All the mom bloggers — I know we don’t call them that anymore, but you know what I mean — are obsessed with the Lindsay Clancy case. And I’m no different.
Clancy, a married nurse, murdered her three children in what her defense argues was a state of psychosis. Her ex-husband, who did an interview with the New Yorker, said she was a normal, devoted mom prior to this episode. She sounds EXCEEDINGLY normal. She was a nurse, a former cheerleader and the family lived in suburban Connecticut.
During the night in question, Clancy also jumped from a second story window in an unsuccessful suicide attempt and is now paraplegic while she undergoes trial for murder.
I hate to even use a normal person’s experience as a jumping off point for discussing a bigger issue in the aftermath of the Jason Arday fiasco. But I’m sympathetic to Clancy, as are most of the other moms I know.
I found reading about her case really haunting. Because some of the stressors on her, I experienced. Fortunately, it never tipped into that sort of scary category that Clancy’s did, postpartum psychosis. I can’t imagine how terrifying that would be.
But some of the milder precursors her ex-husband described about her experience were so familiar.
Clancy, it seems, was fine after the birth of her first and second children, and continued working as a nurse (a hard and stressful job.) She seemed to be overwhelmed, however, with the addition of the third child. Would she have been a fine and leading a normal life had she never had her third, I wonder.
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