Reese Witherspoon is opening up about her postpartum journey as a young mom after welcoming her daughter, Ava Phillippe.
“It was really bad,” Witherspoon, 49, said of her struggle with depression in a Harper’s Bazaar profile published Sunday, November 2. “In the first six months, I was simultaneously happy and depressed. I just cried all the time, I was up all night, I was exhausted. It was a hormone drop I didn’t expect, which I experienced right after birth and again when I stopped nursing six months later.”
The actress continued, “Everyone has an opinion. It’s hard being a young mom and having people tell you how to be, how to react, how to give birth, how to nurse and how to feed your baby. It’s inundating.”
Witherspoon shares Ava, now 26, and son Deacon, 21, with ex-husband Ryan Phillippe, and son Tennessee, 13, with ex-husband Jim Toth.
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Becoming a mom in her early 20s was difficult, and eventually, Witherspoon was encouraged by a friend to seek help. “I had the connections and the means to get to a doctor, a mental-health specialist, but a lot of people don’t. They struggle on their own and hide it,” Witherspoon told the outlet.
As a parent, Witherspoon has fostered an open dialogue with her kids about mental health, thanks in part to how her own mother approached the topic.
“My mom never talked about mental health in a way that made it feel untouchable, unspeakable or taboo; she was almost clinical about it,” she recalled. “When I was a teenager, she would proactively ask whether I was sexually active, about birth control. I don’t beat around the bush. If something is on my mind or I’m concerned, I’m always going to be that person who pushes the edges and asks the hard questions [of my children].”
The Morning Show star has been candid about her postpartum struggles through the years, previously sharing on Jameela Jamil‘s “I Weigh” podcast that it was “a different experience” after each of her kids were born.
“[With] one kid, I had kind of mild postpartum, and [with] one kid, I had severe postpartum where I had to take pretty heavy medication because I just wasn’t thinking straight at all. And then I had one kid where I had no postpartum at all,” Witherspoon said in 2020.
Witherspoon admitted that she wasn’t fully prepared for the effect giving birth had on her own health. “We don’t understand the kind of hormonal roller-coaster that you go on when you stop nursing. No one explained that to me,” she explained. “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.”
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At the time, Witherspoon “white-knuckled” through. “I kept reaching out to my doctors for answers. There just isn’t enough research about what happens to women’s bodies and the hormonal shifts that we have aren’t taken as seriously as I think they should be,” she continued. “I have deep compassion for women who are going through that. Postpartum is very real.”
Last month, Witherspoon reflected on how being a young parent impacted her career, admitting there was some “naïveté” about balancing her work and home lives.
“There were roles I couldn’t take,” she said on The New York Times‘ “The Interview” podcast. “I had to have this immediate balance of family and career, being a mom and being a working actress. That’s why it was also scary when Legally Blonde became such a big hit. I wasn’t going to beg for parts; parts were coming to me. And that almost made it scarier, because I wasn’t picking and choosing what I would reach and strive for. It was more like, what will I not do?”
Witherspoon claimed she was “always being told” not to play moms on screen. “And I was like, ‘But I am a mom,’” she added. “There was so much about our business that desexualized you, so you couldn’t be a movie star if you played a mom. And thank goodness, that’s sort of going by the wayside.”
