The birth of a child is often portrayed in society as a moment of joy. But what if the time that follows is marked by mental exhaustion, anxiety, and alienation? This lecture explores how literature addresses the often-taboo experience of the postpartum period and its psychological crises. The focus is on three novels separated by more than a century: Helene Böhlaus’s *Halbtier!* (1899), Gabriele Reuters’s *Ellen von der Weiden* (1900), and Olga Ravn’s *Meine Arbeit* (Danish: *Mit arbejde*, 2020). Around 1900, Böhlau and Reuter wrote in opposition to a bourgeois image of women that confined women to their bodies, their role as wives, and selfless motherhood. Ravn explores, in a fragmentary, autobiographical form, how motherhood, writing, and emotional crisis intertwine. How do these texts convey feelings of being overwhelmed and a loss of identity? What language do they find for a suffering long considered unspeakable? And what does this comparison reveal about the change and persistence of societal images of motherhood?