Written by: Hannah Howard, ParentCo Editor-in-Chief & Mom of 2
Before I became a mom, I felt pretty solid in who I was. I was a writer with my first book out. I had bylines I was proud of. I traveled. I had long, lingering dinners with friends where no one was watching the clock. I had a marriage that felt like a true partnership. I had done a lot of hard work on myself—real work, the kind that changes how you move through the world. I had been in recovery from an eating disorder since my mid-twenties, and I didn’t take that lightly. I had tools. I had language. I had people.
And I think, if I’m being honest, I believed that all of that would protect me.
Not from the chaos of having a baby, exactly—but from the kind of mental health spiral I had known before. I thought I had already done my breaking.
Then I became a mom on April 9, 2020.
Which, in hindsight, is almost too on the nose. The world outside was shutting down. There were sirens in the distance, empty streets, the low, constant hum of fear. And inside my body, something else was shifting in ways I didn’t understand.
I remember the light that spring—how it came in bright through the windows, like the world was insisting on beauty even as everything felt uncertain. I remember washing my hands over and over again, the dry, cracked skin. I remember the quiet.
And I remember the baby.
How small she felt. How heavy she felt. The way her head fit in the palm of my hand. The way her cries could pierce straight through me, like something biological and ancient had been switched on.
I did not know you had to feed a baby every three hours. I truly didn’t. Or maybe I had heard it, but it didn’t land. It didn’t translate into the lived experience of it—the way time collapses, the way you’re always just coming up for air before you have to go back under.
Feed. Burp. Change. Soothe. Try to sleep. Not sleep. Do it again.
I have always been someone who needs sleep in a very real, physical way. Without it, I don’t just feel tired, I feel untethered. My thoughts get slippery. My emotions get louder. My body feels like it’s vibrating just under the surface.
And I was so, so tired.
There was no relief valve. No one dropping by to hold the baby while I took a shower that lasted longer than ninety seconds. No easy handoff. Just me, my newborn, and this relentless loop.
Sometimes I would sit in the chair in her room in the middle of the night, the house completely still, and feel like I had disappeared. Like I had been replaced by this version of myself whose only job was to keep this tiny person alive.
Eighteen months later, I had my son, Julius.
He is joy. He is warmth. He is the kind of baby who curls into you like he’s always known you.
He is also when things tipped.
Because suddenly it wasn’t just the intensity of one baby, it was two. Two sets of needs, two rhythms, two bodies depending on mine. The sleep deprivation wasn’t acute anymore; it was chronic. My nervous system never really reset.
What had once felt like overwhelm started to feel, at times, unmanageable.
And for the first time in my life, I needed more than the tools I had.
I went on Zoloft.
Even writing that, I can feel the part of me that wants to soften it or qualify it. But I’m not going to. Because if you had asked me before I became a mom, I would have said all the right things about mental health care. I believe in therapy. I believe in support. I believe in all of it.
But somewhere deeper, quieter, I think I believed that I wouldn’t need medication. That I had already done enough work. That I had already learned how to manage myself.
I hadn’t.
And taking it didn’t mean I had failed. It meant I was paying attention.
It helped. Not in a dramatic, overnight way. But in a steadying way. Like the volume got turned down just enough for me to hear myself think again. For me to feel like I could move through my days without constantly bracing.
But the medication was only part of it.
I had to learn how to ask for help in a way that did not come naturally to me at all. I like being capable. I like being the one who can handle things. I like being the person other people rely on.
Motherhood—especially motherhood with two very young kids—did not care about that identity.
I had to say things out loud that felt uncomfortable: I need help. I can’t do this today. Can you take them so I can lie down? Can you come over? Can you just be here?
I also hired a mom coach, which, a few years earlier, I probably would have dismissed. But she didn’t offer platitudes. She helped me look at my actual, messy, overfull life and ask: what actually matters here?
She helped me prioritize in a way that felt almost radical. To put my own needs—sleep, time to write, time to be a person who is not actively caregiving—on the list. Not at the bottom. Not as a reward. On the list.
She helped me see that fun wasn’t frivolous. That rest wasn’t something I had to earn. That I was allowed to take up space in my own life, even now.
I wish I had known that.
I wish I had known that needing antidepressants wouldn’t mean I had done something wrong. That it wouldn’t erase all the work I had done to get to a good place. That it could be part of that work.
I wish I had known that you can be deeply resourced—loved, supported, self-aware—and still find yourself struggling in ways that surprise you.
I wish I had known that motherhood doesn’t just expand your capacity for love. It also exposes every place where you are stretched thin.
And I wish I had known that getting help—real help, tangible help—is not a failure of strength.
It’s a form of it.
If you are in it right now—if you are exhausted in a way that feels hard to explain, if your mind feels louder or darker than you expected, if you are wondering why this feels harder than you thought it would—I want you to know this:
You are not doing it wrong.
This is truly and incredibly hard.
And there are more ways through than you might be able to see from where you’re standing.
That might look like therapy. It might look like medication. It might look like texting someone and saying, Can you come over? It might look like handing the baby to someone else and stepping outside for five minutes of air.
It might look like putting yourself on the list.
You are allowed to need support. You are allowed to take it. You are allowed to build a version of motherhood that includes you in it.
I didn’t know that before.
I do now.
Join The Motherhood Center for our upcoming webinar with ParentCo and Tiny Transitions, where we’ll continue this conversation and talk honestly about what we wish we knew before becoming parents, and how to find support when you need it.
