All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy by Bridget Bell
Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Publication Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781960327086
Pages: 88
In her stunning debut collection of poems, All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy, Bridget Bell explores the horrors and absurdities of postpartum depression (PPD) through arresting confession, dark humor, and refreshing vulnerability. While reading All That We Ask, I cried, yes, but I also laughed out loud and cheered Bell’s courage, truth-telling, and art-making as she shows other mothers who have suffered from PPD that they are not alone.
As Dr. Riah Patterson, Director of Perinatal Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, writes in the medical introduction, PPD is “the most common complication” of childbirth, “affecting 15 to 20 percent of mothers.” American culture often paints motherhood as a blessing and a gift—a perception that might contribute to only a fraction of women with PPD receiving the care they desperately need. By speaking outright what is so often unsaid, Bell’s poems shed much-needed light on this common but underacknowledged illness.
All That We Ask is divided into four sections and moves from Bell’s first pregnancy, to after the birth of her daughter and Bell’s PPD, to hard-won recovery and her decision to try to have a second child, to a miscarriage, to the later birth of her second child (and another flare of mental illness), to recovery again and a look to the future. The path is not linear, which illustrates the one-step-forward-two-steps-back nature of recovery. The introduction, as well as the acknowledgements at the end of the book, clarify that these poems are autobiographical. It is a harrowing but beautifully told journey, rife with as much grisly imagery and gallows humor as a war novel.
From the first poem, “Directive for Women Who Are Not Yet Mothers but Will Become Mothers,” Bell develops one of the book’s key themes: the idea that a mother’s body is no longer her own. She writes, “admire your breasts while they are still your breasts, / not yet udders,” and later, “cherish the body of the woman / you will never be again.” The next poem, “This Is How You Lose Your Body,” ends with the image of a fetus that “claims your body / from the inside.” Bell, thus, likens the fetus to a parasite—a metaphor that one would never see in greeting cards, baby showers, family movies, or other fixtures of the industry of motherhood, but that rings true in these brave poems.
Our culture’s insensitivity to the perils of pregnancy and the mother’s suffering appears again and again, often through Bell’s humor and acrobatic shifts in tone. These stylistic feats shine brightly in the long poem “Origin Stories,” which is broken up into twelve short sections. Section II reads:
The doctor complains about the cold
air conditioning, wraps a warmed blanket
around her shoulders. I vomit in a dish. Blood
and piss mix in my catheter bag.
The assonance in “dish,” “piss,” and “mix” intensifies the humor achieved through Bell’s juxtaposition of the patient’s suffering with the doctor’s cozy blanket. I found myself darkly laughing again as I read Section VIII:
My homework is to make a birth plan:
lemon-infused ice chips. Massage
the perineum. Sip raspberry leaf tea.
My proposal does not unfold accordingly.
As Dr. Patterson elucidated in her introduction, Bell’s non-progressing labor “required an emergency cesarean,” and the trauma of course did not end after Bell’s daughter was delivered. Later in “Origin Stories,” Bell writes:
Some nights, I bow over the crib. Almost prostrate,
I whisper, You have changed everything,
and I hate you for it. Then shame
and its thorny arms.
Though articulated too infrequently in the literature and mythology of motherhood, these difficult thoughts (such as resentment) and complex feelings (such as shame for feeling said resentment, even momentarily) are normal. Bell’s maternal love is fierce—that is never in question here—making her negative or intrusive thoughts all the more heartbreaking and relatable. Bell’s directness results in relief instead of shock for the reader: relief that finally someone is speaking the truth.
Again, as in a war novel, there are moments of necessary, earned vulgarity throughout. In “Sestina in Which the World Fails to Tell You about the Tedium,” “fuck” is one of the six repeating end words, as is the word “alphabet.” Bell juxtaposes the alphabet of acronyms like PPD and PTSD along with lines like “A is for acorn. B is for bird. Alphabet / rising up from the forms / of a world you no longer understand.” This poem and “Dangerous for Mothers” accurately and vividly portray manifestations of depression to a deeply affecting degree. In the latter, which the epigraph notes is inspired by Connie Voisine’s “Dangerous for Girls,” the speaker’s depression is “the crumbling . . . like a mudslide / caving in a village, and I’d drop my head on the kitchen table // and cry next to a plate of Chinese takeout.” Later in this poem, the speaker and her therapist go over “the plan // to get me better: psychiatrist, Zoloft, support group, Ativan, counseling, / sleep.” Then, the speaker asks, “And this will save me?”
Section III of All That We Ask moves to when Bell decides to have a second child. Some readers might ask, Why? How could you go through that again? The short poem “A Survivor of Postpartum Depression Explains Why She Wants Another Baby” answers “because the pull / of life is the strongest addiction.” In an immensely effective structural choice, this section is comprised of only this short poem and a nine-page poem titled “Co-opting Anne Carson’s ‘The Glass Essay’ to Process My Miscarriage,” a dramatic, often funny, and ultimately heartbreaking poem that is as riveting as the climax of a novel. This poem acts as a turning point, and after it, the reader sees the speaker inch closer and closer to healing.
To underscore this turn, Section IV begins with the following quote from Postpartum Support International as the epigraph: “You are not alone. You are not to blame. With help, you will get better.” The poem “On Not Waiting It Out to See If I Feel Better” shows the speaker realizing it’s time to ask for help, via the chilling image of a black widow spider, and the poem “Collective” ends with the line “Everywhere, there is a woman awake with you.” All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy culminates with “The Language of Becoming Well” and closes with the idea that the speaker isn’t ignorant: she knows everything won’t return to how it was before, but she is looking to whom she will become and is bolstered by other mothers and “other mother-writers.”
With her direct style that never minces words, it’s tempting to call Bridget Bell’s debut collection fearless. But I think it’s even braver, even more powerful because Bell examines her fear, looks it in the face and speaks the unspeakable. This is not unflinching writing: we see the speaker flinch—we see her nipples bleed, hear her wracking sobs, watch her wade through maternal mental illness and still keep going. And for that, this collection is all the more remarkable.
BRIDGET BELL’s debut poetry collection—