Reese Witherspoon "cried all the time" when her first child was born.
The 49-year-old actress - who has Ava, 26, and Deacon, 21, with first husband Ryan Phillippe and 13-year-old Tennessee with ex-spouse Jim Toth - has opened up on her "really bad" experienced of postpartum depression and admitted it was "hard" to become a parent when she was just 23 years old.
She told the upcoming issue of Britain's Harper’s Bazaar magazine: “It was really bad.
“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.
“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.”
The Morning Show star was encouraged to seek help by a friend and feels fortunate she had the means to do so.
She said: “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."
Reese had been warned she could face postpartum depression because of the experiences of her grandmother, Dorothea Draper, who stopped working as a teacher after having a family.
She said: "She had been this well-educated woman who was then left alone with two little kids while her husband went to work. She got really depressed.
"My mom was honest with me and said, 'You need to be careful. This could be genetic.'"
Just as the Big Little Lies actress is happy to be frank about her experiences of parenthood, she is grateful for the high-profile women who have "normalised" their experience of menopause.
She said: "Oh, I’ll say the wrong word or the wrong name with extreme confidence.
"We all go through it and have to be patient with each other.
"I’m always grateful for women who normalise it – like Gwyneth and Naomi Watts. I benefit from the research they do."
Reese is now looking forward to marking her 50th birthday next March with a holiday to Europe with her youngest child.
She said: "It’s just me and him – I’m excited about it! I’m off to visit friends in Italy, kind of tootling around a little bit…"
For more from Reese, visit https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/reese-witherspoon
The December/January issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK is on sale from 7 November.
