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.
"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.
"Postpartum depression and anxiety hit me like a freight train. I couldn’t pull myself out from under it. I felt horrible for feeling the way I did because society tells new moms that motherhood shouldn’t be this way."
"I kept trying to quiet the thoughts by telling myself it wasn’t permanent, but it seemed almost impossible to believe. It was like an out of body experience."
"I kept begging the nurse to tell me that I was OK. I kept saying over and over again, “I don’t feel alive. Am I alive?” The nurse kept asking me if I knew that I was repeating that over and over again. I didn’t care though. I didn’t feel like I was in my body. I was so detached from reality and the world around me..."
"I was ashamed that I was struggling with depression instead of experiencing pure joy, but I was not alone. You are not alone, and there is nothing shameful about it."
"I packed a bag at one point so I could run away in the middle of the night. I told myself that they would be OK. He could find a wife that wasn’t such a burden and didn’t cry all the time. My daughter could have a mom that didn’t get angry at every little thing."
"What was postpartum depression? No one told me this could happen. No one told me I wasn't a failure if I experienced it. No one told me they were there for me if I was struggling or there were steps I could take to heal."
