It didn’t take long for then-37-year-old Terrell Baldock to sense that something was different after her third pregnancy. The previous two times it was after giving birthshe reached a turning point in the first six months, when the “bring the baby home” anxiety stopped and she slept through the night, she tells SELF. But this time, months passed and “nothing improved,” he says. If anything, it made her feel worse: “There were wake-ups with the kids, but then I wouldn’t go back to sleep, I was wired and tired,” she says. “I was more depressed, more anxious. And there was a ‘howling with strangers in parking lots.’ kind of rage.”
Baldock’s doctor diagnosed it as postpartum depression. She went to therapy and tried an antidepressant and then an antipsychotic because “nothing worked,” she says. It wasn’t until 13 months after giving birth, when a naturopath did a blood test, that she learned she had low levels of the sex hormone progesterone — a marker of perimenopause, or the stage before menopause when hormone changes can cause a range of mental and physical symptoms.
Recently, more and more women are going through postpartum and perimenopause at the same time, Jessica Shepherd, MDa certified midwife and chief medical officer on the telehealth platform It’s hissays SELF. Postpartum symptoms “may last a maximum of one year for the solutionMeanwhile, perimenopause can last anywhere from a few years to a decade before menopause, which means it can arrive already in your late thirties. And in the United States, more and more women are waiting until then or later to have children, thanks to changing cultural norms and the boom in fertility drugs. Actually the 2025 CDC report showed that the number of births to women aged 35 to 39 has almost doubled since 1990, and that in 2023, for the first time, women aged 40 and older will have more children than teenagers. So it’s no wonder that even first-time mothers are more and more likely to reach perimenopause after giving birth.
This is what happened to 45-year-old Anu Sharma. She delayed starting a family to pursue her career and had a traumatic childbirth experience at age 39, which inspired her to create the San Francisco-based maternity clinic. Millie. “People think it’s a linear process: you have the baby, then the baby is born, and then a few years later you find yourself in peri-menopause. But it can all happen at once,” she says, describing her postpartum period as “one big blur” of mood swings, weight gain, fatigue and hair loss. In 2025, Sharma expanded Millie’s range to include menopause treatment after learning that so many of Millie’s patients have been caught up in what she calls the “hot soup of postpartum perimenopause.”
