All that We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy is a rallying cry from the trenches of maternal mental illness: a cry for visibility, for treatment, for compassion. Mixing academic research with personal experience, these poems push back against the rosy picture society paints of motherhood and instead lay bare the raw, neglected parts: the rage, the sorrow, the confusion, the ambivalence, the tentative joy. But these lines do more than simply give voice—they weave together to create a lyrical safety net, a road map to survival.