A Note from Me
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I grew up watching Hayden Panettiere.
Remember the Titans. Raising Helen. Heroes. Nashville.
She was born in 1989. I was born in 1988.
Maybe that's why seeing 36 next to her name stopped me.
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And then I thought about her daughter.
Knowing that a little girl has lost her mother makes me incredibly sad. Becoming a mother myself has changed the way I process stories like this.
I want to be clear: we don't know what caused Hayden's death. I'm not suggesting that postpartum depression, addiction, or any other part of her history caused it.
Her passing simply made me reflect on what she had been willing to share while she was here.
Motherhood. Postpartum depression. Addiction and recovery. Asking for help.
Hayden spoke openly about experiencing severe postpartum depression and seeking treatment.
She later shared that after speaking publicly about postpartum depression, Neutrogena, a company she had worked with for years, sought to end its relationship with her under a morality clause. Her team pushed back, but the relationship ultimately wasn't renewed.
I keep coming back to the contradiction.
We tell women:
Speak up. Advocate for yourself. Ask for help.
But what happens when a woman actually says:
I'm not okay. I need help.
Hayden had fame, financial resources, access to treatment, and a platform that reached millions.
And none of it exempted her from the parts of being human that can bring us to our knees.
Fame couldn't protect her from postpartum depression. Money couldn't make addiction disappear. Access to treatment didn't mean there wasn't still a struggle to move through.
There are parts of being human that status, success, and money simply cannot protect us from.
And that made me think about women who don't have those same resources.
The mother without paid leave. The woman who can't afford therapy. The parent without family nearby.
Having a baby isn't simply a medical event someone recovers from.
It's a major life transition for an entire family.
Other countries have built much longer periods of parental leave into their systems, including leave for both parents. It doesn't prevent postpartum depression or make parenthood easy.
But there is something meaningful about a system saying:
Something significant just happened to your family. You may need time to adjust.
And that's where my thoughts went somewhere I wasn't expecting.
Marriage.
I've been reading The Conscious Bride, and one idea that has stayed with me is how cultures throughout history have used rituals and rites of passage to acknowledge the transition into marriage.
It made me wonder if we're sometimes really good at celebrating life's milestones and not nearly as good at supporting the transitions underneath them.
We celebrate the baby.
We celebrate the wedding.
But becoming a parent is different from having a baby.
And becoming married is different from having a wedding.
Both can change our identities, relationships, responsibilities, routines, and expectations.
Maybe part of wellness is simply acknowledging that transitions can take something out of us, even when they're transitions we desperately wanted.
I understand that differently now that I'm a mother.
The first three years of my daughter's life have brought some of my greatest joy.
They've also brought some really hard days and incredibly difficult moments.
There were times I genuinely wondered:
How does everyone else make this look so easy? Why am I struggling with this?
I went to therapy. I asked for help. My husband and I worked on communication and built systems that helped us support one another.
And somewhere along the way, I started building another muscle: learning to stand up for myself, my child, and what my family needed, even when it wasn't what someone else thought we should be doing.
Because motherhood comes with an incredible amount of noise.
I was talking with another mom recently about what sometimes feels like an unwritten rule of motherhood:
Whatever you choose, someone will have an opinion about it.
Stay home, and someone thinks you should be working.
Go to work, and someone asks why your child is in daycare.
Don't use daycare, and someone worries your child isn't being socialized.
I could keep going.
Maybe that's a conversation for another Wednesday.
But it has taught me something about support.
Sometimes support isn't another opinion about what you should be doing. Sometimes it's having people around you who help you trust yourself enough to figure out what you and your family actually need.
