Are mothers oppressed by their children?

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2:00Start your free trial on Shopify.com. The subjects that we're going to talk about today is the Lindsay Clancy trial. I've had lots of requests from people asking me to talk about this. And one of the reasons I didn't especially want to is because it is so very grim as a subject matter. But also the public response to this court case has been extraordinary. So I guess there is two things to discuss today. One is the case itself and the other is the public response. And they're linked. But maybe we should start with the case itself and our interpretations of Clancy's defence. I share your reluctance to go through crime.

3:04I confess because of that I've not been all the way down the rabbit hole. I became aware that there was a whole discourse about this woman. I thought, okay, there's a current thing happening about this woman over in America. And I'm going to choose not to look at it. And I sort of, so it's kind of stayed at the edge of my awareness for a couple of weeks. The bare facts of it are horrendous. This is a woman with three children under five who sent her husband away to run some errands. And while he was away strangled her three children in 2023. And tried to kill herself. But didn't is now paralysed from the waist down and and on trial for murdering her three children. And the case turns as I understand it on whether whether she was insane and knew the difference between right and wrong when she committed these acts. And then there are some the specifics of Massachusetts law about insanity, which is which turns on the question of being able to distinguish right from wrong.

4:07Yes. But then around that there's mushroom this entire internet discourse, which has been very polarised along gender wars lines, in which there's a contingent more men than women assert that something something Lindsay Clancy wouldn't be crazy, repeal the 19th, I think is the most extreme version of it. And then there's a whole panoply of responses on the other side, more women than men, who say, this could be any of us turning up outside the courthouse, raising money for her for Clancy's parents. Me too, Lindsay. Yeah, me too. Me too. Expression sees on TikTok. Yeah. And then a whole a whole secondary media sphere of TikTok responses and emotional, expressions of complex emotions around motherhood and caring and maternality, women punching cushions because they're frustrated with their children. And then the sort of masculinist discourse that feeds off that, there's as well, why women be crazy, what is what's going on?

5:09So for my sins, I have now learned a fair bit about this case, because I think it is important, actually, to work out exactly how what kind of crazy she probably is or was. Because I think that actually both sides of the gender war battle here are wrong, basically in their interpretation about what happened. So she had long standing mental health troubles, to do with mood. You know, she'd been an impatient previously. She was also, I think, a nurse or some kind of health professional around obstetrics. I'm not entirely clear on her role, but she had a medic background, but she wasn't working. I wonder, this is just me speculating, but I wonder if part of what was going on there was personality disorder as much as anything else, just based on what I've read about her medical history, but she was apparently very committed to her three children to the extent that actually she was reluctant to let them out of her sight. She was very attached to them.

6:13And clearly just very, a very troubled lady. The problem with the PPP, the postpartum psychosis diagnosis, is that postpartum psychosis is a rare and terrible thing, which will typically come on in the sort of two weeks after a baby is born, and doesn't include hallucinations. That's the nature of psychosis. But typically those hallucinations will be recurrent, and the person will resist them initially, and then will become confused about what's real and what isn't and so on. What Lindi Clancy claims is that she had a single discrete episode of psychosis during which she killed the children. And she planned ahead in that she sent her husband out for an errand, while she did this. And the psychiatrist, forensic psychiatrist, who testified this week, I feel like his testimony is by far the most useful. And if you're trying to judge the

7:16morality of this case, it's by far the most useful, but has got kind of under marks because it's a little bit difficult from the cultural perspective. He says that what Lindi Clancy did was almost certainly not psychotic. It was what's called an altruistic philocyte. She wanted to kill herself because of her terrible depression, and she didn't want to leave her children behind without her. And so she killed them first and then tried to kill herself and came very close to killing herself. It wasn't just a cry for help. It was a very sincere suicide attempt. That was my read as well that she wanted to die and didn't think she could leave her children behind. Yes, exactly. And that's why it's relevant that she was actually very committed to them. It wasn't, you know, she wasn't abusing the children. In a sense, it was the most extreme possible manifestation of intensive parenting. Yeah. And actually altruistic philocyte women do that. Mendoe, we're probably familiar more often with men doing it, and when men do it, we call it family annihilation in the media. Typically when men do it, they also kill their wives. And I remember

8:20actually years ago reading a fascinating series of essays by Deborah Cameron about female serial killers and specifically about Rose West. And she noted, and I think this is an interesting point that when family, when when people commit family annihilation, they take their dependence with them. Men tend to think that their wives are their dependence. Women tend not to think that their husbands are their dependence. People basically kill everyone down from them in the food chain. And then try and kill themselves. Because I have to do this because otherwise I can't leave. Because they can't cope without me. Yeah. So it's so the fact that there's that gender asymmetry in terms of who gets killed in family. And I should let annihilation events does tell you something about how many women conceptualize their roles within the family. Anyway, she was therefore maybe mad, but not in the way that she's claiming. This is the intricacy of Massachusetts law in which I'm no expert. But it means, therefore, that kind of both sides in this argument are therefore kind of wrong, I think.

9:25She wasn't a desperate woman driven to misery by lack of support systems as some of the women are claiming. She had a nanny. She had her husband work from home, her mother and her in-laws were very involved with the children. The elder children went to daycare. She had loads and loads and loads of support. She had loads of doctors. She'd been an impatient. She actually you could not imagine a woman who had more support. Like if you're looking for a woman driven to the brink of insanity by lack of support, Linda Clancy is not your gal. But equally, the men saying she's just evil. I mean, you get into St. Ricky. Very, very tricky questions there about the line between mental illness and evil. Well, I mean, you know, there are plenty of plenty of paranoid schizophrenics, so I think both of us would agree are both mentally ill and also should be kept off the streets, not just for their own safety, but for everybody else's. Oh, definitely. This is not a case of, does that mean they're evil? Yeah. And also, does it mean, I mean, because the the the claim about Lindsay Clancy is that the most ferocious critics of her say that this

10:28should be executed. I mean, frankly, if her suicide alliation is that, is that strong, I'm surprised that she isn't, she doesn't want that. I mean, I think the problem of evil is difficult to answer from inside a secular perspective, but from inside a Christian perspective, actually there's a Kayleigh Triller, who's a commentator. I enjoy reading on gender war and Christian themes reflected in this context. I mean, as a Christian, her take was that evil, you know, requires a measure of human responsibility, but it also, it can also enter at the point of maximum vulnerability. So there's a there's a nuance there, you know, in a sense that the, you know, you you might say from that perspective, I'm not, I'm not paraphrasing Kayleigh here, but you might, you might paraphrase this as demons are real, but they take advantage of, they take advantage of our weak points. Yeah. From a secular perspective, I guess you'd need a slightly, a slightly less colorful way of putting that, but, but that seems to me, that seems to me fair and to give it somewhat more

11:33nuance from and it comes to personal responsibility. It's not as though we're all rational, all perfectly rational actors all of the time because that's just demonstrably not the case, but also it's not true that we're just the helpless puppets of our hormones and the hormones and biological determinism, you know, there's, but agency is real, but also is vulnerability. And sometimes those those things collide or intersect at points where, you know, appalling, appalling things become possible and people do them. Yeah. Yeah. I'm interested in what's going on with these women who are supporting her because one, it's really interesting that they're all white, Lindsey Clancy is white. I've not seen a single woman doing one of these TikToks or cut up outside the court house who isn't white. There seems to be a sense of very direct identification with her. Yeah. Maybe they're just going on. They see themselves in her and that, and that isn't something that can cross racial categories. Yeah. I think when, when I when I pinged you to say, maybe we should discuss this, you know, the phrase, the phrase I

12:37was thinking about and the the angle at which I found myself pondering this, this thing once it appeared on my radar was maternal ambivalence, which is just something which is exceptionally difficult to talk about. You know, you and I both think and write a certain amount about mothering and, you know, being being a woman as an adult human individual, adult human female but also, and the the complicated way that that intersects with the kind of relationality that comes with mothering. And I think one of the one of the darker areas where this is difficult to discuss or difficult to think about and explore is maternal ambivalence, which is to say, you know, you love your children, but sometimes they drive you up, you walk up the wall. And I think, you know, the perhaps this is a kind of extreme, you know, sort of internet hysteria, fuel expression of of that basic sentiment, you know, we all love we all love our children, but sometimes they drive us nuts. And somehow Lindsey Clancy has become a very extreme and very kind of grotesque lightning rod

13:39for people who are trying to say that. And I wonder if actually this this maps in in quite important ways to to what the this forensics I could just was saying, the forensics I could just about about intensive parenting. Because I mean, it's hard to think of a context and you know, it's more likely to aggravate the sense that you love your children and also they drive you up the wall. Then the kind of self-imposed extreme actually quite neurotic approach to mothering that that that tends to be followed by high achieving white western women, which manifests as this kind of intensive parenting. I mean, if you're the kind of if you're if you're a smart, capable, highly highly competent, highly organized, high achieving woman, and you go from doing all the kinds of things that that you do as a woman in that sense in your maiden phase, and you just map that entire way of being, just straight to the mother phase, you're going to get intensive parenting. You know, that's that's what that looks like. And I'm not surprised that some of them

14:44feel like they're going do Lally because it's a model, it's a model of relating to the world, which just doesn't really fit, trying to deal with small humans, you know, who are unbelievably irrational and sometimes exhausting to be around and don't necessarily follow the program the way you want them to, you know, they all child differently, you know, you're comparing, you can try and parent them all according to the same formula, but it doesn't work because they all child differently, you know, and if you talk to if you talk to experienced mothers of many, they'll tell you that, you know, I had to when when X was a toddler, I had to do things completely differently than when Y was a toddler because they were just a completely different person. And that that kind of flexibility sort of goes on remarked in mothering because people just don't necessarily people are not paying attention to that frequency and don't necessarily, you know, it's just it's just some, it's just mum's mumming and that sort of stuff goes on remarked, but then it, but it only really comes into focus when in the context of sort of highly neurotic, highly programmatic intensive parenting at which point it becomes it becomes a bit of a feel for discourse. And

15:47and again, you know, these these really unpleasant politically polarized internet gender wars, they just become fuel for gender slop. That's the end of this bonus. I've so clipped, you can find the full episode by going to the home of the Made Mother Nature Out podcast at theweasperry.supstack.com. I record bonus episodes like this every week, co-hosted by other substakers, including Mary Harrington, Nina Power, Ed West, Rob Henderson, Megan Murphy, and more. If you'd like to listen to those episodes, as well as to the ad-free versions of all of the other MM episodes, you can send it for a paid subscription, which costs either eight U of dollars a month, or 79 U of dollars a year. I really wouldn't be able to produce the podcast without the financial support of my paid subscribers. So if you like MM, if you think what I'm doing is valuable, then this is the key way in which you can support me and support the show. Thank you. Cozy Season is ahead and you'll be spending way more time inside. Is your home ready? Don't worry.

16:55With Wayfair, you can upgrade your space without breaking the bank. Score up to 70% off during their Labor Day clearance on furniture, area rugs, mattresses, and more. Plus, surprise flash deals you can't miss. Whether it's one room or the whole house, Wayfair has pieces for every style and budget. Shop Wayfair's Labor Day clearance now through September 7th at Wayfair.com. Wayfair every style every home. Guessing is for game shows, not your business. Workday is the enterprise AI platform for HR, finance, and IT, with AI grounded in your context to get work done and done right. It's a new workday.