“I felt irreparable. I felt there was no way out of it,” Hayden said. “I was trying to process the idea that maybe I’m going to be depressed like this for the rest of my life. And this was just a new habit. So that scared me.”
She checked herself into rehab when her daughter Kaya was 4 months old. They treated him for alcoholism. No one at the center ever talked about postpartum depression.
Hayden told the story to Jay Shetty on his OnPurpose podcast, promoting his new memoir This is me, Counting.
He didn’t know what was happening to him.
“I had never been around people who had experienced postpartum depression before. I had never heard of it. My mother, the women in my life, no one ever said anything about it. All their stories were about these wonderful moments of joy and love.”
“I was full of depression and anxiety all the time. And what I was doing to suppress those feelings was abnormal and unhealthy. I was so upset. I was in tears all the time.”
He had started drinking to cope.
“I was medicating myself and I wanted to relieve myself from the bottle. I needed to be numb. I needed my sanity to go on a trip. I needed to go on vacation. I needed it to not think about all this bad stuff for a while.”
It took him 10 months of research on his own before he put a name to what he was dealing with.
When she first opened up about her postpartum depression on Live with Kelly and Michael in 2015, Neutrogena ended her 10-year endorsement deal.
“Of all the things I was caught doing, what they labeled me as bad behavior was the scariest thing for me,” said Hayden. “It made me see and understand exactly what people thought about women with postpartum depression.”
In 2018, after years of repeated treatments, Hayden gave his father full custody of Kaya, retired heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, so he could focus on getting healthy. Kaya went to live full time in Europe.
“The idea that anyone would think that I would just give up my child and be fine is heartbreaking. I can’t get away from the truth,” said Hayden. “I went like a mother lion, I would have set the world on fire for my child.
By the time Hayden was healthy enough to consider bringing Kaya home, Kaya had built a full life for herself in Europe. He speaks 5 languages, rides horses, and is surrounded by family and friends.
“I felt that it would be wrong of me and selfish to try to get him out of this life he was living.”
Kaya is now 11 years old and lives in Europe full time. Hayden has been responding that he “left his daughter” for years.
Here’s what Hayden wants people to understand:
“That it’s true. That it’s not what we do. It’s not what we want. It’s not that we’ve lost our marbles. We’re not lying when we tell you something is wrong. We cry for no reason. We have no control over this and this would be the last thing we want to hear or go through.”
“We want to have our new baby and be full of joy and feel like the luckiest person in the world and capture every moment. For anyone to think otherwise they’ve been told the wrong thing.”
“We are already in pain. One of the worst things in the world to happen to a woman has already happened to her. The last thing we need is the icing on the cake of feeling judged so badly and in such a negative way.”