More Than a Mother: A Story of Mental Health, Motherhood and Visibility

Newly married in the year 2000, I was brimming with hope and energy. My husband, a handsome lawyer, and I had just returned from a long honeymoon in Spain, full of dreams for the life we were building. I worked at a thriving tech company in Cambridge during the height of the dot-com boom. A successful IPO had made us all millionaires on paper, if we stuck it out, and though it was a waiting game with long vesting schedules, the future looked bright.

Really bright.

We had just moved into a quintessential New England farmhouse in the Boston suburbs—a home with apple trees, chirping birds, and three bedrooms. One of those rooms had bubblegum pink carpeting, which we ripped out immediately because children weren’t on the horizon for a while. Not yet. We were young, ambitious, and in love, commuting into the city each morning, focused on our careers and each other.

Then, on a business trip to Denver, things changed. Feeling lightheaded, I thought it was the altitude. A stop at a pharmacy and a quiet moment alone in my hotel room gave me the answer. The test, and then two more, confirmed it, but it didn’t feel real until I went up to the rooftop pool, swimming alone with this enormous, glorious secret. I was going to be a mother.

Back in Boston, the reality set in. The culture at work had no room for pregnancies or babies. It was an all-consuming environment, designed to extract as much as possible from its employees. Back then there were no parental leave policies, no lactation rooms, no remote work options, and no sense of work-life balance.

What did exist was a long line of people who would happily take my job if I didn’t perform. My boss questioned my consideration of accommodations, stating “you having a baby is not our problem.” Human Resources was not there to support me/us; it was there to protect the company. Accommodations for babies didn’t fit into the plans of a company fueled by acquisitions and marathon workdays.

Physically, my body was not my own. I had migraines that stole my vision in one eye, relentless nausea, and exhaustion that no amount of sleep could fix. The only thing that helped the nausea was eating, and so I ate, and the weight piled on, far beyond the textbook amount I was allowed to gain. My doctor (one of the best of the best) made a not-so-subtle joke about staying away from the Halloween candy and maybe getting some exercise. My body became something I didn’t recognize with a life of its own, literally.

Less than a year earlier, I had been strong and lean in my wedding dress, the most beautiful I had ever been or felt. Now, I was the opposite: swollen, bloated, tired, and wide. Every day, I felt like I was losing more and more control. I hardly recognized the person staring back at me when I dared to look in the mirror.

My mother’s words echoed in my mind: “Pregnancy and the changes in your body prepare you to not focus on yourself so much.” I understood what she meant, and it felt like yet another reminder that my new life wouldn’t be about me – and I hadn’t quite signed up for all that at the age of 28.

At every routine doctor’s appointment, I was told the same thing: “The baby is doing great.” Each exam brought a wave of anxiety for me, but there was never anything to worry about. “You’re growing a fine baby,” they’d say. And we soon found out our baby was a girl. I could not have been more elated. A girl, all I ever wanted…and familiar! No uncertainties (like a boy) to deal with here.

But at work, the comments were relentless. Colleagues asked if I was “ready to give it all up, including sleep” or casually joked about how babies “ruin vesting schedules.” My pregnancy felt like a public display for everyone to comment on.

My body, my health, my future—it was all up for discussion.

Meanwhile, my husband went to work every day too, untouched by the same scrutiny. No one put him on the “mommy track.” No one questioned his ambition or asked how he’d juggle fatherhood and his career. Although he had plenty of challenges on his own, which included him being away, at work, billing a gazillion hours to show that he was a team player and committed to the firm. Just like any good expectant father would do.

The resentment grew until it gave way to something quieter and darker: shame. One evening in the early fall of 2001, I sat at a red light in Cambridge, alone in my car. I stared at the light, waiting for it to turn, and thought about my life: my wonderful husband, the promising career, the baby I hadn’t even tried for. I thought about all of it, how lucky I was, wouldn’t every woman want this? And how ashamed I felt that, well, I didn’t want any of it.

The light turned green. Cars moved around me, horns chirped in quiet irritation. But I sat there, frozen, not wanting to move. Not wanting to move forward – at all.

Depression doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t knock on the door one day and say, “I’m here!!” Instead, it creeps in slowly, quietly. At first, you don’t even notice it—just a bad day, a wave of exhaustion, or a moment of sadness you can’t quite place. Then it lingers. It weaves itself into your routine, into your thoughts, into your sense of self. It becomes the air you breathe, so gradual that you don’t even see it happening. For me, it wasn’t a conscious decision to keep it inside. It was that I didn’t see it for what it was.

If you’d asked me how I was doing, I would have said I was fine. “Fine”. I might have even smiled as I said it, maybe even looked you in the eyes without even breaking eye contact.

I didn’t know that I wasn’t fine at all.

And then, there was the shame. And that…that I felt so hard. Shame for feeling this way, when by all accounts I had everything: especially a soon-to-be, actual, real-life baby I hadn’t even struggled to conceive. The shame snuck in alongside the sadness, whispering that I was ungrateful. Shame is a cruel companion to depression, and together, they make you feel smaller, lonelier, darker, and not someone anyone would love or understand.

Yet the months leading up to my daughter’s birth held many moments of fleeting joy. There were baby showers, gifts, and certainly the occasional thrill of imagining the little life about to arrive. But there was also fear, and it consumed me when the moment finally came for her to be born.

The doctors decided to let my epidural wear off to “make me angry enough to push.” Little did they know anger would not be the problem.

A secret I haven’t shared to this day is that she could have been born hours earlier, but I was too afraid, certain I would die from being ripped apart. I felt like a trapped animal, hot, panicked and paralyzed. No fucking way was I going to push this baby out any sooner than I had to. Fuck that and everyone who was pretending to help. I was angry, but more than that, I wasn’t sure I would make it to the other side.

When people say that motherhood involves sacrifice, they often mean sleepless nights or putting your needs aside. But in that moment, I was the sacrifice—my body, my safety, my life. And not a single person in scrubs understood that on that day.

There was no perfect birth experience. But at the end of it, I had my beautiful, perfect, dimpled baby girl and that was all that really mattered.

We brought her home on Christmas morning, the sunlight streaming through the crisp, cold air and the slowest commute on Storrow Drive by anyone, ever. The day should have been magical as she was, but it wasn’t.

A few days later I found myself back at the doctor’s office, unshowered, exhausted, with leaking and bloody breasts, stinky clothes, and a fever of 103 degrees. My husband dropped us off at the hospital doors as he headed to a court appointment he could not miss, promising to be back as soon as he could. Although he had asked for more time off (again, parental leave for dads didn’t exist in 2001) he was told “you can ask, but we’ll take you out back and shoot you.” And he had a family to support.

I presented at the registration desk, baby in tow. The staff were dismissive because I didn’t have an appointment but I was undeterred. While they chatted amongst themselves about what to do with me, as if on cue, my baby girl wailed like she never had before. She found her voice, even if I hadn’t. It wasn’t my fever or my pain, it was my crying baby scaring the other pregnant women in the waiting room that got me seen. They treated my baby first, my body second. But no one, not a single person, treated me.

I never went back to the tech company in Cambridge and took a new job closer to home. The commute was manageable, the salary decent, but there were no stock options, no millionaire-on-paper dreams anymore. It felt like the practical thing to do—a choice made for the good of my family, and my husband made changes too. I told myself it was the right decision, and in many ways, it was.

But every now and then, I wondered: was I choosing this path, or was it choosing me? The fast-paced world I once enjoyed felt far away now, like another life. Had I traded ambition for practicality? Or had I simply found a new version of success? Either way, I felt like a real grown up for making this decision, and even took pride in it.

Balancing things the best I could, we did all right, or so I thought until a few months later, my sweet husband sat me down and gently said. “I don’t think you’re okay.” I didn’t argue, but I didn’t entirely agree either. His words were a quiet nudge toward something I couldn’t fully acknowledge at the time. He encouraged me to go back to the doctor, and I did. They were running a trial on postpartum anxiety and I was quickly accepted and prescribed medication.

Therapy was suggested—not required, just an option “if I wanted to.” I decided to try it, though I wasn’t sure it would help. In therapy, we didn’t talk about what I now recognize as antenatal and post-partum depression. The conversations mostly revolved around anxiety perking up around practical things—planning for the future, balancing a marriage, career and motherhood. I didn’t walk away with major insights.

But now I see that the anxiety we discussed wasn’t something I had ever known before. It was conceived alongside my daughter, tethered to the overwhelming love I felt for her and a profound fear for her safety. As if I wasn’t a perfect mother (and I knew I wouldn’t be, but God damn it, I would try, and am still trying), would she slip through my fingers? Would she disappear from life like the fading face in a photograph trapped in a time shift? That fear has stayed with me in one form or another over the last 23 years.

Then one day, driving home from therapy, something changed, again. The blue sky stretched wide above me, the sunlight warm on my face, singing loudly along with radio… the weight that had pressed down on me for so long simply dissolved. It was as if something heavy had been pulled off my shoulders.

Little did I know, I was about three weeks pregnant with – surprise –another perfect baby girl. Maybe it was the medication, but I choose to believe now that the hormonal grip of my first pregnancy lifted because my body was resetting itself with the second pregnancy – one that was quite different.

That moment of relief came with no fanfare, but it marked a turning point.

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This isn’t just my story—it’s a story about how we care for women, how we fail them, and how we can do better.

And I tell this story now because I needed someone to see me—not just as a mother or a patient, but as a person navigating the complexities of life, growth, and change.

I tell it because I hope no other woman feels as unseen as I did.

What many people may not know is how deeply hormones, especially those tied to pregnancy and the postpartum period, affect mental health. This isn’t just about “feeling emotional” or the crying we often associate with the birth of a baby. Hormonal shifts can be profound, severe, and lasting, impacting a woman’s entire sense of self. These changes don’t always occur or simply stop with the birth of a baby; instead, they can occur during pregnancy and create an invisible grip that holds tight, manifesting as depression, anxiety, or both. It’s important to recognize that this isn’t a personal failing or a matter of “bouncing back.” Symptoms can include persistent sadness, overwhelming fear, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness, and, perhaps most isolating of all, shame.

Hormones made my story one of sadness, shame, pain and anger. I couldn’t see the joy of this experience because my lens was cracked and broken. Sadly, it was treatable.

I would love to reach through the years and speak to that young woman at the stoplight. I don’t feel her as me now—I see her as someone else, someone I want so badly to help. I want to tell her, “It will be okay. You will find your way through this. You are not alone, even though it feels like you are. There is nothing wrong with you for feeling this way.” I want to take her hand and lift the weight off her shoulders, even just for a moment.

But I can’t do that. No one can. We can’t go back for the women we once were. But what we can do is reach out now—to the women who may be sitting at their own stoplights, feeling overwhelmed and unsure. We can build systems, create spaces, and ask the questions that matter: “How are you? How are you really?”

We all know there is still a long way to go. Maternal care often focuses solely on the baby, leaving the mother’s mental health and emotional wellbeing as an afterthought—or worse, completely invisible. We ask invasive questions about the wrong things, make casual comments about her weight, her choices, her plans, but we rarely ask the right questions.

It is a logical extension that more women in healthcare is exactly what is needed. And, I’m happy to tell you that the magical, dimpled baby who we brought home on Christmas Day is now on her way to becoming a doctor. And she will do it better – I know she will. I look at her and see not just my perfect baby, but a woman stepping into a field that has shaped and defined so much of my own journey. She will understand, in ways her peers may not, what it feels like to be unseen in moments when visibility matters most.

And it’s not just her—it’s all women who are stepping into these roles, bringing their perspectives, their experiences, and their voices into healthcare and leadership. More women who understand what it’s like to carry this weight, to feel pain, the hope and the fear of creating life. Women who can ask the right questions, build the right systems, and ensure no woman feels unseen or unheard.

We also need more women leaders in organizations—leaders who support women at all stages and phases of life. Leaders who understand that motherhood is not a career-ending event, that mental health matters, and that shame has no place in our workplaces, whether it be pregnancy or menopause. When women lead, they create workplaces and systems that uplift and create space for one another, not tear down and exclude.

Lastly, and most importantly, we need to talk about our pain, our physical and mental health, and even the shame we carry —because only by sharing it can we begin to let it go and truly make the change that is so needed at this time.

Thank you for letting me do that here.