There is something radically askew in the aftermath of the Lindsay Clancy mistrial, and it burned me from the beginning even before I could name what it was.
Then came the final stretch of testimony.
Clancy was never diagnosed with psychosis by the doctors who actually treated her before the killings. She admits she strangled her three children. Her defense doesn’t dispute that. The fight was over whether she should be held criminally responsible.
After 38 hours of deliberation across seven days, the jury couldn’t agree.
Mistrial.
Not an acquittal. Not vindication.
You wouldn’t know that from the pink people.
Hundreds of grown adults showed up outside that courthouse wearing pink — the favorite color of Cora, the 5-year-old daughter Clancy strangled — with pink bows and signs reading “Believe,” “She Needed Help,” and “Peace For Lindsay.”
Think about that.
A 5-year-old girl is dead.
Her mother killed her.
And somehow the little girl’s favorite color became the uniform for people rallying around the woman who did it.
What in God’s name are we doing?
The prosecution presented experts who found no evidence of psychosis in the records they reviewed. They pointed to inconsistencies in Clancy’s accounts and argued she understood right from wrong.
And I believe them.
I believe Lindsay Clancy misled people. I believe she told doctors enough to get help while withholding enough that they never understood what she was capable of doing. I believe the psychosis explanation became considerably more useful after Cora, Dawson, and Callan were dead than it apparently was to the clinicians treating her beforehand.
That’s my conclusion after watching the evidence.
And I’m entitled to it.
But the pink people apparently heard something else.
They heard “mother.”
And suddenly, Lindsay’s agency disappeared.
That’s particularly rich.
For my entire adult life, this same strain of feminism has lectured America that women are strong. Women are brilliant. Women are capable. Women know their own minds. Women don’t need paternalistic institutions second-guessing their choices.
Correct.
Women have agency.
So why are we suddenly treating a highly educated labor-and-delivery nurse as though she were merely a passenger inside her own body?
The doctors did it.
The medications did it.
The healthcare system did it.
Everybody and everything apparently had agency except the adult woman who wrapped exercise bands around the necks of three children.
Please.
Women aren’t helpless.
Women are moral agents.
That means they deserve credit for extraordinary accomplishments.
It also means they are capable of responsibility for horrific choices.
You don’t get equality only when there’s a trophy involved.
And then there’s The Cut.
Because apparently we hadn’t had enough.
Last week, it published a piece about three women who regret having children, packaging their admissions as the sort of taboo honesty our culture is increasingly expected to applaud.
And again I found myself asking:
What about the children?
They can read.
They grow up.
They Google their mothers’ names.
They can eventually discover that Mom publicly told millions of strangers she’d have been happier if they had never existed.
And we’re calling this brave?
No.
This cult of worshiping women merely for “speaking their truth” is garbage.
Brave women persevere.
That doesn’t mean they don’t struggle.
Of course they struggle.
Motherhood can be brutally difficult. Postpartum depression is real. Anxiety is real. Exhaustion is real. Marriages struggle. Money runs out. Babies scream at three in the morning. Sometimes mothers sit in bathrooms and cry because they don’t know whether they have enough left to make it through the day.
And then they do.
That’s the story nobody seems particularly interested in publishing.
The woman who struggled and got help.
The woman who thought she couldn’t take another night and took another night.
The woman who fought depression.
The woman whose husband wasn’t helping enough.
The woman who went back to work because the mortgage didn’t care that she’d slept two hours.
The woman who changed the diaper, packed the lunch, found the missing shoe, paid the electric bill, kissed the forehead, and got up the next morning to do the whole ridiculous thing again.
Where’s her magazine spread?
Where are her hundreds of supporters?
Where’s her pink?
And that’s when this finally became personal for me.
Because I married one of those women.
My bride had no nanny.
No mother nearby to call.
Neither of our mothers lived long enough to meet our children.
And me?
I was gone too much.
I was stringing together paychecks in gig media, getting on airplanes, taking the work, trying to provide for a growing family.
Which meant she carried more of it than I did.
The crying.
The sickness.
The school mornings.
The exhaustion.
The thousand little emergencies nobody writes magazine profiles about.
She didn’t sign up for the grief life handed her.
She didn’t get a cover story for persevering.
She just persevered.
By God’s grace, she loved her babies.
And now, decades later, one of the greatest privileges of my life is watching those babies love her back.
So I posted about her.
And now I’m asking you to do the same.
Not next month.
Not when Mother’s Day rolls around.
Now.
Let’s flood everybody’s feeds with the women who deserve to be seen.
Your mom.
Your wife.
Your daughter.
Your grandmother.
Your sister.
The mother who white-knuckled her way through postpartum depression and got help.
The mom who had three kids under five and can’t remember half the decade.
The single mother who worked two jobs.
The woman whose marriage fell apart and still made sure the children knew they were loved.
The woman who cried where the kids couldn’t see her, wiped her face, walked back downstairs, and made macaroni and cheese.
Tell her story.
Post her picture.
Put it on Instagram. Facebook. X. TikTok. Wherever you’ve got a feed, put her on it.
Tell us what she endured.
Tell us what she sacrificed.
Tell us what made her laugh.
Tell us about the days she thought she couldn’t do it.
Tell us how she did it anyway.
Tell us why her children never had to wonder whether they were wanted.
And tag it:
#SheLOVEsHerBabies
#WomenHaveAgency
#MotherhoodIsTough
#MomsAreFreakinAmazing
I don’t want this to be another column you read, agree with, and forget by lunch.
Let’s actually do something.
Let’s make the mothers who stayed, fought, sacrificed, prayed, cried, worked, forgave, endured, and loved impossible to miss.
Let’s bury the grievance stories underneath stories of gratitude.
Let’s answer the pink people with pictures of the women who understood that having agency also means accepting responsibility.
Let’s answer the magazines celebrating maternal regret with millions of children saying something considerably more important:
Look at my mom.
Because brave isn’t wishing the difficulty away.
Brave isn’t turning regret into a lifestyle brand.
And brave certainly isn’t killing three children and having strangers turn you into the victim.
Brave is loving somebody when loving them costs you.
Motherhood is tough.
Women have agency.
Moms are freakin’ amazing.
And somewhere in your life, I’ll bet there’s a woman whose story proves it.
Post her.
Tell us why.
#SheLOVEsHerBabies
I know why I posted mine.
I married her.