There’s a version of new motherhood that gets told over and over. We’ve all seen the soft light, a sleeping baby, a woman who has never felt more herself. And then there’s the version that actually happens to a lot of us. In the United States, postpartum depression rates have nearly doubled over the last decade — by CDC estimates, 1 in 8 women experiences PPD, which translates to more than 460,000 mothers affected every year. And yet, for most of us, the conversation still stops at the pamphlet in the OB’s waiting room.
Journalist, author, and mom Pooja Makhijani felt that silence acutely when she had her daughter more than a decade ago. She’d read the checklists. She thought she was prepared. She wasn’t. “It hits you like a truck,” she told me. “And then it lingers, and it just makes everything feel like everything has lost its color. Like a shroud had settled over everything.”
What got her through wasn’t a resource or a hotline. It was her mother-in-law showing up at the door after a single phone call in which Makhijani said, simply, “I can’t do this.” Someone noticed. Someone came. The book Makhijani has now written — Together for Mama: A Story of Hope and Healing, out June 23 — is dedicated to her.
Parents have long known that picture books can open doors that direct conversation sometimes can’t. There’s something about the safety of a character on a page which allows a child to ask questions, process feelings, and find themselves in a story. Together for Mama is exactly that kind of book.
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Together for Mama is believed to be the first traditionally published children’s picture book to address postpartum depression directly, which tells you something about how far we still have to go. It’s told through the eyes of an older sibling watching their family mobilize around a struggling mother — aunties cooking, a grandmother staying over, a father holding things together — and it’s as much for the adult reading it aloud as it is for the child listening.
That choice to tell the story through an older sibling’s eyes matters. Children in a family where a parent is struggling aren’t bystanders, instead, they’re participants in the experience, whether anyone names it for them or not. A book that gives them language and a framework is a gift to the whole family, not just the grown-ups.
And for many families, this isn’t a one-time experience. Research suggests that women who have had PPD once have a significant risk of experiencing it again with a subsequent pregnancy, which means a lot of moms end up navigating it with an older child in the house who is watching, absorbing, and wondering what’s wrong. That’s exactly the reader Makhijani had in mind.
Makhijani’s own experience as an Asian American woman shaped not just the story but her understanding of who gets left out of this conversation entirely. About 14% of Asian and Pacific Islander women report PPD, a figure that almost certainly undercounts reality. As Makhijani explained, Asian American women are diagnosed at lower rates not because they experience PPD less, but because stigma keeps them from seeking care. “It was really important to me to have that cultural specificity present,” she said, “and to offer a fully non-judgmental, loving portrait of an Asian American family dealing with mental health.”
The through-line of everything Makhijani told me was isolation. It’s a particular cruelty of PPD that convinces you you’re the only one. “When you have a new baby at home,” she said, “you think you’re the only person who has ever gone through this. And then, eventually, the world opens up and you realize women have been surviving this for millennia.” The problem isn’t the experience. It’s the silence around it.
When we don’t talk about the postpartum period as anything other than soft-focus and joyful, Makhijani said, that framing keeps women from naming what’s happening to them. The flyers help no one if you can’t recognize yourself in them.
She made the book she wishes had existed. One that’s honest without being frightening. It simply says this happens, and people who love you will show up. For her daughter, now a teenager, reading the manuscript at 12 was the moment she learned her mother had been through this. It was also an unspoken promise that if it ever happens to her, she’ll already know she isn’t alone.
That’s the work this book is doing, on multiple levels. For the child in the story, for the child on the couch, for the mom holding the book.
Makhijani’s advice for anyone in it right now is less about finding the right words and more about letting your community do what communities are supposed to do. “We tend to think we have to raise children by ourselves,” she said, “and that’s really the American mentality. But children were never meant to be raised that way.” Ask who your village is. Let them notice. Let them show up.
The book comes out June 23. Read it to your kids. Read it for yourself.
