Model mom admits to blues
THE 31-YEAR-OLD mother was healthy and beautiful, and so was her baby. The mom was also rich, happily employed and sociable. Her husband was successful and supportive. And she was profoundly, achingly, relentlessly miserable.
“I was different than before. Getting out of bed was painful. My lower back throbbed; my shoulders – even my wrists – hurt. I didn’t have an appetite… I never left the house. I mean, never. Not even a tiptoe outside. I’d ask people who came inside why they were wet. Was it raining? There was a lot of spontaneous crying. I was so tired of being in pain. Of sleeping on the couch. Of taking things out on the wrong people. Of not enjoying life.”
What she had was postpartum depression.
What made her different is that she was Chrissy Teigen – Sports Illustrated cover girl, best-selling cookbook author, host of Lip Sync Battle, voluble tweeter, and wife of John Legend, the award-winning singer/songwriter/actor. You don’t look at her and think she’d fall victim to the malaise that affects one out of nine new mothers in the US, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
But she did. In the cover story of the April issue of Glamour magazine, Teigen brings her lively, tell-all prose style to the story of how she fell apart after the birth last April of her daughter, Luna; how she eventually realised what was wrong with her and how she’s dealing with it.
It’s not as though you’ve never before met anyone going through this (or gone through it yourself). But she makes this painful period easy to read about, which should make her story helpful to other women in pain.
The most appealing part is her eye-rolling awareness of how lucky she is compared with most people, as in when she says: “There are weeks when I still don’t leave the house for days; then I’m randomly at the Super Bowl or Grammys. (This is cringeworthily unrelatable, and I am very aware of that – it’s giving me anxiety.)”
Anyway, she’s taking antidepressants, she’s finding a therapist, she says she’s getting better. “I love John and Luna more than I can imagine loving anything, and John and I still hope to give Luna a few siblings. Postpartum depression hasn’t changed that.”
The article ends with a link to a what-you-need-to-know site with advice for any new mom who needs to battle the same problem – with a lot fewer resources than Chrissy Teigen has. – The Washington Post