We Asked Women to Share Private Texts, Searches, and Notes From Their Darkest Postpartum Days

The hardest parts of postpartum life are not always visible from the outside. Sometimes the clearest record is buried in a text thread, a journal, or a search history.

It can look like a Notes app entry titled “Panic diary.” A string of blood-pressure readings taken again and again in the same day; a text to a friend that says, simply, “I don’t feel safe today.” Or a list titled “Positive things I am doing for the baby,” where a new mother has reminded herself, “I smile at him as much as I can. I tell him I love him. I keep him warm and safe.”

When Marie Claire asked women to go back through their phones, we wanted to see the signals of postpartum distress that are rarely talked about but often hiding in plain sight. Looking back, many women found they had left a digital trail of what they were going through. And while some knew they were struggling, others didn’t recognize it until months or years later. Their phones had been keeping the record anyway, remembering what the body eventually learns to forget.

Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial has turned postpartum mental illness into a national fixation. Some of that attention has been illuminating, but much of it has also been reductive, conspiratorial, or frightening in ways that risk making women less likely to ask for help. As forensic psychiatrist Dr. Susan Hatters Friedman recently warned, “If the message is only about risk, we worry about women who are experiencing symptoms not seeking treatment because of stigma.”

The women in this piece are not Lindsay Clancy, and postpartum depression and anxiety are not postpartum psychosis. Still, the stigma around postpartum mental health takes many forms. Last week, the death of Hayden Panettiere brought fresh attention to a story she had only recently told publicly: that speaking openly about her postpartum depression in 2015 cost her a longtime Neutrogena endorsement deal.

By opening their phones to Marie Claire, these women offered an intimate look at an experience that is common among new mothers, but rarely seen this closely. What follows are the records they chose to share.

For some of these women, the first evidence in their phones was just a question, a strange feeling, or a message sent to someone else in an attempt to make sense of an experience they couldn’t yet name.

Sarah, 32, of Gloucester, Massachusetts, says her postpartum depression was strongest three to five months after the birth of her first child, before she fully recognized what was happening. During that period, she turned to ChatGPT.

In messages translated from Portuguese, Marina Barretta, of São Paulo, reached out to her doctor as she tried to understand why she felt so low even as her daughter was thriving.

Dannia, 41, of Washington, D.C., was caught off guard by waves of sadness after the birth of her first child, especially at night.

Carolyn, 37, of the Chicago suburbs, gave birth to her first child in April 2020, weeks into the pandemic. One week postpartum, she wrote in Notes what she says she didn’t know how to tell anyone else.

For others, the record was in what they counted.

Olivia March Howell of Long Island gave birth to her second son in June 2016. She now believes she was experiencing undiagnosed postpartum anxiety; a feeding-and-diaper log in her Notes begins two days after his birth.

Jamie T., 37, of Fairfax County, Virginia, experienced postpartum anxiety after both children. After postpartum hypertension with her second, she tracked her blood pressure in Notes; when panic attacks later led her to start Zoloft, she tracked that too.

During her first postpartum period, a therapist asked her to make a list in her Notes app titled “Positive things I am doing for the baby.”

Elizabeth, 34, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was recovering from severe preeclampsia and placenta accreta after an emergency C-section while her premature son spent two weeks in the NICU. In a text to friends, she recorded the competing instructions she was trying to follow.

Elsewhere, the distress was unmistakable.

Katie Hanrahan, 36, of Dayton, Ohio, documented what she was experiencing in texts after the birth of her first child.

Laura, 35, of Vancouver, Canada, had screened normally for postpartum depression at six weeks. Around four months postpartum, her symptoms began; one of the Notes from that period was titled “Panic diary.”

Two months later, she texted her best friend:

Ruba Ahmad, 33, of Dallas, was 30 and living in Boston when her first son was born in December 2022. She later wrote this private reflection for a friend who was struggling and had asked to hear her story.

The same phones that held panic and countdowns also held the first good day.

Katie, 33, tracked anxiety, insomnia, and medication in Notes for months after the birth of her second child. Eventually, her entries began to look different.

Priscilla Brandão, 35, of Rio de Janeiro, kept a diary through roughly the first 12 weeks after the birth of her daughter, Luana. In entries translated from Portuguese, she documented painful breastfeeding, colic, sleep deprivation, and eventually the feeling of becoming herself again.