Motherly acquired Motherhood Understood, continuing our mission of providing a woman-centered and supportive community for mothers. We are leaning into telling personal essays from mothers as a way that we learn, connect and feel less alone. Centered on the perspectives of maternal mental health, these stories are intended to help moms feel validated and seen.
"Working from home, homeschooling a five-year old who didn’t understand the idea of not leaving the house or seeing other siblings, and coping with the daily changes of pregnancy was beginning to make me feel anxious."
"My baby should be in a park under the sun, on the swings, walking on grass, befriending other kids, but instead, he is at home all day every day, pacing from one room to the other, playing with the same toys each day, seeing no new faces apart from his parents."
"No one told me I could change my clothes. No one told me I could bathe. I needed a caregiver. I needed an advocate. I needed someone to take care of me."
“PTSD?” I asked. “Yes, from childhood trauma. You may think you’ve only been dealing with PPD but this is just a little tip of the iceberg. I’m glad you came in today.”
"Mama bears, I know some of you have walked a similar road or are walking it now. I send you love and give you permission to turn that radio up a little louder."
"The crying didn't worry me as much as the rage. Having struggled with depression before, I knew the crying pretty well. I knew to let it out. I knew to take care of myself. But I had never experienced anything like the rage before."
"'I’m sorry, it sounds like you may just have the baby blues,' were the words that came out of the nurse’s mouth at my OB’s office when I called every day for a week begging for help at one-week postpartum."
"I thought as a mental health professional myself, I would be more aware of what I was going though and of the impact it had on me, but I was so lost, so sucked into the pain and loneliness and suffering, that I couldn't see through the fog."
"I have always been a hypochondriac with an obsessive fear of dying. I used to get blood work quarterly just to make sure I was OK. If you know anything about depression, you know obsessing over death is a major symptom. Covid knocked the wind out of me."
Sometimes newfound motherhood finds you in a doctor’s office, checking your battle wounds from labor and painful delivery. And sometimes it finds you in the waiting room of an ER, clinging to the last bit of sanity you have left-begging for someone to hear you.
