Parenting Without A License

A Most Just Verdict

Posted by Kimberly on July 28th, 2006 — Posted in Kipple, iVillage, Sanity and the Solo Mom

There’s been a lot said this week about the Andrea Yates verdict. I debated jumping into the fray because that sort of political commentary really isn’t what this blog is all about. But what it is about is being a mother, and the trials and triumphs that that entails. So I decided to heck with it. My thoughts on the verdict are relevant because this is an issue that I think is relevant to all mothers.

I am thrilled with that verdict. I thought the initial sentence was a travesty, and that this is the most just outcome possible under the circumstances.

Yes, she did it; she chased down and methodically drowned her five children. She has never claimed otherwise. But she didn’t do it for love or money or vengance. She did it because she was sufferring from a severe, untreated psychosis. Not merely intense depression, which can be crippling enough to a mother. Psychosis. Horrific though it is, I can totally believe her chasing them down and then laying them out one by one. Because she was psychotic . It was an awful thing, but really, I feel it was at least as much a tragedy for her as for everyone else. Because she was denied the help she needed, because she was dismissed and belittled and made to feel like she didn’t matter, like her very real, obviously dangerous illness was simply a ridiculous display of self-indulgence, she will now have to live with the knowledge of what she did for the rest of her life.

Personally, I think her husband shuld be charged with something. He played a huge role in creating the situation that lead to this. I find the fact that he’s allowed to simply move on and begin creating a new family deeply offensive.

He refused to allow her to take medication for her PPP. He refused to take measures to limit their procreation, insisting that she bear as many children as she possibly could in spite of the fact that her doctors made it clear that she was not psychologically capable of positively dealing with the hormonal stresses of pregnancy and childbirth. When she recognized that she was teetering on the brink and checked herself into a psychiatric ward, he promptly dismissed her concerns and her illness and checked her back out. He insisted that she homeschool the boys, effectively trapping her inside her worst nightmare all day. He isolated her, moving her to a remote trailer and controll ing access and support to her. Andrea Yates’ faulty brain chemistry created this nightmare, but her husband’s presumably lucid mind gave it life. She might not have been in the right mind to know what she was doing, but he sure as hell was. And yet she is the only one on trial.

I remember this case vividly because Regan is the same age as Mary, the Yates’ youngest child. I remember the horror at the the thought of what had happened to those poor children, and I remember the demonization of Andrea that followed. The media spin and much of the righteous talk on the playground was about what a monster the woman clearly was, to have committed such a heinous act. I think some of the cry for blood was because Andrea Yates is everyone’s worst nightmare–she forced people to confront the dirty little secret that motherhood is not all sunshine and rainbows.

Sometimes you hate your kids. You love them desperately, but sometimes you want to climb the walls because they are eating your brain. Sometimes you maybe even, in the darkest reaches of your soul, want to drown them in the bathtub. But we don’t do it, because we know those feelings are fleeting. Because we are not crippled by the chemicals running through our brains.

But if we’re honest, I think we do understand the impulse, and I think that frightens people. They need to make Andrea an abberration in order to continue on with the fantasy that everything is fine and mothers are infinitely patient women who adore all children with their every breath.

Motherhood is hard. Exhausting and soul draining even on the good days. Personally, I look at Andrea Yates with compassion and pity, understanding that there but for the grace of brain chemistry and hormonal balance go I.