My mother vanished when I was three. Her mother sold her babies for a living. Neither of them killed a child, and that distinction is the whole point of this piece.
I think this is where your root-cause analysis and mine separate. I don’t read women saying “Same, Lindsay” as identifying with what happened to those three children. I hear women identifying with everything that happened before them. I begged for help. My husband didn’t recognize how far gone I was. My doctor dismissed me or handed me another prescription. Nobody listened when I said something was terribly wrong. I was drowning in front of people who loved me, and everyone still expected me to function.
Patrick is relevant to that conversation, but not because he is the keeper of where our sympathy is allowed to go. Lindsay was deteriorating, cycling through providers and medications, had been hospitalized, and was struggling badly enough that additional help had been brought into the home. Yet we keep coming back to the fact that nobody specifically told Patrick she couldn’t be left alone with the children. That is part of what women are talking about. At what point do the people closest to a woman recognize what is happening, listen to the woman herself, without waiting for a doctor to formally tell them she is no longer okay?
And there is another piece of this that I don’t think can be separated from it. Look at what happens when women try to have this conversation. I did, and within hours hundreds of men were calling me emotional, mentally unstable, stupid, telling me my children should be ashamed of me, I shouldn’t be allowed to vote, accusing me of defending a murderer, and sending things privately that were substantially worse. The response to women saying “you aren’t listening to us” was to immediately demean the women saying it. That mentality does not begin in a comment section. The internet just makes it louder and gives men permission to say publicly what women have encountered privately in marriages, workplaces and doctors’ offices for generations.
That is why dismissing these women as a “fan club” or treating their stories as evidence that society no longer values children bothers me. It collapses two completely different things. Empathizing with the illness, the dismissal and the failure to intervene is not celebrating the outcome. Cora, Dawson and Callan are dead. Nothing about recognizing the failures preceding their deaths diminishes the enormity of that fact.
Andrea Yates was 25 years ago. Five children died and we had a national conversation about postpartum psychosis, treatment failures and what can happen when a profoundly ill mother remains responsible for children. A quarter-century later, three more children are dead and women are telling us that they still recognize the road that led there. Because nothing changed on the road.
They aren’t saying “I identify with killing my children.”
They’re saying “I recognize that road, because I have been on it.”
If we’re actually doing root-cause analysis, we cannot dismiss the people pointing at the upstream failures simply because what happened downstream is horrific. Those are precisely the people we should be listening to.
The good part is, Im totally good with being wrong and any mothers persepctive on this is going to be better than mine as mine is a very different perspective since I’ve learned from women and never been one so I appreciate your input.
This is a painful 14 minute read. Well written. The author himself was abandoned by his biological mother. Then does a deep dive into his DNA geneology revealed disturbing revelations in his own family tree. My own husband is uncovering uncomfortable secrets in his parents’ genealogical DNA search. He was’t adopted. But the scars from family secrets do carry on to future generations.
I think this is where your root-cause analysis and mine separate. I don’t read women saying “Same, Lindsay” as identifying with what happened to those three children. I hear women identifying with everything that happened before them. I begged for help. My husband didn’t recognize how far gone I was. My doctor dismissed me or handed me another prescription. Nobody listened when I said something was terribly wrong. I was drowning in front of people who loved me, and everyone still expected me to function.
Patrick is relevant to that conversation, but not because he is the keeper of where our sympathy is allowed to go. Lindsay was deteriorating, cycling through providers and medications, had been hospitalized, and was struggling badly enough that additional help had been brought into the home. Yet we keep coming back to the fact that nobody specifically told Patrick she couldn’t be left alone with the children. That is part of what women are talking about. At what point do the people closest to a woman recognize what is happening, listen to the woman herself, without waiting for a doctor to formally tell them she is no longer okay?
And there is another piece of this that I don’t think can be separated from it. Look at what happens when women try to have this conversation. I did, and within hours hundreds of men were calling me emotional, mentally unstable, stupid, telling me my children should be ashamed of me, I shouldn’t be allowed to vote, accusing me of defending a murderer, and sending things privately that were substantially worse. The response to women saying “you aren’t listening to us” was to immediately demean the women saying it. That mentality does not begin in a comment section. The internet just makes it louder and gives men permission to say publicly what women have encountered privately in marriages, workplaces and doctors’ offices for generations.
That is why dismissing these women as a “fan club” or treating their stories as evidence that society no longer values children bothers me. It collapses two completely different things. Empathizing with the illness, the dismissal and the failure to intervene is not celebrating the outcome. Cora, Dawson and Callan are dead. Nothing about recognizing the failures preceding their deaths diminishes the enormity of that fact.
Andrea Yates was 25 years ago. Five children died and we had a national conversation about postpartum psychosis, treatment failures and what can happen when a profoundly ill mother remains responsible for children. A quarter-century later, three more children are dead and women are telling us that they still recognize the road that led there. Because nothing changed on the road.
They aren’t saying “I identify with killing my children.”
They’re saying “I recognize that road, because I have been on it.”
If we’re actually doing root-cause analysis, we cannot dismiss the people pointing at the upstream failures simply because what happened downstream is horrific. Those are precisely the people we should be listening to.
The good part is, Im totally good with being wrong and any mothers persepctive on this is going to be better than mine as mine is a very different perspective since I’ve learned from women and never been one so I appreciate your input.
This is a painful 14 minute read. Well written. The author himself was abandoned by his biological mother. Then does a deep dive into his DNA geneology revealed disturbing revelations in his own family tree. My own husband is uncovering uncomfortable secrets in his parents’ genealogical DNA search. He was’t adopted. But the scars from family secrets do carry on to future generations.
This was painful to read, but well done. God bless you, Rob.