POSTPARTUM · REAL STORIES

I did not tell anyone the real reason I was crying in the shower

Everyone assumed it was the hair. It was not the hair.

Last updated July 2026  |  6 min read

I will tell you what I told people first, and then I will tell you the truth.

What I told people: my hair was falling out and I was upset about it.

That was true. Seven months after my daughter was born I was losing it in fistfuls. I had started showering with my eyes closed so I would not have to look at what came off in my hands.

But it was not why I was crying.

The thing I did not say

Somewhere in that first year, I stopped wanting my husband.

Not stopped loving him. He is a wonderful father and he had done nothing wrong — he was patient, he was kind, he never once made me feel bad about it. Which honestly made it worse.

It was more like a switch had been flipped off inside me. By the end of the day I was touched out, my brain was still running through bottles and naps and whether we had nappies, and when we finally had a moment alone all I wanted was silence.

We tried scheduling it, which made me dread it. We tried being spontaneous, which made me feel guilty for not being able to get there.

And underneath all of it was the thought I never said aloud to anyone — not to him, not to my sister, not to my GP:

I missed feeling like a woman and not only a mother. I missed wanting things. Not just him — anything. Plans. Nights out. Food I actually fancied. A whole part of my personality had gone quiet and I had decided that was just what motherhood cost.

What I blamed

I blamed hormones. Then breastfeeding. Then my body. Then, mostly, myself.

I read a lot of things about reconnecting with your partner and date nights and scheduling intimacy. All of it assumed the problem was our relationship. Our relationship was fine. I was the problem, and I could not find the fault.

I even went to my GP about the tiredness — because that part I could say out loud. My daughter had been sleeping through since six months. I had no reason to be that tired.

She ran bloods. They came back normal. She said, and I am quoting, that is just motherhood.

I want to tell you what that sentence does to a woman who is quietly terrified she has lost herself. It closes the door. If this is just motherhood, then it is not fixable, and the version of me who wanted things is simply gone.

What actually changed it

My sister-in-law is a nurse. Not my doctor, not involved in any of this — she just asked me, at a family thing, why I looked so grey.

I gave her the short version. Tired, shedding, bloods normal.

She asked whether they had tested my ferritin.

I said I assumed that was the same as iron. It is not.

Haemoglobin — the number on a standard blood test — is the iron circulating in your blood right now. Ferritin is your stored iron. The reserve. It is not on a standard panel. You have to ask.

And when your stores run down, your body triages. It protects the blood and takes from everything it considers non-essential. Your hair, because follicles are metabolically expensive. Your energy, because that is what iron is for. And — this is the part that made me sit down — your libido, because desire is one of the first things a depleted body switches off. A body that thinks it is running out of resources is not a body that wants to reproduce.

I was not broken.

I was empty.

Seventeen

That is what mine was.

Fourteen months of thinking I had become somebody else, and I was running on a number a fifth of where it should have been. My GP had looked at my full blood count and told me, correctly, that it was normal.

Why I did not fix it with food

I did try. I want to say that, because I know how this sounds.

I ate the liver. I made the soup. I did red meat three times a week for about a month.

Two problems. The first is that I have a toddler and a job and there is a ceiling on how much organ meat a person will actually cook for themselves at 9pm. I lasted five weeks.

The second is that I was blocking it anyway. My prenatal has calcium in it — calcium blocks iron absorption. And I was drinking coffee all day to survive the exhaustion, and coffee blocks iron too. Every good meal I made myself, I cancelled out with the mug in my hand.

Depleted stores do not refill from good intentions. They need a proper dose, held for months, in a form your body can actually take up.

What I take

Reborne, because of two things I had not understood.

Iron on its own gets stuck. You need vitamin C to absorb it and copper to release it out of storage. Reborne has both, plus B12 and folate to actually build the blood cells. Four factors — which, it turns out, is precisely what is in liver. Every culture on earth fed new mothers liver for forty days and none of them knew why. That is why.

And it does not wreck your stomach. It is a chelated iron, bound to an amino acid, absorbed roughly twice as well as the standard prescription stuff without the constipation that makes most women quit inside a fortnight.

The order things came back in

This surprised me and I think it matters.

The hair was last.

Week three: I did not fall asleep on the sofa at 8pm. That was the first thing.
Week five: I was making plans again. Suggesting things. Wanting to go places.
Week seven: I noticed the shedding had slowed.
Around week eight or nine: I reached for my husband. He did not say anything about it and I have never been more grateful for anything in my life.
Month four: the ridiculous halo of new hair at my hairline that makes me look permanently electrocuted, and which I love.

What I would say to you

If the tiredness does not match your sleep. If the shedding has not stopped. And if the part of you that used to want things has gone quiet and you have quietly decided that is just who you are now —

it might not be who you are. It might be what you are running on.

Ask for a ferritin test. Specifically. By name. And do not accept that is just motherhood, because it was not, and I lost fourteen months believing it.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Always speak to your healthcare provider about supplementation, particularly while pregnant or breastfeeding.