By
Sarah Wheeler,
'Mother of it All' podcast co-host & 'Momspreading' newsletter author.
She also writes the parenting column "Good Enough Parent," and has written about parenting, culture, and neurodiversity for Romper, Salon, HuffPost, The New York Times, and more. She has a PhD in educational psychology from the University of California, Berkeley.
It’s been a decade since my first postpartum experience, and I’m still processing it. Chatting with a few friends recently, reminiscing about those early days of parenting, I was taken aback by my own recollections of that time. “It sounds like you were depressed,” my friend Julia, who had only just identified her own postpartum depression a decade after the fact, insisted. “Oh, no,” I countered. “I was just afraid to leave the house, lonely down to my bones, and completely detached from my baby, who I viewed with suspicion.”
