We know you know this, because you love her as much as we do, but it doesn’t get much more real than Chrissy Teigen: wife of John, mother to Luna and chief Twitter comedienne.
The 31-year-old took a break from cracking funnies on social media to reveal she’s been struggling with severe postpartum depression in a beautifully honest essay written for US Glamour magazine, sharing how difficult the birth of her first child with Legend has been on her mental health.
That’s Luna, otherwise known as the cutest human ever produced.
Teigen wrote that she couldn’t leave the house for weeks after giving birth to her daughter, she was feeling so low, and that John would sleep with her on the couch because she struggled making it up the stairs to bed.
“I never left the house. I mean, never. Not even a tiptoe outside. I’d ask people who came inside why they were wet. Was it raining? How would I know – I had every shade closed. Most days were spent on the exact same spot on the couch and rarely would I muster up the energy to make it upstairs for bed.
“John would sleep on the couch with me, sometimes four nights in a row. I started keeping robes and comfy clothes in the pantry so I wouldn’t have to go upstairs when John went to work. There was a lot of spontaneous crying.”
As well as having little energy, she lost her appetite and experienced aches and pains in her body – all common symptoms of postnatal depression, which affects about one in every 7 Aussie women who give birth each year – which made going to work on TV show Lip Sync Battle painful.
“Getting out of bed to get to set on time was painful. My lower back throbbed; my shoulders – even my wrists – hurt. I didn’t have an appetite. I would go two days without a bite of food, and you know how big of a deal food is for me.”
It also turned her into a snippy version of herself, she says.
“One thing that really got me was just how short I was with people. I would be in my [Lip Synch Battle] dressing room, sitting in a robe, getting hair and makeup done, and a crew member would knock on the door and ask, ‘Chrissy, do you know the lyrics to this song?’ And I would lose it. Or ‘Chrissy, do you like these cat ears, or these panda hands?’ And I’d be like: ‘Whatever you want. I don’t care.’ They would leave. My eyes would well up, and I would burst into tears. “My makeup artist would pat them dry and give me a few minutes. I couldn’t figure out why I was so unhappy. I blamed it on being tired and possibly growing out of my role: ‘Maybe I’m just not a goofy person anymore. Maybe I’m just supposed to be a mum.’”
Teigan went onto debunk one of the most common, and ludicrous, misconceptions around the mental health condition – that you’re somehow ungrateful or a bad mother if you admit to struggling.
“I had everything I needed to be happy,” she wrote. “How can I feel this way when everything is so great? I’ve had a hard time coming to terms with that, and I hesitated to even talk about this, as everything becomes such a “thing. And I can already envision what will be said about me after this admission. But it’s such a major part of my life and so, so many other women’s lives. It would feel wrong to write anything else.”
10/10 honesty from a 10/10 woman.
Photo: Instagram / @chrissyteigan.
