Lindsay Clancy and her children deserved to live.

Content warning: This post touches on postpartum psychosis, suicide, and child death, without going into detail.

This morning someone sent me the New Yorker article “What We Still Don’t Understand About Postpartum Psychosis”. 

Several women are named in this article. All of them had children under a year old. Those children are now dead, and their parents’ lives are destroyed.

All of the women sought help multiple times. What they received instead of help was meds, and being sent home to the same environments in which they had been living when their symptoms arose. 

Their husbands kept going to work. They themselves kept mothering and running their households. The world turned, and everyone around them acted like everything was normal.

Until it wasn’t. 

There are few things that sadden and enrage me more than their stories. 

I want to write alternate endings for them.

Their husbands got year-long paternity leaves. Their mothers and sisters came to live with them. Their friends surrounded them all the time. They didn’t have to cook a meal or clean a room for the first year after their babies were born. They were fed properly, given relaxing touch daily. They had occasional nights of broken sleep, but not many. They healed from their births, body and soul.

I have a question about these stories, and what we seem to be taking from them. Is motherhood killing mothers? If not, then what is? If so, then why is it so dangerous? Is this simply how it has to be? Is motherhood like this in every culture? Are we thinking about this scientifically? Are we examining this issue like people who want to change it? Or like people enjoying a spectacle and a sacrifice, saying: it has to be someone. Glad it’s not me.

If we conceptualize motherhood as a trial by fire, as a battle, then it follows that some will not survive. 

If we are going to conceptualize motherhood this way, then we owe it to the fallen to look them in the face and say: we did this to you. 

We joked about how sleep deprivation is literal torture, and then left you to be subjected to it endlessly, while small children were in your care. 

We joked about how all you eat is leftover chicken nuggets and coffee, about how when you see another adult you can’t stop talking because you’re so lonely, about how your husband is like another child in your household, about how you work around the clock for no money. 

We told you to have a glass of wine when things hurt, because not doing the things was never an option. 

We piled all of this weight on you—the weight that broke you.

Perhaps there was a fault, a seam, but would it have given way had we not thrown the world on top of it?

The pain I feel when writing about this is so deep, it’s numbing.

We’re all numb to this. Why is everyone so resigned? 

We don’t have to do things this way.

What should happen is that our broken society should evolve towards repairing this gaping hole through which children and their mothers are tumbling, day after day after day.

But I understand that that’s close to impossible. Fine. If we can’t fix the way we do motherhood—if we can’t keep the husbands home to help, live with the aunties and sisters, let the mothers be cared for organically, within the fabric of an intact culture that already knows what to do—then we can do it the new-fangled way, and hire skilled help. 

What would these families’ fates have been if they had had postpartum care?  

I don’t want to be arrogant and say that a doula could have prevented this. We’re not actually magical, as much as the world likes to see us that way. 

But on the other hand, that’s why many of us got into this work. Because we’ve been there, or we see what’s going on, and we see what needs to happen to stop it, and nobody’s doing it, so here we are. I believe we can prevent many of these types of tragedies, and many smaller tragedies too. 

Our whole purpose is to keep mothers from becoming sacrificial lambs. We don’t want to live in a world where that’s how it works. 

Lindsay Clancy and her children deserved to live.

What they got instead was the trap that every single family in our culture is forced to walk into the moment they have children. We need to throw this trap out forever.

I am sincerely begging the families of women beginning their childbearing journeys: Hire your beloved person help. Hire them extensive help. Don’t think that the way everyone does it is good enough for them, or for you, or for their kids. It’s not good enough. It is in fact a game of roulette with bad odds. 

It doesn’t have to be this way.