Story highlights We used to hear how great motherhood is; now, we see in film and TV how terrible it is

Postpartum psychosis is a rare and serious mental illness featured in the new film "Tully"

This story contains spoilers about the movie "Tully."

(CNN) For most of cinematic history, on-screen mothers have been a tame bunch. They were observers and healers, drivers and cheek-crumb wipers. They could be wise but rarely were given the chance to reveal how they earned this wisdom. Back stories, with all their tension and grit, have a way of humanizing us, and mothers weren't allowed to be fully human.

No more. A new crop of entertainment about motherhood has turned its eye toward the inner lives of motherhood, exploring feelings and storylines that were long overlooked. "Tully," a new film featuring Charlize Theron, is about a mother's experience with feeling lost -- and, eventually, kind of found -- after the birth of her third child.

It's joined by television shows like "The Letdown," "Catastrophe" and, to some degree, "Big Little Lies," whose plots largely revolve around the darker side of life with children. There are also the many parenting memes and hashtags that, if read in isolation, make parenting sound like purgatory.

The struggles they portray aren't new -- they're the manifestations of "the problem with no name" examined by Betty Friedan's 1963 book "The Feminine Mystique" -- but the fact that characters are hashing it out on the screen is new.

These stories do important work. They embolden many to reject the specter of idealized motherhood that still looms over women. Still, the net effect is a grim one. We've gone from a unnaturally seamless portrayal of motherhood to a pockmarked one, when the reality is often somewhere in between. We used to hear, again and again, how great motherhood is. Now we hear, again and again, how terrible motherhood is. An improvement? Sure. But it's far from ideal.