Men need a shoulder to cry on

AT THE risk of sounding like I’m five years old, I MADE A NEW FRIEND AND SHE IS REALLY NICE! Our eyes met across the playground. She was pushing her pretty baby on the swings, and I was watching my daughter practise her circus skills on the rope frame trying not to scream, “DONT FALL AND CRACK

YOUR HEAD OPEN” at her.

My new friend and I began to chat. We hit it off and had a proper laugh instead of just the usual mother’s small talk – schools, siblings, reflux. When it was time to go, I took a leaf out of my five-year-old daughter’s book and said: “Let’s be friends!” before showing off how fast I could turn on the spinning seat. We swopped numbers, texted each other and are going for coffee next week.

Isn’t it marvellous being a woman? You can meet another woman you like and it’s perfectly normal to say, “let’s hang out”. Just like when you are little. Can men do this? Can two men, strangers, connect in a pub or a park, then say, “Hey, do you wanna hang out again, mate? Coffee?”

In my old life pre-kids, when I felt immortal and always out at a party or club, there would sometimes be a stranger in crisis, a girl crying in the toilet because her boyfriend dumped her, or some other heartache exaggerated by booze. My own girlfriends and I would help, lend tissues, wipe tears, tell her he’s not worth it, make her laugh with no barriers beneath the umbrella of friendship.

Men don’t seem to have this cushion of support. For men, getting into a fight is more socially acceptable than crying in public. I’ve never seen a group of lads gathered around a guy, drying his tears and saying: “Stay strong babe, you’re a prince and she doesn’t deserve you.”

It’s easy to mock the gangs of new moms who gather in coffee shops and discuss breastfeeding and sleep patterns. I see grumpy social media posts moaning about a coffee being ruined by their gurgling babies.

What these women are actually doing is building a raft for themselves, and each other.

Without friends in the same boat, parenthood can be soul-crushingly lonely. Women create communities at this time, weaving networks and giving ourselves more chance to notice, more confidence to intervene when one of our number is slipping under. But even then it’s hard to speak out when all is not rosy.

I had post-natal depression with both of my children for a year after they were born. I couldn’t talk about it at all with my first. To this day, my ex, the father of my first born, has no idea of the deep, dark place my head was in much of the time. I felt utterly insane and eventually, after we split up, got professional psychiatric help.

With my daughter (who I had on my own), it was as bad, but this time, I was able to tell people. I was in Australia with my children, working at a comedy festival. I called my brother to say I didn’t trust myself to go out on to the balcony of my 27th floor apartment. I told other comics how lonely and down I was feeling and they organised days out which included my children and me, made a fuss of the kids and made me feel less needy and lost.

But men, too, sometimes feel desperately lonely after becoming a parent. The most vilified men are those who cheat on their wives soon after the birth of a baby. I’m not condoning it, but can we consider that in a world where it isn’t the socially accepted norm for new fathers to talk about their feelings of confusion, exclusion, loneliness without being called “man child” or “selfish”, that escapism might be sought?

I want to see men swopping numbers in parks and going for coffee, I want to see dads’ support groups invade coffee shops and talk about the sheer terror of it all. And yes, I want to see Dave giving Mark a cuddle in The Swan toilets, saying: “It’s all right, mate, let it out.”

• Shappi Khorsandi is a comedian and writer