It didn’t take long for Terrell Baldock, then 37, to feel something was different in the wake of her third pregnancy. It had been the previous two times postnatalshe reached a turning point during the first six months when the anxiety of “bringing a baby home” was over and she was sleeping through the night, she told SELF. But this time, months passed, and nothing improved, she says. If anything, she felt worse: “There were wake-ups with the kids, but then I wouldn’t go back to sleep, and I was stressed and tired,” she says. “I was more depressed and anxious. I had ‘yelling at strangers in parking lots.’ Kind of angry“.
Baldock’s doctor thought it was postpartum depression. She went to therapy and tried an antidepressant, then an antipsychotic because “nothing was working,” she says. It wasn’t until 13 months after giving birth, when her naturopathic doctor did a blood test, that she learned her levels of the sex hormone progesterone were low — an indicator of perimenopause, or the stage before menopause, when hormonal changes can cause a host of mental and physical symptoms.
Recently, more women are experiencing the postpartum period and perimenopause simultaneously, Jessica Shepherd, MDa board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and chief medical officer of the telehealth platform she hassays the self. Postpartum symptoms” can take It took over a year to solve it“, she points out. Meanwhile, perimenopause can extend anywhere from a few years to a decade before menopause, meaning it can reach As early as your late 30s. A growing number of women in the United States are waiting until then, or later, to have children, thanks to changing cultural norms and a boom in fertility medicine. In fact, A CDC 2025 report It showed that the number of births among women aged 35 to 39 has almost doubled since 1990, and for the first time, in 2023, more children will be born to women aged 40 and over than to teenagers. So it’s no wonder that first-time mothers are more likely to experience perimenopause during the postpartum period.
This was the case for 45-year-old Anu Sharma. She delayed starting a family to pursue her career, and at age 39, she had a traumatic birth experience – inspiring her to set up a maternity clinic in San Francisco. Millie. “People think it’s a linear process: You have a baby, then you go through postpartum, and then a few years later you find yourself in perimenopause. But it can all happen simultaneously,” she says, describing the postpartum period as “a big blur” of mood changes, weight gain, fatigue, and hair loss. In 2025, Sharma Extended Miele Offers to include postmenopausal care after learning that many of Millie’s patients also fell into what she calls “the hot soup of menopause.”
