Coming to See the Good
Personal Perspective: A postpartum daughter's breakthrough about herself and her mother.
Posted March 7, 2025 | Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
My mother had postpartum mental illness that arose around my birth. I had a sister who was two years older than I was, and my mother had a normal mother-baby relationship with her, but she wanted nothing to do with me when I was an infant. I know this and a few other details from my father—I don’t remember what happened myself, of course. But I’ve pieced together things my father said, what I do know about my own experience, and some shards of actual memory , and tried to draw conclusions. Mostly, what I know is that some things that happened when I was a baby and toddler scared me so much that I was never able to stop being afraid of my mother, and I was never really able to have a normal relationship with her or see her in any way.
I always knew my mother was mentally ill—she was hospitalized repeatedly and struggled in various ways for many years—but I had no idea that maternal mental illness was the root of the problem, and the psychiatrists who treated her in the 1950s and ‘60s probably didn’t either. At some point when I was growing up, my father told me she was diagnosed with everything from manic depression , as they called bipolar disorder back then, to schizophrenia. (I’ve read that postpartum mental illness didn’t come into focus as a research topic till the early 1980s.)
The thought of maternal mental illness as the true source of our problems had been occurring to me vaguely and intermittently for a long time as an adult, but it really sank in for the first time in 2014, when I read two articles in the New York Times about maternal mental illness. My mother had been dead for more than thirty years by then, but I had never stopped grappling with her illness and how it affected me.
There’s been a fair amount of information published since 2014 when I saw those articles about how maternal mental illness affects mothers, how it manifests, and how the illness can be treated. But it seems to me there’s much less about how it affects the children. I’ve always known I was deeply affected by my mother’s mental illness and I’ve done a huge amount of work to recover from the childhood traumas that were related to it, including twenty-plus years of EMDR, a therapy that can be used to treat PTSD . But it’s only been recently that I’ve started to understand how I might have specifically been affected by my mother’s postpartum illness, and the understanding of that continues to unfold.
I thought of that a few weeks ago when I was lying on my yoga mat on the floor in my upstairs study after doing downward dog and pigeon pose, and I noticed that directly at eye level, sitting on a lower shelf in my bookcase, were six copies of the hardcover of my book, a literary memoir I published in 1999.
One of the issues I’ve been working on for a long time in therapy and in other ways is that I can’t see myself. I know that no one can ever really see themselves objectively, but I also know that there’s something different about the way that I can’t see myself. It’s like there’s some cloud or block in front of my mental eyes when I try to see myself or think of myself, and in the place where some kind of realistic view might be, there’s a blank space.
Something came to me at around the time I was lying on my yoga mat staring at my book: Maybe the reason I can’t see myself is that my mother wasn’t looking at me when I was an infant; maybe I didn’t see myself reflected in her eyes and that’s why I didn’t learn to see myself. And I realized as I was lying there on my floor that I have the same kind of blindness about my book—that I’ve never been able to see my book either, to feel good about it as an accomplishment.
And, I also realized that the blindness was wearing off. The very fact that I could see it showed me that it was wearing off. And now I could see and feel good about my book, could even see the cover in a new way—the cover photo with its blue sky, clouds, a ladder made of Japanese sticks reaching up to heaven. The book has been out for a long time now, and it’s kind of astonishing that it’s taken me so long to be able to feel good about it. But better late than never. The real accomplishment, I thought as I was lying there on the floor looking at my book—the thing that was the hardest and took the longest, the thing that is the most valuable and that I’m probably the proudest of in my life—is the healing of how I see myself (and my book): all that going inside myself and finding the broken parts and piecing them together into a whole, through the miracle of EMDR.
I wish my mother had been able to do that, and I feel connected to my mother, only now, when she’s been dead for all these years, because I have been able to do that.
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Mary Allen, the author of The Rooms of Heaven, is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.