Patrick Should Have Been a Better Husband. Lindsay Was Still Psychotic.

It was December of 2021. I had a ten-year-old, a three-year-old, and was still breastfeeding my nine-month-old. I was battling extreme burnout after trying to navigate therapies for my toddler daughter, who had gotten an autism diagnosis in October of 2020, while I was pregnant with my son and trying to help an elementary schooler who was struggling with remote learning. It was late at night, and I was about to close my eyes when I felt a sharp pain in my upper abdomen. I tried to ignore it, but it brought me to my knees. My former husband called my parents. But the pain slowly ebbed away.

“I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?” my Dad piped up from speakerphone

“Yes. Sorry for waking you! False alarm.”

I desperately did not want to go to the Emergency Room at midnight; I wanted to sleep. In my mind, nothing would be wrong with me, and I'd miss out on valuable sleep and throw off my whole routine.

I tried to go to bed, but the pain returned with a vengeance. I crept downstairs, like a teenager trying to sneak out, and walked laps back and forth from my kitchen to my living room, trying to figure out if I could shift my body so it wouldn't hurt.

While I did this, I packed my daughter’s lunch and got her backpack ready for her therapy preschool. I laid out her clothes. I filled up her water bottle. And I made sure there was clean laundry for the baby. The pain became blinding.

Then I got in my car and drove myself to the ER in the middle of the night.

I threw up in the parking lot, and they got me to triage quickly. They inserted an IV and told me they were starting morphine, and I called my parents. It was probably 4 am. I told them my daughter’s backpack was ready, and I needed someone to drive her to therapy, then asked my mom to care for my 9-month-old until I got home. Then I called my former husband and told him where I was. Then hung up the phone and entered narcotic bliss while they told me I needed my gallbladder removed.

I’ve told this story several times, and women are rarely shocked. When you are a mother of young children in particular, mothering never ends.

"A man may work from sun to sun, but a woman's work is never done"

Mothering includes many typical care tasks we think of as the physical labor of caring for children, but the never-ending labor is feeling like you're never “off the clock.”

Even when you are sick, even when you are exhausted, even when you are falling apart, there is still a little voice in the back of your head asking: Who is going to take care of everyone if I can’t? My body was actively failing me, but my brain was still doing the work of making sure motherhood could continue without me.

When I finally went to the emergency room, I was not just worried about myself. I was making arrangements for my absence.

Clancy had been struggling with severe mental-health symptoms, including insomnia, intrusive thoughts, anxiety, and depression. She had sought treatment, been hospitalized and cycled through an enormous number of psychiatric medications. Her former husband, Patrick Clancy, testified about how badly she was deteriorating.

And still, motherhood remained.

She left inpatient treatment early because she wanted to attend her daughter’s birthday, which she had planned. I obviously don’t know how this actually played out, but I picture her sitting in the psych ward, making sure there would be enough princess plates for the party, that she ordered enough juice boxes, and that her final RSVP count was correct. Mothers have certainly done crazier things.

Like many women watching this trial, I cringed when I heard Patrick testify.

Not because I think he killed his children. I don’t.

Patrick has become the subject of conspiracy theories claiming that he was somehow responsible for what happened. I don’t share that theory. The evidence presented at trial does not support the idea that he should be treated as the hidden perpetrator of his children’s deaths.

What I do understand is the visceral reaction many mothers have had to hearing about the way he managed Lindsay’s worsening mental health.

I can’t imagine a world where a father who is suffering from severe insomnia and whose wife is in an obvious psychiatric crisis isn’t relieved of his parenting responsibilities until he gets well.

If my spouse were experiencing a mental-health crisis, I would expect to be completely clued in to his care. I would want to know his medications. I would be researching the best psychiatrists available. I would be making sure he could get to appointments. I would arrange childcare so treatment was actually possible.

Too many mothers are watching this trial and can feel the deep-seated loneliness of having to figure out how to manage their mental health on their own, with a partner who is unattuned, and who can’t be trusted to get up with the baby if you’re working night shift. Too many mothers understand the loneliness of having to figure out how to manage their own mental health while simultaneously managing everyone else’s lives.

Many of us know what it feels like to be the person who notices that the baby is low on clean clothes while we’re sick. To read bedtime stories in silly voices to stop ourselves from crying. To make sure someone knows where the field trip form is while we’re sitting in a doctor’s office.

And we know what it feels like to have a partner who is technically present but who still somehow leaves us responsible for making the entire system function.

But this is where I split off from some of the commentary surrounding the Clancy trial.

I am not convinced that Patrick being a better husband would have changed the outcome. It’s possible, but we can't know.

I read this tweet and found myself instantly at odds with it.

Psychosis is not simply the logical consequence of being overwhelmed. And mothers manage with far, far worse husbands than Patrick Clancy and do not come anywhere close to killing their children.

There are mothers with abusive husbands. Mothers with absent husbands. Mothers who work full-time and come home to do the second shift. Mothers who are profoundly sleep-deprived. Mothers who are severely depressed. Mothers who have postpartum anxiety so intense that they are terrified to be alone with their babies.

They do not “snap” and kill their children.

That matters.

We should acknowledge the enormous burden placed on mothers without turning that burden into an explanation for an act that is extraordinarily rare.

I don’t think Patrick had reason to believe his wife would kill their children. In fact, his testimony reflected how difficult it was to understand what was happening to her. He testified that she had expressed intrusive thoughts, but that she had not told him she intended to kill the children. Lindsay was a great mother, Patrick has said so many times (another reason I don’t think he is the secret perpetrator). Involved, loving mothers rarely kill their children. Uninvolved, terrible mothers rarely kill their children.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, it is not obvious what a husband is supposed to do with that information when the person experiencing the thoughts tells him they are intrusive, unwanted, and not accompanied by a plan.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask whether the care Lindsay received was adequate. We absolutely should. Her treatment, medication management, and access to appropriate psychiatric care deserve scrutiny. The trial itself is forcing difficult questions about how we treat women experiencing severe postpartum mental illness.

But I don’t think we need to establish that Patrick was a bad husband to ask those questions.

Because the lesson I take from my gallbladder story is that I had internalized the idea that my responsibilities to everyone else continued even when I was the one who was sick. I was in excruciating pain, and I was still packing a preschool backpack. I have heard hundreds of similar stories from other moms my age, and endless more from generations above me. This is the culture of motherhood. Mothers are the family's infrastructure.

But sometimes it means a woman can fall apart in plain sight and still be expected to make sure everyone has clean underwear and the toilet paper is restocked.

A mother should not have to reach the point of psychosis before she is allowed to stop functioning as the family’s primary caregiver. She should not have to prove that she is dangerous before someone else takes over.

She should not have to be the one researching her own psychiatrist, arranging her own childcare, tracking her own medications, and making sure everyone else’s lives continue while she is drowning. And she should be allowed to receive that care without us pretending that better support can guarantee a particular outcome.

I am devastated for Lindsay Clancy. And I relate to Lindsay Clancy—up to a point.

I relate to the mother who is exhausted beyond what she thought a human body could withstand. The mother drowning in appointments, medications, childcare arrangements, and the endless logistics of keeping children alive. The mother who cannot quite give herself permission to stop.

But I am not Lindsay Clancy. Psychosis is not simply the inevitable endpoint of maternal exhaustion. It is a break from reality. Mothers can be profoundly sleep-deprived, depressed, unsupported, and overwhelmed without becoming psychotic. And mothers experiencing psychosis are not destined to hurt their children.

Patrick should have cared for his wife because she was suffering, not because doing so would have guaranteed a different outcome. And Lindsay’s psychosis deserves to be understood as its own devastating illness, not as the inevitable consequence of having too much on her plate.