Children's author and illustrator Marianne Richmond chronicles her fraught relationship with her mother in a tender, openhearted memoir, If You Were My Daughter. Though Richmond wanted to please her mother, she was often hurt as a young child by her mother's seeming disinterest in her life and her refusal to act as a protector for her daughter. As Richmond gradually learned to advocate for herself, she embarked on a journey toward acceptance, forgiveness, and inner freedom. Her memoir shares that journey, while charting Richmond's career as a prolific greeting card designer, illustrator, and author of dozens of books for young children, which mostly focus on emotions and interpersonal connection.

Richmond details her childhood experiences with undiagnosed epilepsy: episodes that eroded her trust in her own body and made clear that her mother was uninterested in, or unable to, support her daughter in finding answers to her medical questions. Richmond's mother, a veteran, had undergone electroshock therapy as a young woman at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., an experience that left her deeply scarred and convinced she was owed some sort of compensation. Her mother's intense focus on herself left her with little emotional space for Marianne's issues, so Richmond learned to get by on her own as best she could.

Richmond recounts her mother's attempts to care for her family through increasingly esoteric health-food diets and exercise regimens, as well as an oft-repeated belief that God would provide what they needed. While her father's hearing worsened and her brothers were off living their own lives, Richmond relied increasingly on her friends and her own inner compass. But she always longed for two things: normalcy, as opposed to being a young person who felt she couldn't share her family life with her friends, and a mother who truly listened to her questions and frustrations.

As a teenager and then a college student, Richmond was able to claim more control over her medical decisions and her future plans. She chronicles her early career working in direct-mail marketing and event planning, trying to adjust to life in New York City. She meets Jim, the man who will become her husband, and is astonished by his compassion and care for her. And when some tests reveal a mysterious lesion in her brain, a comment from a kind neurosurgeon nearly undoes her with his parental compassion: "If you were my daughter, this [surgery] is what I'd recommend." As Richmond undergoes brain surgery, juggles medications, and navigates a serious relationship, she must learn how to receive affection and care (in crisis and in everyday life) as well as return it.

Richmond explains how her years of neglect and dismissal fed directly into her desire to be a top-notch mother to her own children, and also into her work creating greeting cards and children's books. Many of Richmond's books for young readers address big, messy emotions felt by young children, providing them with language to talk to the adults in their lives about fear, anger, excitement, anxiety, or love. Richmond admits to writing those books directly to her own children and to her younger self, trying to heal the part of her that still longed to be mothered, even as she became a mother to her three children.

As an adult, Richmond struggled to connect with her mother, who continued to petition the VA for restitution relating to her experiences with electroshock therapy. Richmond gradually realizes two things: one, that her mother will never be able to engage with her in a healthy way, and two, that she is in some sense living a parallel life to her mother's, chasing after external validation that will never come (in her case, from her mother). Through a combination of therapy, spiritual searching, and building healthy relationships with her husband and other adults, Richmond learns to let go of her unfulfilled expectations for the mother-daughter relationship, and simultaneously to acknowledge that the wound will always endure.

As she grows her greeting-card business, parents her own children, and builds a stable, loving marriage, Richmond returns again and again to her distant relationship with both her parents, but mostly her mother. She writes with honesty and grace not only about her difficult experiences, but about her ongoing journey to process and understand what has happened to her.

Richmond's experience will resonate with readers who have dealt with complex family bonds and longed to find hope and redemption. And her determination to forge a different path is both relatable and inspiring. If You Were My Daughter is a poignant account of a fraught mother-daughter bond, but it's also a hopeful account of a woman choosing to build a life of openness, forgiveness, and love. --Katie Noah Gibson

Marianne Richmond (photo: Shoott Photography)

Author and illustrator Marianne Richmond has published dozens of picture books and board books, centering on messages of encouragement and love for young children and their families. She and her husband, Jim, spent 16 years co-running a greeting card company focused on her designs. If You Were My Daughter: A Memoir of Healing an Unmothered Heart, her memoir, is her first book for adults. It will be published by Sourcebooks on March 18, 2025. Richmond lives in the Nashville area.

What was the inspiration for If You Were My Daughter?

This book has been about 15 years in the making. For all my children's books, the "why" behind creating them was to put loving messages into the world--to create these connections between parent and child that I felt like I didn't have. For many years, I was telling the story of my complicated relationship with my mother as part of my career. But it wasn't until I got into therapy, as my greeting card business was wrapping up, that I learned to name some of my experiences. I also wanted to take on the challenge of writing a nonfiction book that would stretch me as a writer, and force me to think differently about theme, structure, and dialogue.

You had a complex, even traumatic, relationship with your mother.

I had misdiagnosed epilepsy as a young child, and for years, adults were telling me that I wasn't telling the truth. The combination of that and having a mom who was parenting out of her own fear--it was not great. It upended me and hollowed me out. There was no internal safety, and no external safety. It's the ultimate in vulnerability to have your body lose control when you don't know what it will do. A lot of people can relate to that journey of misdiagnosis and being misunderstood in that medical capacity. For years, I was operating in fear and anxiety and hypervigilance. I was in fight or flight mode for decades.

My mother was the only link between me and any kind of meaningful help. But because of her own history with electroshock therapy [at a veterans' hospital], she didn't have the capacity to be there for me. We were living parallel lives, in a certain way. I kept thinking: Can't you see how I'm hurting? And that's what we're all looking for, to be witnessed. No one could witness her, and no one could witness me. It led to a sense of deep aloneness.

How did you try to address those emotions through your children's books?

My children's books are all about helping witness the deep emotions of life. A lot of them are about parenthood. For example, Be Brave, Little One, is about trying to live a courageous life. For me, it's been about understanding that courage is a choice. It can look really small and quiet, or it can look really big and loud.

My first books were aspirational: I was writing what my ideal experience of being loved by a parent would feel like. Now I have my own model with my children. I was giving my kids what I wanted them to know, but also what I wanted for myself. As a young mom, I think I was overcompensating. I thought, I'm just going to let them know they're the greatest, all the time. But the result of that is an exhausted, depleted mother. Because I was coming at it from a place of lack in my own soul, rather than coming from a place of wholeness.

How did you get to that place of wholeness?

Going to therapy was pivotal for me. This therapist was the first person who was able to name some of my experiences. I remember her saying, right off the bat, You've had some huge nurturing gaps in your life. She started to educate me about the natural attunement between parent and child. That's secure attachment, and it's what gives the child the inner safety to understand how to handle life. Understanding what didn't happen for me was very helpful. I remember the therapist talking about the goal of inner alignment: head, heart, body. I remember she said, When your soul feels heard, you can move forward.

What was it like to delve into this story and put it on the page in a more direct way?

I started writing pieces of this book long ago, but I was still so angry that it started to sound bitter. It took me a long time to figure out what story I was telling. I'd read so many things on how to write a memoir, and someone delivered this equation: This is a story of X, as told through Y. The X becomes your universal, as told through Y, which is your personal story. So: this is a mother-daughter story, of coming to terms with what you never got. And either letting that stay in you as bitterness or finding some sort of resolution and acceptance. I had to look back at my mom's story and get to a place where I could realize that we were looking for the same thing. I still wish my experience could have been different, but I got to a place of acceptance, and a little more understanding and compassion.

The subtitle mentions "healing an unmothered heart."

I specifically landed on that word unmothered. I think my mother thought she was doing a decent job: I was provided clothes and food and physical essentials. The unmothered heart gives voice to the fact that what she was able to give and what I needed were a mismatch--because of who I am, and because of who she was. I think my brothers got what they needed from her, because they didn't need her in the same way. The unmothered heart is such a personal experience that people can dismiss [it] as You were so sensitive. It comes back to validation--that it's okay to need and desire in certain ways. We're quick to dismiss and diminish ourselves and our valid needs. And it's okay to want. And it's okay to grieve that we didn't get it.

What do you hope readers gain from this story?

I recently got my master's in mental health counseling. I'm struck by this idea that we are all born into a story in progress, and that story is pivotal to what our journey becomes. And we have to choose: Do we carry this story forward--the pain, and the frustration--or are we actively trying to re-narrate what it becomes? The stories we're born into end up shaping the ones we tell about ourselves. As I sit in the counseling chair now, and hear people tell their stories, it's often negative about themselves. So often, it comes back to What's wrong with me? I want to give people an invitation to examine that story, and say, What am I carrying forward that I don't want to, or that's not even true?

In a lot of ways, the book is about choosing to re-author that narrative for ourselves. I think we could take the same plot points or material and mix and match them to tell a different story. You could tell a business story, or a marriage story, or a story in which I'm the victim. But I think it's an invitation. I think it's also for women who can relate to the unmothered heart. I want them to let this book be that healing witness. --Katie Noah Gibson