each other.
Not just for childcare logistics. For everything.
They processed births together. They grieved losses together. They navigated the identity shift of becoming a mother inside of a container of women who had already been through it, who could say I know, I know, I know. I’ve got you. They had ritual. They had ceremony. They had the kind of witnessed transformation that we now go through almost entirely alone, in the dark, wondering why the hell we feel like we’re losing our minds.
Anthropologists call this “alloparenting”—the practice of cooperative child-rearing across a community. And the research is crystal ball clear: it wasn’t just good for children. It was ESSENTIAL for mothers. The data shows that mothers in communities with strong social support networks have lower rates of postpartum depression, lower cortisol levels, higher reported wellbeing, and stronger attachment with their children. SIGN ME UP.
The village wasn’t a nice perk of ancient life. It was the entire operating system of motherhood. And then modernity came along and dismantled it almost entirely. Woof.
the loneliness epidemic nobody is talking about
Wanna know an insane in the membrane stat??
Chronic loneliness is as damaging to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
FIFTEEN CIGS A DAY!!
We have entire public health campaigns about smoking. We put warnings on packets. We tax cigarettes into oblivion. And yet the loneliness epidemic (which is affecting mothers at absolutely staggering rates) gets...what? A “self-care Sunday” post? A reminder to take a bubble bath?
I legit cannnotttt.
A 2020 survey found that over 60% of mothers reported feeling lonely on a regular basis. Over 60% (and that was before the pandemic made everything infinitely worse).
I know I touched upon this above, but I wanna be really clear about something: lonely doesn’t always mean alone. Some of the loneliest mothers I’ve ever spoken to are surrounded by people all day long. They have partners who love them. They have children who need them every second of every waking hour. They are never, ever alone.
And they are deeply, profoundly lonely.
Because there is a specific kind of loneliness that comes from not being truly SEEN. From going through one of the most significant identity transformations of your entire life—because that is what matrescence is, that is what motherhood IS—without a single person in your orbit who can hold the full complexity of what you’re experiencing.
Not the “I’m good, tired, you know how it is” version. The REAL version.
The version where you love your children so fiercely it physically hurts and you also sometimes grieve the woman you were before them. The version where you are exhausted and overwhelmed and occasionally furious and also so full of joy it makes you want to cry. The version that doesn’t fit neatly into any of the boxes society has given you for what a mother is supposed to feel.
THAT version. The one most of us carry around silently (and often shamefully) because we’re not sure there’s a safe place to put it.
what happens when women actually gather
I want to tell you about something I’ve witnessed when I gather with mothers. Because the science is one thing. But experiencing it happen in real time is another thing entirely.
There is a moment—and I’ve seen it happen over and over again—where a mama in circle says something out loud that she has never said to another human being. Something she’s been carrying in the swirls of her mind, maybe for months. Maybe for years. Something she was almost certain made her a bad mother, a broken woman, and/or a person who was fundamentally doing it allll wrong.
And she FINALLY says it!!!
The room goes quiet for just a second.
But then—every.single.time—someone else says oh my god, me too.
You can literally watch something shift in her body.
Her shoulders drop. She exhales. Her eyes fill up.
Because she has just experienced something that no amount of alone time, no bubble bath, and no journaling session can replicate…
She has been WITNESSED. And she has found out she is not alone.
That’s why one of my most fav sayings that I use inside our MILF & Tea mothers circles is “when we gather together as women and get really REAL, we move from shame to OMG, same!!”
This is what Dr. Brené Brown has spent her career researching and what she calls the core of human connection—the moment of me too. The moment where shame loses its power because it has been brought into the light and met with recognition instead of judgment.
This is what women’s circles have done for thousands of years across virtually every culture on earth. Long before we had the research to explain why it works, women knew intuitively that gathering mattered. That sitting in circle together, sharing, witnessing, and being witnessed was not indulgent. It was ESSENTIAL.
The Yoruba people of West Africa have egbe—women’s societies that supported mothers through every transition of life. Indigenous cultures across North America held women’s circles as sacred space. Ancient Greek women gathered in thiasos—ritual communities of women who supported each other through life’s passages. Medieval European women had guilds. Celtic women had their bean feasa—women of wisdom who held the community together. And on and on.
This is not a new idea. This is actually the oldest idea. We just forgot it somewhere in the middle of building a world that told us we should be able to do everything alone.
belonging is not optional
Here’s something else the research tells us that I think about all the damn time.
Belonging (aka the felt sense of being truly seen, accepted, and part of a community) is not a nice-to-have for human beings. It is a fundamental psychological need, right up there with food and shelter in Maslow’s hierarchy. Without it, we don’t just feel sad. We actually don’t function as well. Our cognition suffers. Our immune system suffers. And our capacity for joy suffers.
And mothers (who are already navigating a profound identity shift, running on depleted resources, and shouldering an invisible load that goes largely unacknowledged) are among the people MOST in need of genuine belonging.
And not the performative, “we all love our kids so much!!” moms group kind where everyone is presenting their best self and nobody is telling the truth.
The REAL kind. The kind where you can walk in as you actually are—exhausted, confused, messy, luminous, complicated, celebratory, whole—and be met with recognition and love.
The kind where someone looks at you and says I see you. The real you. Not the highlight reel. You!!
That kind of belonging doesn’t just feel good. It is genuinely, measurably healing. Research from the University of Michigan found that even brief, meaningful social connection can restore cognitive function and improve executive decision-making in stressed individuals. And a Harvard study that tracked people for over 80 years found that the quality of our relationships is the single greatest predictor of health, happiness, and longevity—not wealth, social status, or achievement.
The quality of our relationships.
And yet…here we are raising a generation of mothers in conditions of profound relational poverty. Surrounded by connection opportunities that are a mile wide and an inch deep. With surfacey Instagram followers and Facebook groups and WhatsApp chats and absolutely nowhere to actually tell the truth.
this is why I built MILF & Tea
As convincing as the research is, that’s not why I birthed MILF & Tea. I birthed it because I felt the aching absence of it in my own body.
I know what it feels like to be a mother who loves her life and loves her kids and still has this ache of but does anyone actually SEE me right now? I created it because I’ve sat in enough circles to know that the moment a mama stops performing “fine” and starts telling the truth, something magic and ancient and deeply profound happens.
I created it because we are living in a moment where matrescence (the profound identity transformation of becoming a mother) is finally starting to get named and acknowledged and talked about.
And I believe that transformation deserves to happen inside of a love-filled container. With witnesses. With women who get it. With the kind of community that your nervous system has been aching for since the moment you became a mother (and probably long before).
MILF & Tea is a mothers circle (virtual and IRL in Bermuda) where we actually check in for real. Not the “I’m good, tired, you know how it is” version. The real version. We go deep. We tell the truth. We witness each other. We leave feeling more like ourselves than when we arrived.
It’s the kind of space that your tend-and-befriend nervous system has been desperately searching for. The kind that our great-great-grandmothers had built into the fabric of their lives without even thinking about it. The kind that the research (every single fiber inside of you) already knows you need.
And the first session is completely free (our next one is THIS Friday, March 13th at 12pm ET).
DM me “MILF & TEA” on Instagram @lexidangelo and I’ll send you all the deets.
you were not meant to do this alone
I want to end with this because I think it’s the most important thing I’ve said in this entire piece…
The fact that you are struggling…
The fact that you feel depleted or invisible or lonely or like you’ve lost some essential part of yourself in the becoming of a mother…
Is NOT evidence that you are doing motherhood wrong.
It is evidence that you are doing motherhood without the village that was always supposed to be there.
You were designed for community. Your nervous system was literally built for it. The tend-and-befriend response, the oxytocin, the thousands of years of women gathering together in circle…all of it is pointing to the same truth…
You were never meant to do this alone.
And you don’t have to. 🖤
If something in this landed for you—come find us. MILF & Tea is a mothers circle for the full-range, multidimensional mama who is doing ALL the things and quietly wondering where SHE went in the process. Real check-ins. Honest conversation. A lil ritual. Deep connection. The kind of space most of us didn’t know we were starving for until we walked into it.
First session is completely free. DM me “MILF & TEA” on Instagram @lexidangelo and I’ll send you all the deets. Can’t wait to see you there.