Health & Wellness

3 Things About the 3-Month Postpartum Wall That Nobody Warns You About

March 16, 2026

Everyone warns you about the newborn phase like it’s the final boss of motherhood. The sleepless nights, the diapers, the healing, the “you’ll never sleep again” jokes that people seem way too excited to make. And then you survive it and you’re like okay cool, we made it. But somewhere around three months, something shifts.

On What We Said, best friends and cohosts Jaci Marie Smith and Chelsey Jade Curtis get brutally honest about the part of postpartum nobody really prepares you for. Whether you’re in the thick of it right now or just trying to understand what’s coming, here are three things they wish someone had told them sooner.

Three months is when it can actually start getting hard

A lot of moms expect the hardest stretch to happen right after birth. And those early weeks are intense. But Curtis says the real wall hits later. “The adrenaline has worn off from the new baby,” she says. “You’re getting tired. You’re getting no sleep. It’s been three months now.” Smith agrees. “Expectations come back in,” she says. “You look different. You feel different. You kind of feel like you should start getting back to your old life. Then you’re like, what even?”

Around three months, the meals stop showing up. The family visits taper off. The world kind of assumes you’ve got it figured out by now. “You’re left to your own devices,” Smith points out. “And you’re still like, I don’t even know how to be a parent.”

Missing your old self doesn’t mean something is wrong with you

You love your baby more than anything and you also kind of miss the person you were before they existed. Both of those things can be true at the same time and neither one cancels the other out. “When you’re pregnant, you’re kind of just in pregnant land,” Curtis explains.

Everything you’re feeling physically and emotionally has a built-in reason attached to it. But once the baby is here, that context disappears and suddenly you’re just supposed to be fine. Smith says the identity spiral hit her hard: “What even was my old life? Do I want to go back to my old life? What is my new life? Who am I?”

And it’s not just mental. Curtis points out that you were pregnant for nine months and your organs literally shifted to different places. Your hormones are still leveling out. Your body is still catching up to the life you’re already living. “You’re definitely not crazy for feeling like that,” she says. Three months is just not enough time for any of it to settle, and comparing your timeline to someone’s bounce-back reel is only going to make it worse.

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If joy feels completely out of reach, that’s worth paying attention to

There’s a difference between feeling tired and foggy and not being able to access joy at all. Curtis says she knows that difference firsthand. “It felt like my receptors for joy were fried,” she says. “I cannot reach the cap of joy that I used to be able to feel. It’s just unreachable.”

Smith is direct about what that sounds like: “postpartum depression.” Curtis agrees and explains that some level of emotional flatness is normal early postpartum, but if it’s still happening at three months, it’s worth bringing up with your OB or midwife because “they are very equipped to handle this kind of thing.”

Curtis also says that trying to white-knuckle through it only made hers worse. “I was trying to shove it down for so long,” she admits. “The more you push it down and ignore it, the worse it gets.”

If any of this sounds like where you are right now, please know that reaching out to your OB, midwife, or a therapist isn’t dramatic. It’s not an overreaction. It’s literally what they’re there for. You don’t have to wait until it feels unbearable to ask for help.

Listen to the full episode on What We Said with Jaci Marie and Chelsea Jade, available wherever you listen to podcasts.