If you’ve gone to the grocery store lately, you may have found yourself forced to have an uncomfortable conversation with your kids. Tabloid magazines lining checkout aisles across Chicagoland tend to be at eye-level for youngsters. So odds are they’ve come across the Lindsay Clancy story.

Clancy is the mother at the center of a trial that has become something of a cultural phenomenon and a rallying cry for women across the country who identify in some way with her plight.

Before 2023, Clancy’s life likely looked familiar to many suburban mothers around here. She and her husband, Patrick, shared a home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, not terribly far from Boston. With them lived their three young children.

Her story diverges on Jan. 24, 2023. That’s the day she allegedly killed her children by strangling them to death in their basement with exercise bands.

Clancy reportedly cut her neck and wrists after committing this horrific act, then jumped from a second-story window. The fall left her paralyzed.

Clancy does not appear to have disputed that she killed her children. At issue in her trial is whether she can be held criminally responsible for doing so. Her attorneys argue that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and lacked criminal responsibility; prosecutors contend that she deliberately planned the killings and understood what she was doing.

Before all of this took place, Clancy reportedly made multiple attempts to get help.

What are we supposed to do with this tragedy?

Some will reflect, some will pray, some will see it as a call for action and some will choose to ignore it.

But a growing number of women have taken the loose threads of the tragedy that played out in a coastal Boston suburb and have interwoven their own struggles with pregnancy, with birth, with postpartum, with the trials and tribulations of every day parenting that can feel lonely and isolating and underappreciated.

Society’s fascination with the subjects of blockbuster trials, especially those involving murder in the home, is nothing new. But as this case has become amplified via social media, it has taken a dark turn.

Women have taken to posting videos of themselves crying while holding their children, crying while sitting and rocking in place. Some of the most disturbing trends feature mothers posting videos of themselves holding their small children with captions like “Same, Lindsay” or “Me too, Lindsay.”

To write this off as an online phenomenon alone is inaccurate, because hundreds of women have been showing up to Clancy’s trial, standing outside the Plymouth, Massachusetts, courthouse bearing signs emblazoned with slogans such as “Believe” and “She Needed Help” and “Peace for Lindsay.”

Some even bring their children.

We wish to pause here to point out something obvious: You can — and should — absolutely have sympathy for women struggling with mental health issues. Whether or not you are a mother, you should be concerned about the insufficient attention paid to maternal mental health.

We do little as a society to prepare women for what may come once a baby arrives. Joy, yes, but shadows of darker things, of changes in their bodies and their hormones beyond their control that they may not understand.

The ways in which mothers suffer physically and mentally is very real. You may have had difficult pregnancies or complications during birth. The period after the baby arrived may have brought feelings of loneliness and despair that no one ever let on was possible. You may suffer silently at home.

All of this can be true. And yet we still must condemn the killing of children. Loudly and repeatedly.

We fear that this is where many of Clancy’s supporters have lost the plot.

Lost in the fervor surrounding the trial are the alleged victims: 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan. This is not a TV show, and the children strangled to death in a Massachusetts basement aren’t child actors who will wake up at the end of the morally instructive scene.

If you feel the need to rally behind someone who killed three kids, imagine explaining that urge to your children. Think of the words you’d need to use. Imagine their faces as you talk to them. Explain the nuance behind how you can cheer on Clancy while also harboring no urge to do them ill.

How would you feel if they then asked whether you’d ever hurt them? See if that doesn’t throw some cold water on the whole thing.

If this trial struck a chord with you, by all means advocate for better postpartum care. Be honest about your own struggles, because you never know who you might help in doing so. Check in on anyone you know with little kids. Offer to help. Mean it.

But do not lose sight of three dead children.

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