We Don't Support New Moms

It's easy to slur "That bitch crazy" and move right along, but there's a much bigger picture around new mom mental health -- and a lot of it lays at the feet of dudes.

I do not think anyone aspires to kill their children (you’d hope), and when it happens, it’s obviously a societal edge case (as in, most women and/or men do not kill their children) but some rise to the level of “covered nationally” and thus “create a discussion.” Lindsay Clancy, in Massachusetts, was a recent example of that.

Now we have Jessica Chandler, in Tennessee (I believe it was Pigeon Forge). Here are some details.

She killed her kids with a Lilo and Stitch blanket, and there are some rumors on the Interwebs that she poisoned one or both of them too. She also left a handwritten note saying she intended to committ suicide (same as the Clancy Case), which tracks because she was found in a bathtub with cuts. (Lindsay Clancy is actually paralyzed from the waist down, as she jumped out a second-story window of her home after murdering her children.)

Chandler here also left a note saying she “couldn’t keep them safe,” which could speak to some kind of dementia around seeing demons or could honestly be a reflection on the modern American economy and how she thought her kids had no future. It’s probably the former, could be the latter.

In all the news reports on this, they say the husband “discovered” the scene when he went to “her” house, so I assume the husband and this lady were living apart (or perhaps were never married, and thus the word “husband” would be wrong). If he moved out, it’s easy to think he did so because she was nuts. That is where most people will go, and honestly I think we say that about women when Men leave them — even if the woman doesn’t go on to kill their children.

Here is a video that runs down a lot of what we know and don’t know: