A special bond! Shay Mitchell‘s daughter, Atlas, has given her a warm welcome to motherhood.
“I’m really, really lucky,” the Pretty Little Liars alum, 32, exclusively told Us Weekly at the Revolve Awards on Friday, November 15. “She’s an easy baby so far so we’ll see!”
Mitchell and her boyfriend, Matte Babel, announced the birth of their nearly 1-month-old daughter on October 20. “Never letting go,” she captioned an Instagram photo holding her baby’s hand.
The You star kept her pregnancy a secret for two trimesters before revealing she was expecting her first child six months into her pregnancy.
“Does this mean I’m allowed to drive in the car pool lane at all times now?” Mitchell captioned a topless photo of herself showing off her baby bump in June.
However, keeping her pregnancy a secret led to “severe” prepartum depression — a condition that Mitchell wasn’t aware existed.
“As long as I can remember, I’ve heard about postpartum depression,” she explained in an interview with Hatchland in October. “However, to be depressed at the beginning came as a shock. The isolation and anxiety I experienced was crippling. I thought I was going out of my mind and questioned why nobody ever talked to me about this phase. I’ve been fortunate since sharing the news of my pregnancy to have some amazing conversations with other pregnant women and moms and know that all these feelings are ‘normal.’”
She added that she believed keeping her pregnancy a secret contributed to her prepartum depression. “I was gaining weight without having a noticeable bump,” Mitchell said. “I became paranoid that my team was giving me the side-eye (not knowing I was pregnant) and thinking I should hit the gym — which added to my loneliness.”
Mitchell encountered another hardship before becoming pregnant with Atlas. She opened up about previously suffering a miscarriage at 14 weeks in a candid Instagram post in January explaining that she “lost the child of my hopes and dreams.”
The Canada native had one more secret up her sleeve after the birth of her daughter. She unveiled her child’s name, Atlas Noa, in a sweet Instagram post on November 6.
“I wake up each day (and also every 2-3 hours 😉 still in awe that you are mine, and I am yours,” Mitchell wrote.” I’m still learning about you and I’ll never grow old of watching you slowly wake up, catch a glimpse of me or your dad and focus intently, almost as if to say ‘I know you.’”
With reporting by Kayley Stumpe
