When I was newly postpartum with my daughter Alma, I started seeing a woman in the corner of the room. She had stringy black hair, grey skin, and a tattered white nightgown. She didn’t speak. She didn’t move. She just stood there, while I nursed in the pitch black silence of 3 a.m. I never screamed or flinched. I knew she wasn’t real. But she also didn’t feel fake.
That was my brain, rewritten by sleep deprivation, hormones, and the surreal isolation of those early weeks. I never saw her again once Alma started sleeping through the night. But I’ve never forgotten her. Because she was real enough to remind me: this phase changes you. You stop making sense. You become a new kind of animal—one that adapts, breaks, rebuilds, and sometimes sees things no one else can.
So when I saw an Instagram thread asking moms to share the most “unhinged” thing they did postpartum, I didn’t laugh. I nodded. And when the comments started pouring in, I didn’t feel amused—I felt understood. Because no amount of antenatal classes prepares you for the strangeness of new motherhood. And when that strangeness finally finds language—especially online—it becomes more than cathartic. It becomes a lifeline.
One mom walked to the coffee shop wearing only her baby carrier. No shirt. No bra. Just the baby. Another made two cups of coffee one morning—one for her, one for the baby—before realizing what she’d done. Another mom went outside at 3 a.m. in a bathrobe and beat a bush with a stick because a frog wouldn’t stop croaking and she needed to sleep. One woman made her husband stand in the bathroom holding the baby while she showered so she could see the baby at all times. Another bought a stack of cheap plates and smashed one every time she reached her limit.
These stories were labeled “unhinged.” But I think they reveal something else: survival. Creativity. The slow-burning desperation of a body and mind being remade without anesthesia. These aren’t breakdowns. They’re adaptations. In some ways, they’re rituals. Because postpartum isn’t just a phase. It’s a zone—part dream, part delirium, part forced rebirth. And for many, especially in the Western world where nuclear families are isolated and support systems thin, it’s a phase that happens in near-complete solitude.
That solitude distorts time. It’s why so many moms say they don’t remember the first few weeks, or they remember it like a hallucination. You measure days in feedings and diaper changes. The sun rising means nothing if you never went to bed. You lose track of your own voice, your old identity, your previous rituals. You forget how you used to start a day. And in that forgetting, something wild and often irrational rises.
It makes sense, then, that postpartum stories feel surreal. Because the experience itself is surreal. One mom recounted how she hallucinated a ticking clock that didn’t exist. Another said she heard the baby crying even when the baby wasn’t home. Some described entire conversations with themselves at night. Some thought they had left the baby somewhere—even while holding them. These aren’t rare. They’re common. But we’ve trained ourselves to call them embarrassing instead of expected.
The postpartum brain isn’t broken. It’s reconfigured. Neurologically, the maternal brain goes through more structural change than puberty. Parts of the brain associated with threat detection, empathy, and routine intensify. Sleep deprivation, hormonal whiplash, and oxytocin flooding distort perception. Add in physical recovery from childbirth, identity loss, and the constant pressure to “bounce back,” and you’ve got a recipe for cognitive fragmentation that would overwhelm anyone. So when one mom microwaved her breast pump, or another locked herself out of the house while topless and bleeding, the response shouldn’t be “What’s wrong with you?” It should be: “That sounds about right.”
And here’s where the cultural shift becomes critical. Because for generations, postpartum weirdness was buried. If you cried in the shower or screamed into a pillow or imagined running away, you were told you were weak. If you raged or feared or obsessed or fixated, you were told you were hormonal. But today’s mothers are reclaiming those feelings—and making art, memes, and community out of them. They’re naming the ghost in the room. They’re posting the screenshots. They’re making reels about how the baby blues turned into baby rage turned into baby apathy turned into, somehow, survival.
These confessions matter. They break the illusion that there’s a “right” way to do this. They tell a different story—one where motherhood isn’t serene, soft-lit bliss, but a jagged series of attempts. Attempts to soothe, to survive, to love, to endure, to not throw a shoe at your partner’s snoring head. These stories make space for ambiguity. And in doing so, they create something incredibly rare for new moms: relief.
Relief that you’re not crazy. Relief that you’re not alone. Relief that someone else also stood in the shower crying because they’d just yelled at their dog, or spilled pumped milk, or realized they hadn’t eaten in 36 hours.
There’s power in shared absurdity. And that’s why this new genre of “unhinged postpartum storytelling” is more than comic relief—it’s cultural correction. It fills the void where postpartum education should have been. It replaces shame with solidarity. It tells the truth with humor because the truth, left unspoken, can turn poisonous. And in the absence of universal paid leave, affordable childcare, or consistent mental health screening, a funny TikTok or a raw Instagram comment might be the closest thing a new mom gets to support.
It’s important, too, to acknowledge the emotional precision these stories often hide. The mom who brewed coffee for her baby wasn’t just tired—she was so disoriented by the rhythm of her life being erased that her brain filled in the gaps. The one who smashed plates? She wasn’t violent. She was building a non-verbal, sensory outlet for rage in a culture that punishes maternal anger. The one who saw a ghost? She wasn’t hallucinating in the psychotic sense. She was metabolizing her fear in the only way her altered mind could.
These aren’t symptoms. They’re adaptations. And they’re often brilliant in their own way.
But not all postpartum symptoms are benign. Postpartum depression, anxiety, OCD, and psychosis are real and serious conditions that require professional care. The danger is when we dismiss everything as “just baby blues” or “just sleep deprivation,” and leave women to suffer in silence. That’s why the line between unhinged confession and clinical symptom needs to be walked with care—but not avoided.
Sharing stories doesn’t replace therapy or diagnosis. But it does create an emotional runway—one where moms can land safely with their feelings before they become dangerous. It allows them to test what’s normal, what’s common, what’s concerning. It lets someone say, “This is how I felt,” and someone else say, “That’s how I knew I needed help.”
There’s also a deeper question beneath all of this: why do we frame these stories as “unhinged” in the first place? Why is losing track of time, crying in the car, or peeing with the door open considered evidence of collapse? Why do we expect surgical precision from women whose bodies have just gone through biological war?
Part of the answer lies in our cultural mythology around motherhood: that it should be natural, instinctive, graceful. But nothing about learning how to care for a baby—or yourself—after birth is natural. It’s learned. Fumbled. Relearned. And sometimes, the only way to survive the mess is to laugh about it, post about it, and remember that other people have done it too.
In that way, these stories aren’t just funny. They’re archival. They are our version of folklore, passed down in the digital age. Instead of oral tradition, we have comments. Instead of midwives, we have mutuals. Instead of sacred texts, we have Instagram captions that read, “I put nipple cream on my eyelids by accident and just let it happen.”
These moments might feel absurd in isolation. But collected, they form a mosaic of what postpartum actually is—not what it’s marketed to be. And when enough of us see that mosaic, we stop feeling broken. We start feeling like we’re part of something ancient, messy, hilarious, and hard.
One day, the fog lifts. The baby sleeps longer. The plates stop smashing. The frog quiets down. You wake up, and the ghost woman in the corner is gone. In her place is a mother who made it through. Not perfectly. But honestly. And maybe that’s what postpartum really is: not a clean transformation, but a strange, beautiful unraveling—and a slow, unfiltered return.
If you’ve been there, you know. And if you haven’t, just know this: the most unhinged thing a mom does after birth is not losing her mind. It’s holding onto it—by any means necessary.
Even if that means punching a bush. Even if that means making coffee for a baby. Even if that means seeing a ghost and letting her stay. That’s not madness. That’s motherhood. And finally, we’re telling the story right.
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