The trial of Lindsay Clancy and the mirror of motherhood

A heinous crime always attracts a crowd, and none like that of a mother who kills her children. But the women who have filled Lindsay Clancy's trial for weeks did not come to a spectacle, but to look at her closely, notebook in hand, seeking to recognize something of their own in her.

Stephanie McCrummen told it in The Atlantic, in a chronicle of atmosphere and listening that focuses the camera backwards, on the two rows of benches where these peculiar spectators sit. But back to the trial. The defense portrays a mother who asked tirelessly for help (psychiatrist visits, medications, emergencies) and was abandoned by a fragmented system; the Prosecutor's Office, to a woman with resources who knew what she was doing.

While I was reading it, I thought about a monster from two centuries ago. In 1816, at the age of 18, Mary Shelley imagined a man who creates a life and, the moment his creature opens its eyes, flees the room, disgusted. From this abandonment a chain of deaths will be born. Feminist critic Ellen Moers read Frankenstein as a “birth myth,” a novel about motherhood whose true horror is not creating life, but abandoning it.

And what is decisive is what Shelley does with our gaze: she places this father-creator exactly where culture would place a monstrous mother (the one who engenders and denies) and makes us pity him, to see his tragedy. For Lindsay, the Prosecutor's Office shows her leaving her children like broken toys on the basement floor: the monster mother, the oldest category in the repertoire and—why deny it—the most comfortable for everyone. There is even the medical name, puerperal psychosis, and yet we choose the monster. Shelley also diagnosed that double standard: we give men a tragic pain that, for the same reason, we would always deny to women.

But Shelley goes deeper. The creature is not born a monster, it becomes a monster because no one welcomes it, because it has no language or framework to understand itself and it learns to speak and read itself by spying on the De Laceys, creating from scratch the concepts that no one gave it.

That is exactly the gesture of the women on the wooden benches that McCrummen notices. On a stand full of experts, lawyers and technicalities, one of them recounts the intrusive thoughts she had with her baby; another, who after giving birth emptied her account and wrote a farewell note, and was only saved because she was admitted to the same program that had rejected Lindsay a month before.

Another remembers the psychiatric hospital and the electroshocks of the seventies; Another says that he flew from Cleveland because he recognizes in Lindsay the same skill at masking the collapse. No one says: “I would do it.” They say: “I was in that place and no one named it.”

What characterizes these women is that they recognize themselves in the quiet zone that surrounds the crime, in the distance between the motherhood that is demanded of us, idealized and without a shadow, and the one that is truly lived, ambivalent, exhausted, crossed by thoughts that are not allowed to be confessed. Adrienne Rich named that crack half a century ago and almost everyone has lived there.

What Lindsay illuminates is a system that first condemns that crack to silence and then judges whoever falls through it as if they had chosen it. Therefore, when the prosecutor opened her argument with “This is not about the mental health system,” one of them muttered to herself: “It is.” Mary Shelley wrote it two centuries ago: the monster was never in the creature, but in the refusal to receive it.