The average first-time mother gets only 90 minutes of adult contact a day, according to a new survey. No wonder we go bonkers, says Lesley Thomas

	The wriggle-monster: Lesley Thomas cried when her mother left her alone with her baby

You see them hanging around in Starbucks at odd times of the day, lingering over half-drunk lattes. Hollow-eyed, they rock back and forth, often with something that looks like an angry, bald Chihuahua in their arms.

They may be patting the noisy creature on its back while balancing it uncomfortably on one shoulder. They are the undead; the haunted, sleepless new mothers, tortured by insomniac nights and exhausting, capricious days.

But shouldn't they be happy? After all, they've just had their first, yearned-for baby. What on earth is wrong with these women?

A new survey has confirmed what most mothers know all too well – that the first year of motherhood is the loneliest of their entire lives. Just over 53 per cent, according to the poll of 2,000 women, say they are "lonely and isolated" and two-thirds say they feel "cut off from normal life".

Tiredness has always been a feature of the early days of parenthood, but isolation is a relatively new phenomenon. Elena Dalrymple, editor of Mother & Baby magazine, which commissioned the study with Tesco, says: "Leaving work and having a baby is a huge physical adjustment for women.

Friends without babies drift off; grandparents live miles away; neighbours are barely on nodding terms. Other mums you bump into at the shops aren't your type and the social life you once knew has ground to a halt. Meanwhile, babies are extremely demanding and life can be very lonely in our modern, anti-social society."

The average first-time mother, according to this new wisdom, spends 90 minutes a day in the company of other grown-ups – apart from their partner. Wow. A whole hour and a half of adult contact a day?

I suspect these are city dwellers whose hectic social calendars include mother and baby massage groups and those singalong-a-baby meetings where zombie mums stare into space while performing dirge-like renditions of The Wheels on the Bus.

The "tunes" are accompanied by limp hand actions and the unspoken shared acknowledgment that this is not, in fact, stimulating their three-month-olds. It is, however, Mum's only escape from the house and a reason to get dressed on Wednesdays.

A staggering 34 per cent of women – and this really does make me want to cry – spend all day alone. These are surely the rural mums.

Before I had children, I fantasised about moving out of London to the countryside, where my growing child could frolic in rolling hills. As soon as my first baby arrived, though, I changed my mind sharpish.

In downtown south London, when there is no other adult company available you can always go on an "outing" to Tesco and have a natter with the checkout vixens – a one-way chat is better than nothing. Even the postman (when he's not on strike) will shoot the breeze about the weather – no matter that he is backing slowly away all the while.

Until a couple of generations ago, many mums could rely on their own parents and extended families for succour and company, but fewer and fewer of us live close enough now. The typical modern-day set-up is that Granny moves in for a week or so after the birth and then disappears to her home hundreds of miles away a week later.

Having ignored her advice for the previous 30 years, my own mother suddenly seemed a guru after the birth of my first daughter six years ago. But like the two in three women surveyed by Mother & Baby, my mum lives hundreds of miles away.

When, after a couple of weeks of granny duty, she left for the train station, I bit my bottom lip hard until her taxi pulled away.