So, I have followed true crime since everyone else did with Serial, Season 1. But I go DEEP. I don’t just listen to the podcasts or watch the documentaries. I follow the cases. I watch the trials. I listen to the testimony, read trial transcripts and case law.
My original career goal was to be a lawyer, but somewhere along the way I ended up in education and advocacy work instead. More on that another time.
The latest trial, Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Lindsay Clancy, has been SUPER triggering for me in the weirdest and most unexpected way. While watching the trial, memories have been coming back to me about my mom.
After giving birth to me, she had some kind of issue with the lymph nodes in her neck. The memories are frustratingly incomplete. What I remember (or remember being told) is that either while she was still in the hospital after giving birth or at a follow-up appointment, a doctor told her the lumps were terminal.
I know something happened. I saw the scars on her neck. But I don’t know the whole story.
I also know my mom struggled significantly with her mental health. She had a therapist for much of my childhood. I even remember his name: Dr. Brannan. She trusted him enough to see him for years. Then he suggested she might have bipolar disorder.
She never saw him again.
As a child, I didn’t have words like mania or depressive episode. But the patterns weren’t particularly difficult to recognize. I loved the manic times. We would take spontaneous trips. Once, during one of those periods, she signed me up for a beauty pageant. I rolled with all of it because she was my mom and, honestly, those times could be fun.
But I learned pretty quickly that the highs came with lows. And some of those lows were hard. I became very good at looking for cause and effect. Ten-page handwritten letter arrives from her mother = Mom spends weeks, sometimes months, in her bedroom. My childhood solution? Throw the letters into the storm drain. I’m fairly certain my intervention was not clinically indicated, but it made perfect sense to me at the time. If the letters made my mom disappear into her bedroom, get rid of the letters. I was also the child who locked my dad’s cigarettes in my little lockbox so he couldn’t smoke anymore. Problem identified. Problem solved.
Except, of course, none of these problems were that simple. Which brings me back to my mom and these memories that keep surfacing. Those lymph nodes were called terminal. What happened after someone told a woman who had just given birth that she was going to die? Did that make her spiral?
All I really know is that my dad took care of me “for a long time” after I was born. What does a long time mean? Where was my mom? Was she physically sick? Severely depressed? Manic? Did she experience postpartum psychosis? I don’t know. And the people who might have known are no longer alive.
My mom hated doctors and avoided them whenever possible. She wouldn’t take SSRIs for depression because she said she didn’t like the way they made her feel. Now I find myself wondering about that, too. Was she being treated for depression when what she was actually experiencing was bipolar disorder?
Years later, her dad’s third wife who served as a healthy mother figure suggested that she might be bipolar. My mom ended that relationship, too. Why was that particular label so unacceptable to her? Why was there so much stigma attached to it that she would walk away from people she trusted rather than consider it?
There is another layer to all of this that feels different to me now. My husband and I chose adoption in part because of the significant history of mental illness in my family. At the time, I felt proud of myself. I had made it into adulthood. I had escaped some things. And I had decided, rather defiantly, that the genetic defects ended with me.
I look at that language differently now. Because now I’m not only remembering my mother as my mother. I’m thinking about her as a woman. A woman who had just given birth. A woman who may have been told she was dying. A woman who clearly struggled with her mental health for much of her life. A woman who, for whatever reason, couldn’t tolerate the possibility that what she experienced had a name. And I feel so incredibly sad for her.
Watching the Lindsay Clancy trial, I find myself feeling a similar sadness. I’m not trying to diagnose my mother decades later. And I’m certainly not suggesting that her story and Lindsay Clancy’s story are the same. They aren’t.
Maybe I will never know what happened to my mom after I was born. But this trial has forced me to think about something much bigger than either woman.
What happens when a woman is at her most vulnerable and her brain begins to betray her?
What happens when fear, shame, stigma, or a broken system keeps her from getting the care she needs?
What happens to her children?
And why are we still so often trying to understand what happened after something terrible has already happened?
My mom deserved better. Lindsay Clancy deserved better.
Women experiencing serious mental illness during pregnancy and postpartum deserve better. Their families deserve better.
How do we do better at seeing women before their illness becomes a crisis?
I don’t know the answer yet. But I know we have to keep asking the question.