While her kiddos are now 11 and 6½-years-old, Busy Philipps is just now sharing her postpartum experiences, including anxiety she experienced after her older daughter, Birdie Leigh, was born.
“I didn’t even know that was a thing,” Philipps, 40, shared with PEOPLE of her postpartum anxiety. “I had heard only really terrible postpartum depression stories, like the ones that would make the news.”
“And that wasn’t my experience so I thought, well I guess this is just what being a new mom is like — being unable to go into the grocery store because you’re panicked and crying in your car,” she adds.
“It took me a long time to really be able to vocalize what I was going through and to get some help for it,” Philipps continues. “I’m glad that people have been more open about all kinds of postpartum issues.”
Philipps also adds how “de-stigmatizing women’s health issues” is important to her, including all types of postpartum body issues, such as urine leaks.
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“This is an issue that a lot of people shy away from and don’t want to talk about and yet it affects one in three women, and that’s a lot of women,” she states.
“After I was a new mom with my second kid, I experienced this and I never really knew that that was a thing that happens.”
Philipps is a mom to Birdie and Cricket Pearl and says that while both of the sisters are “fairly different” personality-wise (Birdie is “pretty serious and very thoughtful,” while Cricket is “free and goofy”), they are “little buddies.”
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Philipps added how that the two quickly fell into their older and younger sibling’s roles. She shares how one time she asked Cricket if she would like a younger sibling, saying: “She was like, ‘No, I’m the baby.’ Note taken.”
Philipps says she hopes her own openness about women’s issues empowers her daughters.
“I hope that my girls live their lives in a way where they feel very empowered and free to be who they want to be in whatever way they want to be,” she states. “I hope that they hold on to that.”
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