All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy by Bridget Bell
By Acadia Hansen
Bridget Bell’s evocative poetry collection All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy (CavanKerry Press, 2025) shares a vision of motherhood often obscured from the public eye. Bell, a survivor of postpartum depression, presents memories from her own perinatal experience, offering readers a chance to listen and understand the truth behind the generally accepted idea of “Mother.” Bell’s vivid imagery and word choice aare mixed with scientific research, and, intriguingly, the book features an introduction by Riah Patterson, director of Perinatal Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina. This collection, then, serves as both a reflection and a call to action.
Bell’s lyrical voice is expressed in each section and poem. She combines this lyricism with intentional structuring; some of her work meanders across the page, following an easily identifiable path, and other selections offer only a glimpse at Bell’s interiority and paint the story with striking, unmatchable colors. One of her more visual poems, “Postpartum Depression,” offers a series of quickly moving images, seemingly unrelated except in their capture of confinement:
a hot empty attic
a strange fish in the ocean’s midnight zone unable to ever see light
a loose button dropped unnoticed off the cuff
slick stones at the bottom of a river
a car-shattered deer dragging its broken body
a window painted shut
a cornered mouse frantic along the floorboards
wheels on black ice—
spinning, spinning, spinning—
From the first line, Bell places a reader in a room that is both dark and inescapable, and her choice to leave out most punctuation allows for a dizzying transition from one space to another, mimicking both the stillness and terrifying velocity of depression. The poem moves from an unnatural space—an attic—to the deep sea, and then again from something human-made to something in water. Bell’s capturing of this movement is the very thing that confines it. On the page, the window that is painted shut will never be pried open, and the “wheels on black ice” are “spinning, spinning, spinning—” Bell does not give us an easy ending. In this poem, everything is trapped, no matter if it is portrayed in motion. Here, Bell effectively arranges the sensation of depression in a single stanza.
While it may portray confinement, literature is not made to be kept cleanly on the page. It is a reflection of society and a map for change. Like much important work, Bell’s collection is not simply a depiction of an experience, but a critique and a “rallying cry.” Her poem “Raising Mothers” blends her own perinatal experience with the all-too-commonly held belief that motherhood is always aesthetically pleasing and is always a source of fulfillment. Bell writes:
A bad way to raise mothers is with flyers
taped to doctor walls promising an empowered
peace-filled birth. Each night, a choir
of monitor lights flashes the mother’s face and she cowers
convinced that she’ll never understand
how to quiet the child. Sunlight halts behind
the curtains. She is lost inside the land
of it-makes-no-difference-if-it’s-day-or-night.
A bad way to raise mothers is to deify
Everything Baby, to say what a blessing,
then hand over the flailing fists, to deny
that motherhood is hard as fuck: festering
fetid pile of bibs and burp rags,
the bottle’s milk-film, registry must-haves:
wipe warmer, perpetual smile, stocked diaper bag,
love every moment, clip-on car mirror because the mother
must always watch the baby. Then it is night and I am alone.
Then it is night and then it is night again.
In this poem, like in “Postpartum Depression,” Bell toys with light and dark, and again arranges elements of the natural world, like sunlight, alongside unnatural counterparts, like monitor lights that flash intermittently in a dark hospital room. While it uses similar imagery, this poem focuses less on sensation and has more of a narrative structure than “Postpartum Depression.” Readers are reminded that mothers, too, must be raised, and that focusing only on the “perpetual smile” leads to a culture that cannot understand any other expression. A culture that does not recognize the difficulties of this time cannot adequately care for mothers during or prepare mothers for the perinatal experience.
At the conclusion of “Raising Mothers,” Bell returns to the senses and to the idea of confinement. While mental health tends to fluctuate, the feeling of that fluctuation cannot always be felt in the moment. When it is night, it seems like it will be night forever.
Given that postpartum depression is such a personal experience, tt’s notable that Bell, who graduated with a degree in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence’s MFA program and teaches English at Durham Technical Community College in North Carolina, gives readers a chance to live these moments with her. And All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy certainly has an effective storytelling arc. The very first poem, “Directive for Women Who Are Not Yet Mothers but Will Become Mothers,” propels a reader forward with its quick, two-line stanzas and lingering sentences.
Soon you will be mired in layers
of din, your body’s smallest bones—
malleus, incus, stapes—stirrup-shaped, will shake
to the sound of phantom milk cries, so stop
now, while there is still this mercy
of no one needing you, and listen
to the zip of white leather
boots, flaunt them with a storm-stomp, like lightning
while your eardrum cracks to the bass
of 3 a.m. dance floors because soon your world will spin
on the axis of your breasts, too-heavy cuffs, prolactin
like flash floods, or the reverse, a drought and the body’s
fuck you refusal to make milk, so pause
in front of a full-length mirror and admire
the peach blossom, sand dune, deep taupe, cabernet
of your nipples before new pigment paints them
a different color, admire your breasts while they are still your breasts,
not yet udders, hold them, drape them in tulip silk,
caviar lace, smoke and ash.
Bell encourages a reader to pause, to linger in that space that exists before change, but once the journey has begun, there is no way back. The pages keep turning.
Bell structures this poem in such a way that it feels as though each line is carrying a reader forward into an unknown. The indentation of the second line of each stanza helps to create this sensation. Like most of Bell’s work, the poem is a mix of narration and imagery; a reader is told what will happen after this moment, after this pause, and is also given a delightful visual of white leather boots and lightning, is presented with the delicate touch of “tulip silk.” The speaker revels in the before and hints at the after while the poem delivers the change: “cherish the body of the woman / you will never be again.”
Bell’s final poem in the collection is titled “The Language of Becoming Well.” It serves not only as an ending to the collection, but also as a hopeful sequel to the first poem. The final stanza reads:
I am nourished by the glittering simple
promise inside this advice: remember, everything
will normalize, the verb to normalize—
to bring or restore to a normal condition—
guarantees not a return
to how I once was, but an arrival
at whom I am yet to become.
The momentum of the first poem feels as though it was always meant to deliver a reader here, to this ending, to this realization of becoming. Motherhood may not be a sustained period of pure joy, but in the complexity, one can find community and a new sense of self. Bridget Bell’s All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy is an honest portrayal of motherhood—“what a blessing,” “smoke and ash”—and each poem in the collection invites readers to listen to those sometimes jarring rhythms.
New Ohio Review 