Alanis Morissette was so prepared for the act of giving birth to her son Ever Imre back in 2010 that she didn't expect what would come after. But when the "You Oughtta Know" singer found herself facing postpartum depression in the months after she had her son on Christmas Day, she rebelled against the emotions she was feeling until they got too big for her to control.
“I just thought it was a swampy chapter, if I soldiered it out, that it would go away,” she tells ET Canada. “I came to realize that the longer I waited, the more intense it would become.”
The 38-year-old singer says she chose to speak out about her struggle with postpartum depression in an effort to help other women deal with the same problem. Of course, the Tom Cruises of the world aren't helping anyone in this difficult situation, and Morissette is all about accepting the fact that postpartum depression exists and getting help for it.
"I think if there is any goal in me talking about it, it would be to eradicate the shame around it," she says. "It’s just what happens sometimes and, for me, I just waited way too long to reach out for help."
Morissette opened up about her struggles with postpartum depression when she became a guest blogger for CelebVillage last November. In her iVillage essay, she talked about how unprepared she was for everything that came after giving birth.
"Something greater than me had to take over. My go-to survival strategy of headiness combined with tomboyish charm and physicality was not going to serve me in this new postpartum terrain, because, well, these qualities had been kidnapped by my hormones. I was in the perineum-pain’d and hormonally swampy trenches with an instant family, a blank slate. No handbook. No helmet. Seemingly no mercy," Morissette wrote. "See, I thought postpartum would be all about the birth of my baby. I had no idea the person I’d always dreamed of becoming was being born at the exact same time."
