Writing a New Life Story

Author Marianne Richmond is best known for her award-winning children’s books. If I Could Keep You Little, Be Brave Little One, and The Gift of an Angel are just a few of her beautifully illustrated books cherished by millions of parents, children, and parents-to-be for nearly three decades.

Now she has written a powerful new memoir that provides a glimpse into her own troubled childhood with a neglectful mother, an undiagnosed illness, and a legacy of emotional trauma. It is hard to reconcile the author of such heartfelt, warm books that celebrate life’s important relationships and milestones with the story she recounts of a childhood and early adult life plagued by physical and emotional pain.

Richmond, who today lives in Franklin, Tennessee, recalls growing up in Greendale, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. Her family includes two older brothers, a father who is hearing impaired, and a mother — a devout Catholic — who, Richmond understands from a young age, “doesn’t like being a homemaker.”

At age 9, Richmond experiences her first seizure, a frightening occurrence her mother — and the first of many pseudo-doctors — calls a “muscle spasm.” Even as a child, Richmond understands the episode is more serious: “Her choice of words bugs me,” she writes, “but I don’t know what to call it either. Spasm is what happens in Dad’s back after he mows the lawn. Or in my calf in the middle of the night. A muscle cramp. Not the headbanging hurricane that flattened me on Saturday.”

Over the years Richmond experiences many more seizures, each one a terrifying reminder of her difference and, ultimately, of feeling alone in the world. After every seizure, Richmond’s mother turns to prayer and then to various alternative health practitioners. These include a chiropractor who posits she is out of alignment, a naturopath who claims Richmond suffers from “cerebral allergies,” and a neurosurgeon who concludes her seizures are a result of “psychological trauma.” It is not until she leaves for college and has a serious full-body seizure in her dorm room that Richmond finally receives a diagnosis of epilepsy and proper medical treatment: anti-convulsant medication along with neurological intervention. “I am absorbing that I am eighteen years old now,” she writes. “An adult. And I can take the damn pills if I want to, no matter what mom thinks.”

Richmond recounts with wit and emotional detachment a relatively normal life of a young college student — parties, drinking, football games, and friends — that belies the unresolved trauma of her childhood. All the while she keeps her illness a secret. Until, in her 20s, she meets the man who will become her husband and life partner accompanying her through the many upheavals that lie ahead. In him she finally finds the support and stability she lacked for so many years, even though a loving and nurturing relationship with her mother remains elusive. When she least expects it, Richmond experiences another life-changing health crisis and, in its aftermath, embarks on a new creative endeavor, one that will lead to her career as a successful author and publisher.

Alongside the evolutions of her professional life, Richmond becomes a mother herself and grapples with her own ideas of a mother’s love and the generational trauma she carries inside that love. When her mother becomes ill and Richmond decides to be present for her, she is able to rewrite the story of loss and longing into one of acceptance and empathy. “Life lets everyone down,” she writes. “It’s what we do in its wake that defines us.”

Richmond is adept at writing about life’s milestones with clarity and vulnerability punctuated by feelings of loss and betrayal that stubbornly continue to haunt her despite her outward success. Some of the most evocative parts of the book are the moments when the memoir dovetails with her other creative work — when life events such as the unconditional love for a child or loss of a loved one lead her to craft the poems that will become one of her beloved children’s books. For example, Be Brave Little One was born from a conversation with her son about what it means to have courage; for Richmond that means rescripting a life story of her own, not the one she inherited.