It was a typical Wednesday evening. The kids had just gotten home, and we were deep in the post-school vortex of homework, playtime, screen time, and the daily exchange where parents beg for any crumb of information about their children’s day.

I was cleaning up while the kids coloured at the dining table. The iPads hummed in the background with some combination of Zombies and YouTube Kids.

Then my daughter Millie padded over, holding something behind her back, and handed it to me.

My stomach dropped before as I made sense of the blocky first-grade letters my six-year-old had pencilled onto an index card.

“I am sad and I do not know why.”

I marvelled at her handwriting and how much she had already learned in first grade. She looked up at me with wide brown eyes. Expecting... what? Answers?

I froze. Was this a moment? Was this the beginning of something bigger – childhood depression, anxiety, a shadow forming in the shape of mental health issues?

I panicked and did what mothers do when we have no clue how to hold something so heavy – we turn to snacks. I told her I’d be right back, ducked into the kitchen, and stared into the cabinet.

That’s when it hit me: the weight of this moment wasn’t hers, it was mine. Millie wasn’t panicked. She knew about feelings – we have plenty of books about them on our bookshelves. There’s the Little Feminist Book Clubs’ Little Faces Big Feelings, which shows us what emotions feel like. The Color Monster teaches us almost nightly what to do when our feelings get all jumbled up.

And we’ve talked about feelings before, of course:

“How do you feel?”

“Use your words.”

“You dropped your ice cream cone. It’s OK to be sad.”

But never like this. Never in such a seemingly huge way. Never initiated by her, out of the blue, and delivered like an admission.

The author (right) and her daughter (left) enjoy a sunset together.

I didn’t ask her then why she wrote it on a card instead of just telling me. I wonder if saying it out loud might’ve felt too big. Or maybe it was just easier that way. Safer. Or maybe it was just about something silly, like a squabble with her sibling.

We sat and talked together over tiny, smiling Goldfish crackers. The conversation went nowhere and everywhere all at once, and that moment cracked something open in me.

I began to revisit our family’s stories in my mind – the mental health of generations past and present that lived in whispers, that popped up through the lineage of our history. Addiction. Overdoses. Anxiety. Depression. Avoidance. Co-Dependence.

My mum was 9 when her mother, Frances, tried to kill herself. She survived, only for cancer to take her life many years later. Still, she was never the same. She was in and out of mental........

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