It’s not just men who need their own own private hidey-hole. Leigh-Anne Hunter finds a room of her own (for a few hours) It's witching hour at our house and an H-bomb in toddler form is barrelling towards me, shedding meatball and babbling what sounds like "Bedlam, bedlaaam!" Don't bother trying to hide in the loo. Toddlers have mommy antennae.story_article_left1Warp-jump about a century back, to Virginia Woolf's East Sussex cottage. You imagine the sounds of birdsong. A typewriter. Certainly Ms Woolf didn't have to concern herself with prying mashed banana from her shoes. A room of one's own? I wish.Granted Woolf's 1929 essay wasn't quite about mothers and their need to escape the cave troll of domesticity. But it was a groundbreaking treatise, in which Woolf championed a woman's right to aloneness. Yet it's still deemed more acceptable when a man retreats to the wilds (or golf course) because it's seen as a primal male urge. Like shooting buck or nose-picking while driving.I wasn't thinking about Virginia Woolf when, in a doctor's office, I wept over a plastic cranium. He diagnosed me with postnatal depression and waved me off with a script as if my despair was infectious. I could have punched him, but I didn't have the energy.I wasn't thinking about Virginia Woolf when, on my route home one day, of their own accord my hands turned the steering wheel down the wrong street. The hotel I'd once stayed in pre-motherhood was still there, as I'd hoped. A 1940s Tuscan-style manor, painted peach, with white roses climbing the gate.I asked the new owner, K, if he had a room until bedtime. "Oh sure. Baby blues?" he said, reading my mind. "You're not the first. I have a mom who stays in the Peach Room every month." He's seen it all. Including Danish tourists skinny-dipping in the hotel pool.Checking in, I felt guilty, as if I were having an affair. What am I doing here? I'm a mother now. I need to man up.Maybe it was the view of a river from the window that stayed me. A family of geese balanced on the stones. "Floods in summer," K said. "You wouldn't believe it's the same river." Italian prisoners of war built the canal, altering the river's course. Maybe she's still pissed off.story_article_right2I fell into the bed (my bones melted into it). I slept deeply to the sound of water, and dreamt of naked Danes.K was a gentle giant accustomed to being his patrons' therapist, and cooking for them. "I think I'm having a nervous breakdown," I told him. "Is there any other kind?" he said.I read. I walked the lawns. "Mind the acorns!" K shouted. All day you'd hear these small meteorites thudding on the grass. In that hotel, over eight hours, I felt held against the bosom of a benevolent nonna, and the fog inside me lifted.Finding a quiet hotel room became a monthly obsession. The ritual was always the same. I'd arrive early carrying a small suitcase and be home in time to put my daughter to bed.I thought about Virginia Woolf that first time, sitting next to that river. How she'd put rocks in her pockets and walked into one. Perhaps if she'd received proper treatment for her depression she wouldn't have ended her life, but her insights could help women battling this illness today.Because Woolf understood that a room is more than four walls. It's a space to hear our thoughts, a reprieve from the madding crowd. Or one madding toddler.No, we can't all afford regular hotel stays (I had to quit my addiction), but he can babysit for two hours while you play the trombone.A woman also needs her cave...