Nobody warned Hannah Harper that the song she wrote on her couch during postpartum depression would one day chart higher on iTunes than the most streamed children’s song in history.
SHE WAS NOT THINKING ABOUT CHARTS. SHE WAS BARELY THINKING AT ALL.
Hannah was going through a hard stretch after the birth of her third son. The kind of exhaustion that settles deep into your bones and does not leave.
She was touched out and overwhelmed and feeling invisible in the way only a mother in the middle of it truly understands.
Hannah’s audition song about her fight against depression
Her toddler kept walking over asking her to open string cheese and in that moment of complete depletion, something just snapped.
She picked up a pen and wrote the most honest song of her life.
THAT SONG JUST RANKED ABOVE BABY SHARK ON THE ITUNES CHILDREN’S CHART.
But the moment that told the whole story happened before any of that.
When Hannah sang String Cheese on American Idol for the first time Lauren Alaina was at home holding her newborn daughter eight months postpartum.
She recorded herself watching the performance with tears streaming down her face and posted it for the world to see.
Lauren Alaina reacts to String Cheese while 8 months postpartum
A country star who had built her entire career. Completely undone by two minutes of honest songwriting from a stranger in Missouri.
That is what postpartum depression looks like when someone finally puts it into words instead of hiding it.
It does not sound like a diagnosis. It sounds like a song every mother already knows by heart but has never heard out loud before.
Hannah Harper wrote it for herself, but it turned out she wrote it for moms throughout the world.