When I reflect on my first few weeks of motherhood, one particularly painful moment stands out. It wasn’t the cracked nipples, or the adult diapers, or the indignity of having strange hands reach into the most intimate parts of my body. It wasn’t even the sleeplessness, the cruelty of which made me question my ability to go on another day (and another day, and another endless day). All of those things were difficult, yes. But there was a different moment, a rawer, more visceral moment, when something broke inside of me.
I had driven to the store after a challenging nursing session with my newborn daughter, a mewling, unsettled creature who was about as familiar to me as a passerby on the street. Nursing didn’t come easily to her—or maybe it didn’t come easily to me. Regardless, we were not succeeding at the most basic of maternal-infant tasks. Phrases like “tongue-tie,” “nipple-shield,” and “poor latch,” words that would have been meaningless to me mere weeks prior, suddenly held the weight of gospel. The supplemental nursing system that we were using, a tangle of tubes more aptly described as a device of motherly torture, required four hands and the intercession of all the saints to work properly. The milk that should have been flowing into my child’s waiting mouth was instead welling up inside my painfully engorged breasts, waiting for a proper latch, a proper hold, a proper pillow, a proper mother. I was three weeks into motherhood and convinced that I had already failed.
And then I saw it, on the shelf at TJ Maxx, propped innocently next to a pile of burp cloths and tiny socks: What to Expect When You’re Expecting, the guidebook to pregnancy on every expectant mother’s registry. “Well,” I thought to myself, “I don’t know what I was expecting, but it sure as heck wasn’t this.” I stared at that book, the sick irony of its title burrowing into my mind, taking up residence right next to all the other things I should have known but couldn’t have, couldn’t possibly have, because nobody told me about this, about all of this. I drove home from the store that evening, and I screamed into my steering wheel, furious with my body, my inability, my weakness, my failure.
I have thought of that moment often over the past several weeks, as I have followed the coverage of the Lindsay Clancy case. Clancy appears to be guilty: guilty of a crime so ghastly, so unimaginably vile, that our impulse as a society is to immediately condemn her and everything that she embodies (or, alternatively, to deny the crime’s very possibility, searching frantically for another perpetrator and constructing elaborate conspiracies). A mother taking the life of a child she has nurtured since before birth is simply incomprehensible. And three children? Words simply do not—cannot—capture the horror.
And yet… if you are a mother in the twenty-first century, you and Lindsay Clancy may be more alike than you’d care to admit. You probably haven’t harmed yourself or your beloved children in a sudden break from reality. You may not have visited a psychiatric hospital before. You might not have even heard of the term “postpartum psychosis.” But, nevertheless, the lived experience of Lindsay Clancy as detailed in her personal journals is shockingly relatable. In an entry on November 18, 2022 (just three months before that horrible night), Clancy wrote: “I’m so desperate to get a mental break from taking care of everyone that my mind is trying to find something physically wrong with me.” In another entry around the same time, she described feeling “incredibly sad and guilty” about not breastfeeding, and mentioned that she was “obsessed” with her infant’s sleep schedule.
If the various Facebook groups and motherhood forums that I belong to are any indication, Lindsay Clancy is not alone in these feelings. It seems like every day that I see an anonymous post asking for help, seeking sleep recommendations, or simply lamenting the unique challenges of motherhood. Even without a clinical diagnosis of postpartum depression or anxiety, the first several years of motherhood can be brutally difficult.
The Fallacy of Control
Today, I am the mother of three beautiful, awe-inspiring children, and that tiny infant who couldn’t nurse is now almost seven years old. (She did eventually nurse, and successfully, for almost two years.) The doubts and fears of my early motherhood are mostly in the rearview mirror. Most days, I would describe myself as tired but deeply content with my life as a stay-at-home mother. Yet when I place myself back in that TJ Maxx, with that pregnancy book before my bleary eyes, the urgency and the desperation I felt still take my breath away.
You see, before I gave birth for the very first time, before my daughter’s body slid out of mine as the sun rose over Cambridge, Massachusetts, I thought I would be a good mother. I thought motherhood was a matter of effort, of determination, of perseverance. I thought I was in control. I thought that actions had predictable consequences, and that the future was uncertain but still mostly certain. I thought that if I read the books and practiced the swaddling and took the childbirth classes, I would sail into motherhood like riding a bicycle. I might fall a few times, but surely I would achieve mastery in a week or two. If I put in the effort, I would achieve the American—strike that—the Maternal Dream.
Yet I soon discovered that, in motherhood, effort, skill, determination, and fortitude—the things that since childhood I had been taught would necessarily result in success and happiness—often seem less important than luck, genetics, and circumstance. What was once a clear formula for achievement is suddenly muddled. You can try, and try, and try again, and your baby still might not be able to breastfeed, or sleep through the night, or reach his milestones on time. You might be an emotionally stable person—a person who has never reached for an antidepressant, or met with a therapist, or cried into her pillow at night begging for sleep—who finds herself doing all of those things, crippled by postpartum depression.
You are not in control. Actions don’t always have foreseeable consequences. The future is deeply, unnervingly, disturbingly uncertain. This is the reality of motherhood that I didn’t expect when I was expecting.
Postpartum Darkness
When I read Clancy’s diary entries describing her feelings of devastating overwhelm, I couldn’t help but think of my own journal—a hidden record of my deepest fears and most painful doubts—tucked away underneath my own bed like the soft underbelly of my motherhood. When I listened to her husband, Patrick Clancy, list the medications that she was prescribed leading up to the tragic night of January 24th, 2023, I silently compared them to my own list of psychiatric drugs: Ativan, Zoloft, Hydroxyzine, Buspar, Trazodone… all of them hiding in my own medicine cabinet, dark reminders of my own postpartum fog. When I saw the full-bodied sobs of Clancy as she relived the most horrific night of her life, I saw a woman who harbored deep guilt, yes, but I also saw something else. I saw myself.
On July 17, 2023, when my children were three years and fifteen months old, I lay in my bed and mustered the energy to write: “I feel down today. I’m not sure if it’s hormonal, or just the fact that life is still really, really hard. Or maybe it’s the utter exhaustion (Henry is going through a sleep regression…). I’m just feeling… beaten down. Like I have no reserves left and the slightest thing might knock me down into crazy, anxiety-fueled nightmare land.” In that same entry, I wrote: “I am astonished by how difficult motherhood is. Like, actually flabbergasted.” The next day, I journaled: “I’m excited for Heidi to go to school, but also guilty for being excited. Am I failing her by not homeschooling her?” On October 15, 2023, I wrote a single, brief entry: “Will I ever feel like myself again? Am I doing any of this right?”
While these entries are stark reminders of the depths of my anxiety, they also remind me that my circumstances, difficult to begin with, were made more difficult by the guilt and shame I felt. My inability to see past the things that were not in my control, coupled with my overwhelming sense that my decisions were being scrutinized by some outside Maternal Authority, coalesced into a cloud of sheer despair. It’s easy for me to imagine how, if left untreated and unsupported, I could have spiraled into a place far darker.
A Strange New World
With each of my three children’s births, I found myself thrust into a new reality in a matter of hours. I am certain that every mother can relate to the sudden, often baffling transformation that occurs shortly after childbirth. But what I experienced after each of my deliveries was more than your typical “baby blues.”
My most debilitating symptom, each time, was my inability to sleep. While my body ached for rest from the physical feat of delivery, my mind simply would not disembark from the adrenaline-fueled rollercoaster ride of birth. I vividly remember lying awake in my hospital bed, covered in sweat and tears and blood, praying for sleep to come. But it never did. Not until I begged for something—anything—to help. Not until I wept into the phone, pleading with my doctor, and then another doctor, and then another doctor, to please give me a prescription. Please let me sleep. Yes, I am breastfeeding. Yes, I know the risks. Yes, I’ve tried deep breathing. Please, I need to sleep, or I won’t be able to keep going or… or… Ativan, Zoloft, Hydroxyzine, Buspar, Trazodone…
Only after all of that—only after pleading and weeping and hoop-jumping and liability-waiving and deep-sighing—only then did the sleep come. It’s incredible how much better and brighter life is when basic human needs, like sleep, are met.
Mercifully, my crippling postpartum anxiety and insomnia have thus far been temporary afflictions. With medication, counseling, and the loving support of my family and friends, I have always made it through the “fourth trimester” in one piece. (Breastfeeding torture devices notwithstanding.) Around five months postpartum with each child, the clouds seemed to lift for me, and I reentered the world with a renewed sense of gratitude for the gift of my baby. For others, the devastating effects of postpartum mood disorders last much longer. One study suggests that up to one quarter of women with postpartum depression are still suffering three years after giving birth, even though most healthcare providers stop screening for postpartum mood disorders at six months postpartum.
For Lindsay Clancy, debilitating insomnia and depression were still plaguing her on the night she killed her three innocent children and then attempted to kill herself. The darkness hadn’t lifted for her, even though she had tried, and tried, and tried to get better. This sense of insurmountable despair is familiar to me. I remember my own postpartum thoughts: You are not in control. Actions don’t always have foreseeable consequences. The future is deeply, unnervingly, disturbingly uncertain. To Lindsay, the future must have seemed so uncertain, so dark and foreboding, that she would rather die than watch it unfold.
According to her legal defense, Lindsay’s depression transformed into something much more disturbing and much more rare: psychosis, a mental state characterized by its disconnection from reality. Psychosis is often accompanied by delusions and hallucinations… like the loud, commanding male voice Lindsay said told her to kill her children. I thank God that I have never experienced such a terrifying break from reality—and that very, very few women do.
The Worth of a Mother
In the depths of my own postpartum struggles, my religious faith has always been a lifeboat. While my lifelong relationship with God has not prevented deep suffering, it has tempered it, softening it into something that I can later grasp in my hands and understand. So when I saw Lindsay Clancy wheeled into the courtroom during her trial with a cross around her neck, the same neck she cut in an attempt to die, I was caught off guard. Where was God? Where was her church? How could someone who wore the sign of the saving power of Jesus commit such atrocities? The image of the cross necklace refused to leave my mind for days. Eventually, I realized my error.
Faith is not a guarantee of an easy life or prayed-for outcomes, any more than doing a rain dance is a guarantee of stormy weather. Our prosperity in this life is not an indicator of divine favor, any more than a child’s report card is an indicator of how much his parents love him. From a Christian perspective, our identity as mothers—as humans—is not in what we do, have done, or have failed to do. It’s not in what we fear, or dread, or run away from. It is most certainly not based on our worst day, or even our best day. In the messy, turbulent seasons of life, as well as in the calm buoyancy of peaceful seasons, our identity as children of God remains fixed, unchanging.
Christianity teaches that our worth does not come from what we do but from Whose we are—and Who we were designed to reflect. Human beings are made in the divine image, and as such, are worthy of basic dignity and love, whatever our failures. Our status as image bearers remains unchanged by our most heinous sins and most egregious shortcomings, even as our actions impact our ability to reflect that image and enjoy the peace that friendship with God gives. As Rachel Lu recently shared, sometimes a simple reminder of Jesus’s unconditional love is enough to pull a struggling postpartum mother out of a downward spiral.
In our post-Christian era, mothers are uniquely susceptible to believing that their worth comes from their achievements and accolades (or their number of likes and comments) rather than their identity as beloved children of God. In a social-media-dominated culture, the reasons to doubt one’s mothering prowess are endless. Should I be using cloth diapers instead of disposables? Should I be making all of the baby’s purees from scratch? Should I ditch purees and do baby-led weaning? Should I sleep-train my infant, or will it damage our bond? (That last one is straight from both Lindsay Clancy’s and my own journals.) Our algorithms are filled with calls to action that become more urgent the longer you pay attention. (“Click here for outfit details!” “Click here to read the research yourself!” “Click here to prove your worth as a mother!”) The more time you spend on social media, the more likely you are to think that the solution to your maternal struggles is simply to try harder.
Mothers desperately need the peace that comes from knowing that their worth cannot be earned. This is the radical claim of Christianity. It is also the reason that I believe that Christianity is uniquely suited to speak to postpartum mothers. Where the culture says “hustle,” the church says “be still.” Where the culture says, “it’s not okay to be broken,” the church says, “brokenness is our specialty.” And where the culture cries “she is guilty,” the church says “let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone.” (John 8:7) The church teaches us that we are not in control, but God is. The future is deeply, unnervingly, disturbingly uncertain, but only to us. Our sins are real, but so is God’s grace. It is this truth that I wish I could go back and tell my newly postpartum self, as I struggled with an infant who wouldn’t nurse and a mind that wouldn’t stop racing. I wish that Lindsay Clancy had been able to internalize this truth, too, before the darkness engulfed her.
I hope Lindsay Clancy continues to wear the cross around her neck. I hope that it is a reminder to her of her identity as a daughter of God, a God who—incredibly—offers her forgiveness for even this unimaginable act. I hope, too, it is a reminder to all of us watching the courtroom drama unfold that nothing can separate us from the love of God, should we choose to accept it. That love is more powerful than the crimes we commit, more powerful than the violence that we perpetrate, and more powerful than the intrusive thoughts that threaten to overcome us.
Beyond the diaper drives and the potluck fundraisers, beyond providing financial assistance to needy families, beyond the pregnancy clinics and the childcare and the well-meaning prayers—beyond all of those wonderful and essential acts of caregiving, struggling mothers need something more fundamental. They need to know that God loves them, despite their scary thoughts and their weary souls, despite their basest impulses and their worst mistakes—and that we do too.
