It’s been more than a year since Jena Malone became a first-time mom, with she and fiance Ethan DeLorenzo welcoming son Ode Mountain in May 2016.
And while the arrival of a baby is always joyous, Malone is opening up about her apparent struggle with postpartum depression after her child’s arrival, writing that “this struggle is real” in a candid Instagram post.
“Motherhood, depression and self worth,” she wrote on Instagram on Thursday. “I don’t have anything beautiful to say. Except that this struggle is real. The sharp edges are too much to hold without compassion. I’m struggling with this. Compassion for myself and this moment of growth in my life. I know I am not alone in this. I guess I just needed to share, in hopes of being seen and feeling not so very much alone.”
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Back in June, the “Hunger Games” star shared a photo of herself and her son, writing that “there is no constant with children except that they will always change. And oh what an amazing lesson. To love what is there not what was.”
Malone had been absent from social media in the months following Ode’s birth, and explained the reasons why in a November 2016 blog post.
“I have been very inactive on social media since the birth of my son,” she wrote. “It was not a conscious break. I simply didn’t have time to post as much. The things that seemed important to me before my son came into the world just didn’t feel as important now. ”
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Earlier this month, Malone posted a lengthy message to her son on Instagram, expressing her anxiety about the world in which her son will be growing up.
“All I can do is show you, my dear boy, what it is to be a human, in the long history of being human, on a planet at the edge of another collapse, during the fall of an empire convoluted with so much hate,” she wrote. “I can only lead by example one step at a time. I can only show you how our history lives in our skin, the good and the bad and the ugly of it.”
