We Prepare for the Baby, Not the Mother

As I’ve watched the Lindsay Clancy trial unfold, I’ve felt this uncomfortable pit in my stomach. I scroll through social media and see everyone (!) offering their opinions—some informed, some shaped by personal experience, and many based on only a scan through headlines and/or a general lack of reading comprehension. Open the schools, I beg. 

Everyone is so eager to give their opinion on whether or not Clancy is guilty. And somehow “we” as a society are more willing to argue with some angry incel man on Twitter or believe the hundreds of TikTok conspiracy theories than to face the fact that a mother, a former labor and delivery nurse at that, suffered from postpartum psychosis and may have done something terrible. However, the more troubling question I can’t get out of my head is: Would we even be talking this much about a postpartum woman’s mental health if her situation hadn’t ended in unimaginable tragedy? (Not to mention, would we even be talking about a postpartum woman’s mental health if she weren’t white? But that’s an entirely different essay.)

We’ve been taught to equate motherhood with suffering. Struggling is normal, exhaustion is expected, and losing yourself is ~*only temporary*~. Pulling through isn’t a celebrated victory, it’s just the kind of self-sacrifice we’ve been taught is required to be a “good” mom. We admire and praise the mothers who show no cracks—the ones who seamlessly float through their morning routines and pack lunches to the sweetest song choice on Instagram Reels. One look at the comments on said videos and we see multiple remarks about how together they have it, how strong they are, and how they are “crushing motherhood, mama.” But, somewhere along the way, we stopped asking whether moms should have to be that strong in the first place. We’ve become so accustomed to applauding maternal resilience that we’ve forgotten resilience can sometimes be a sign that someone has been left without enough support.

In Clancy’s case, it wasn’t that she wasn’t asking for help. As presented in court, she asked for it repeatedly. She saw multiple psychiatric and medical professionals. She tried 13 different medications in the four months leading up to the deaths of her children. She was doing exactly what we tell people to do when they are struggling: Ask for help. We want to believe that if someone is suffering badly enough, and they ask for help, someone will catch them. The unsettling truth is that this is not always the case. Mental health, but especially maternal mental health, is often treated as the sole responsibility of the person experiencing it. We acknowledge what “could” happen after the baby and encourage mothers to speak up, talk to their doctor, and fill out the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale at their appointments, with no concern as to what comes next. We dust off our hands. We did it. All done.

We don’t think about their next appointment, whether they’ve actually found the right providers (a comically hard thing to do these days), whether the medication they are prescribed is working, what side effects they’re experiencing, or whether they have the support they need in between appointments. We need to stop treating “asking for help” as the finish line. It has to be the point at which we start paying closer attention. Through our time writing Folly, we’ve spoken with many perinatal mental health experts, and one of the most shocking—and, unfortunately, common—themes has been the lack of education offered to those charged with treating and ensuring the safety of mothers as they go through this mentally transcendent, hormonally charged life change. 

We prepare for a new baby, but we do not prepare for a new mother. All this to say, it’s more than time to pay attention. What if “I’m not okay” was enough? What if a mother didn’t have to be in crisis before we listened to her? What if she didn’t have to become a headline before we became interested in what was happening inside her head? That’s why it’s so important to check in on the new parents in our lives.

Check in to the point of being annoying. No one has ever regretted being too inquisitive, too supportive, or too compassionate to a loved one in need. But even more crucially, check in when things seem fine. When they are still packing the lunches, on time to every play date, and posting the Reel with the cutesy song about how wonderful life is. The reality of motherhood is that a multitude of things can all be true at the same time. You can be grateful and overwhelmed. You can be happy and struggling. You can be functioning and falling apart. Looking okay and being okay are not always the same thing.

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