It's not an easy time to be a kid. Not with the news: Drowned her five children. Postpartum depression. "What's the matter with Mary" – the chase through the house before she drowned the oldest son beside his baby sister. Dead children wrapped in sheets.
Do kids also try to comprehend the incomprehensible through projection – so as we adults have tried to imagine a woman doing battle with each slippery, struggling child, have our kids wondered what it would be like to flail for life looking straight in the eyes of a mother without mercy?
For years they've been hearing of babies left in dumpsters, babies left in toilets, babies thrown from windows. Our children live with the stuff nightmares are made of.
But they've never had to deal with this kind of aftermath: A father who says he still supports the murdering mother. Grandmothers who say she was a beautiful person. All the people clogging the airwaves with "now we'll finally get these poor postpartum mothers the help they need" excuses. The adult buzz is loud as locusts: Well, no wonder she snapped. Five kids would drive me crazy too!
Where is the outrage for this outrageous act?
Are children to be left with the understanding that having children can make women depressed and that we understand how a depressed woman may be driven to kill her own? And that while a father would be held accountable for killing his kids, mothers are given more slack? Don't all the bending-over-backwards sighs of understanding – the cries of five kids would make me crazy too! or it must have been the husband's fault! – only grind salt into the psychic wounds all kids will suffer because of the actions of one murdering mother?
How therapeutic it might be for them to see some righteous, unabashed anger from the father, the relatives, the "experts," or their own parents. Instead of pre-programmed psychobabble, some basic reassurance that murder is always intolerable, that a word like depression can't excuse an atrocity committed against someone small and weak and vulnerable – someone like them.
But we don't see it through our children's eyes, haven't for years. We've been too busy creating the kind of culture that has led us to exactly this place – the kind of world where we count our children as burdens rather than blessings.
Isn't the most dangerous place in America today the mother's womb? Thanks to our "sacred" right to choose, only two out of three kids even make it out alive. But lest we jump to the conclusion that those two will grow up feeling wanted, consider the pervasive anti-child atmosphere which will surround them as they grow.
How many will hear their own mother say to someone with more kids: "Oh, I don't know how you do it. My two are [or one is] a) plenty for me, b) all I can handle, or c) enough to drive me crazy." For such a sensitive, aware society, a remark like this should sting like the worst racial slur.
Maybe someday they'll be sad or angry to think how we didn't get it about them, never saw them as resources and blessings and personal wealth, the way parents see their children in other cultures – you know, the ones we're always trying to "civilize" by setting up abortion clinics, assuming that the rest of the world should evolve to our sophisticated, civilized view of children as expendable.
Today I stuck a verse from the Bible on the refrigerator door: Children are a gift from the Lord, they are a reward from Him.
I want my kids to know they're not expendable. I want them to know that if anyone ever harmed them, no matter who, there would be no pity, no understanding, no support for such evil. I have reassured them – as every parent who's ever used the word "depressed" now must – that though I too have been depressed at times, never once have I thought of harming them. And I never will.
A murdering mom doesn't deserve mercy as much as our kids need to know whose side we're really on.