When I first learned about Lindsay Clancy, the 35-year-old former nurse who is currently on trial for killing her three children in 2023, I was thrust back in time to 2005.
Like Clancy, I was living in Massachusetts when I gave birth to my first child. It was one of the last days of October; my water broke at almost exactly the moment daylight saving time ended. The delivery was traumatic, and in the hours that followed, a deep-seated sorrow began forging fault lines through my psyche.
Driving home from the hospital, down New England country roads bathed in the amber glow of a receding autumn, those fault lines burst open. The distance between knowing I should love my baby and actually feeling that love stretched before me like a vast, dark chasm. This child I had longed for was a stranger to me, as I was to myself.
Over the next several weeks, I descended into a distorted mirror of the reality I once knew. Joyful celebration surrounded me. I could hear it like an echo from another world, but I couldn't reach it. Waking from a nap one afternoon, I heard my daughter crying downstairs in my mother-in-law's arms. Instead of feeling love, I felt an overwhelming desire to no longer exist. I felt myself slipping into the chasm.
