9 Celebrity Moms Share What They Actually Felt After Giving Birth

A baby can be the biggest gift of your life, but before a mother starts feeling this way, there can be a heavy postpartum period that includes depression and pain. And women, during this time, need more attention, care, and love because they give all of themselves to their children.

We at Bright Side would like people to be more mindful of the postpartum period, and that’s why we want to share 9 different experiences that celebrities had after giving birth.

1. Courteney Cox

If you’re a smart, beautiful, talented, and successful woman it doesn’t mean that you can’t be tired or depressed. This is what exactly happened to Courteney Cox after giving birth to her daughter Coco: “I couldn’t sleep. My heart was racing. And I got really depressed. I went to the doctor and found out my hormones had been pummeled.”

Good friends and therapy helped the actress to battle her postpartum depression.

2. Reese Witherspoon

Reese Witherspoon confessed that she had anxiety and battled with mental health issues for years: “My anxiety manifests as depression, so I would get really depressed. My brain is like a hamster on a wheel, and it won’t come off, I’ve been managing it my entire life.”

After delivering a baby she felt even more broken: “I was 23 years old when I had my first baby, and nobody explained to me that when you wean a baby, your hormones go into the toilet. I felt more depressed than I’d ever felt in my whole life. It was scary.” The actress says that with one kid she had a mild postpartum period, with another one it was severe and she had to take medication because, “I just wasn’t thinking straight at all.”

3. Katy Perry

Katy Perry also noticed that there is a lack of information about the postpartum experience: “Nobody talks about the first 6 weeks after you have the baby. Oh my god, it’s wild! What a roller coaster!”

The singer feels very emotional when she talks about the time after giving birth but still, she calls her baby the gift of her whole life.

4. Kate Hudson

On October 2, 2018, Kate Hudson announced the birth of her third child. She says that the last pregnancy was a bit different and it took a little bit longer to get back in shape: “It was like 12 months, but I did it differently.”

At the end of November 2018, she posted on her Instagram that she finally started focusing on herself and on her health: “It is the most challenging thing in the world to balance kids and personal time.”

5. Anne Hathaway

As a mother of 2 kids, Ann Hathaway knows the journey of being pregnant and having a postpartum period really well. She says: “There’s this tendency to portray getting pregnant, having kids, in one light, as if it’s all positive.”

She knows that you can feel pain and grief during this time, and this is normal: “But I know from my own experience, it’s so much more complicated than that. When you find out that your pain is shared by others, you just think, ‘I just feel that’s helpful information to have, so I’m not isolated in my pain.’ I mean, what is there to be ashamed of? This is grief, and that’s a part of life.”

6. Blake Lively

Blake Lively shares that after her third pregnancy she didn’t feel confident: “And I wish I felt as confident then as I do now, a year later looking back. That body gave me a baby. And was producing that baby’s entire food supply. What a beautiful miracle. But instead of feeling proud, I felt insecure. Simply because I didn’t fit into clothes. How silly is that in retrospect.”

7. Kate Winslet

Kate Winslet, after her last pregnancy, almost forgot about herself while taking care of her baby: “To be honest with you, after having a baby you end up being so busy with the baby and the nursing. And I have 2 other children as well, obviously, so there’s so much going on that the difficulty I find is remembering that you have to eat. Because when you’re nursing, you really have to eat, otherwise you don’t produce anything that’s going to feed your child.”

8. Adele

Adele opened up about her deep secret that she “mourns” the life she had before becoming a mother. There are things that she can’t get back and “it’s the freedom of being able to do whatever you want, whenever you want.”

Besides this, she had heavy postpartum depression: “Giving, giving, giving, to a baby or a toddler, when they can’t even talk to you, your brain goes a bit mushy. You’re not stimulated very much.”

9. Amanda Seyfried

Amanda Seyfried also had a negative experience that influenced her a lot: “I had something that went wrong with my second birth. The baby was okay, but it was tricky and it was painful and it didn’t have to happen, and it did, so it added an extra level of trauma.”

She opens up that she was terrified of suffering from postpartum depression so she had to go through therapy: “It was hard, and it was so hard the struggle, but it wasn’t anything I didn’t think I could handle. And with my second kid, that’s partly because I was on my medication and I never got off of it.”

How did you feel during your postpartum period? Would you like to have more kids?