Brooke Sheilds' NYT Editorial

Who woulda thunk it? An editorial by Brooke Shields appearing on the NY Times' Op-Ed page? I guess stranger things have happened.

I didn't know what to think, so I clicked and I read it through. It's well written and very personal. And to catch you up on why it's relevant to anything, she wrote a book Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression about, duh, Postpartum Depression. Then, Tom Cruise [and I just discovered he's a NYer from that IMDb link?!] ranted on how taking pills is wrong and publicly chided Shields and then in an interview with Matt Lauer went off about how Lauer didn't know jack shit and how he, Tom, was some kind of knowledgable person about medication, depression and aliens?

Well, it's a good read and offers some insight into the fact that celebs are just like the rest of us with real problems, but with oodles of money to pay for them I guess. An excerpt:

I never thought I would have postpartum depression. After two years of trying to conceive and several attempts at in vitro fertilization, I thought I would be overjoyed when my daughter, Rowan Francis, was born in the spring of 2003. But instead I felt completely overwhelmed. This baby was a stranger to me. I didn't know what to do with her. I didn't feel at all joyful. I attributed feelings of doom to simple fatigue and figured that they would eventually go away. But they didn't; in fact, they got worse.

I couldn't bear the sound of Rowan [her baby daughter] crying, and I dreaded the moments my husband would bring her to me. I wanted her to disappear. I wanted to disappear. At my lowest points, I thought of swallowing a bottle of pills or jumping out the window of my apartment.

There's more to Brooke than The Blue Lagoon.