It wasn’t until Kate Arquilla’s therapist put a name to her feelings that her experience started to make sense. She had postpartum depression (PPD). Arquilla’s PPD manifested as anger—an emotion that carried a lot of shame for her at the time.
“Motherhood is messy,” Sarah Kauffman, MD, the physician director for the Hoag Maternal Mental Health Program in Newport Beach, California, tells SELF. “Society talks about motherhood as this wonderful, blissful time, but it’s not always like that.”