***
One morning in January 2016, my ex-fiancé Kara came out of the bathroom and told me she was pregnant. She said it as if she were trying to convince herself it was true. It was the first month we had been trying, and she was prepared for the worst—that it would take several attempts, or that it might not happen at all. As for me, I was nonchalant. I figured it was bound to happen, probably on the first attempt, if only because perhaps I feared it would happen. Now it was a reality.
“Why did you have to wake me up for that?” I said with a bit of a groan as I slowly rolled over in bed, as if I was in denial.
At the time, I was deeply ambivalent about becoming a father. My relationship with Kara had been on the rocks for several months. I almost had broken off our relationship two months prior after a trip to see my family in Rhode Island, where we had had a few acrimonious exchanges. But this was also the woman I had thought I was destined to marry, so I was determined to fight for it. When Kara had an operation to remove pre-cancerous cells as a preventative measure against cervical cancer, I empathized deeply with her given her fear that she might never be a mother.
We decided to start trying. But I still had misgivings about our relationship, and I was scared that I was not ready to be a father. So, when the news broke, my reaction was not one for the Hollywood scripts.
Ten years later, I recall my initial reaction with regret. In life, however, moments like that do not come with a do-over. There is only a coming to terms. Time, or at least the way human beings think about time, only moves forward. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once quipped: life may be lived forward, but it can only be understood backwards. So, what to make of all this?
***
Postpartum Blues
Nine months later, when I heard my daughter cry for the first time from behind a curtain as she was removed from the womb after a Caesarian section, I felt overwhelmed by the unadulterated, undeniable, and seemingly incomprehensible reality that a newborn baby girl had emerged from what seemed like thin air and that I had been assigned by nature and fate to be her father.
Even then, standing in the hospital ward amidst the doctor and nurses, with Kara lying on the surgical table, a curtain shielding the surgical operation from my sight, using my phone to film my daughter as she was tested, swaddled up, and handed to her mother, I was still deeply ambivalent about becoming a father. I felt out of place. I felt out of mind. Being a loner and an introvert by nature, I was not sure if my personality was well-suited to being a parent. The thought of being confined in the net of postpartum responsibility and obligation—it frightened me.
What never occurred to me, however, was the thought of leaving. It never occurred to me to want to escape. To me, “deadbeat dad” was criminal. I also found it surprisingly and incredibly easy to bond with my newborn daughter. Changing diapers. Feeding her. Holding her. Playing with her. It was exhausting, not exhilarating. But it was seamless, and enriching. I never doubted that I loved and cherished my daughter.
Nonetheless, lack of sleep, hormonal disruptions, and personality differences further strained my relationship with Kara. I was also stuck in old habits. While Kara was on maternal leave, I went to work every day. After work, I would go to the gym. Exercise has been an essential part of my life since childhood. To give you an idea, I did calisthenics in the bathroom during the three days we were in the hospital. I am addicted to the endorphin rush, which became even more essential as a way to keep calm and carry on during those stressful postpartum months. The upshot, however, is that I arrived home late every evening, where I often found Kara on the couch breastfeeding while watching the West Wing. It was only years later, when she said that she felt profoundly alone in those months, that, sadly, I came to appreciate her feeling of neglect.
I could have done better, but the point of all this is to say that postpartum blues in a society that is less than accommodating to new parents—at the time, I did not have any remote work arrangement, and I was not allowed to begin paternal leave until her maternal leave was complete—is real.
I have conveyed only a few of the salient facts that come to mind in describing my own experience as a postpartum parent. As we can all attest, each of us deals with these circumstances and challenges in their own ways. Some couples have more functional relationships, while others may not for reasons that may or may not reflect the long shadow of growing up in a toxic household. Some couples have extended family immediately available to help. Some couples may be more or less susceptible to mental illness. Some couples may have helpful friends and neighbors. Some couples have access to excellent health care professionals and facilities, while others do not. Some couples may be plagued by differences of personality and preference that only come to light after a short honeymoon romance and shotgun marriage. One can imagine countless more examples of good and bad luck that may facilitate or impede a steady, healthy family life.
This is not to deny the importance of accountability. We need to learn how to do the right thing in life. But take a moment to reflect on all the things you do not control in life, and all of the unforeseen coincidences, fortuitous incidents, and unwelcome frictions that affect what happens to you, and you realize how lucky you are that you ever managed to do the right thing. In my own case, I knew instinctively that I could only ever love and adore my daughter. She was of me and by me, and beyond any connection to me, a human being at the mercy of her surroundings, whose whole life and future would depend on my caregiving. I felt compelled to love and protect her.
But to feel that, I had to have had a life that prepared me to feel that. I had parents who loved me. I had experiences in life of disappointment, of failure, of alienation, of estrangement, and of other hardships that made me acutely aware of the inevitable challenges that awaited my daughter in her own life. The totality of circumstances that I had encountered in my life, most if not all of it beyond my control, had not only shaped me as a person who was acutely unnerved about becoming a father, but also a person who was emotionally prepared to love and care for his daughter.
***
The Problem of Luck
In becoming a father, I was the beneficiary of good constitutive and circumstantial luck. By constitutive luck, I mean all the ways that life had shaped me, by heritage and by experience, to be the person I am, with the disposition, capabilities, and inclinations I have. I was lucky to be the kind of person who wanted to be a good father. By circumstantial luck, I mean the luck to have had good role models, a good job with good benefits, and a mature partner who was a devoted mother. I was lucky to have been born and bred in circumstances that helped me acquire the social and personal advantages I enjoyed as a parent.
I also suffered the bad luck of being plagued by ambivalence and uncertainty. As well as the bad moral luck of not realizing how much of an unsupportive partner I had been. At the same time, I never had the bad moral luck to even contemplate the idea of abandoning, or otherwise harming, Kara or my daughter.
Many might say that none, or at least not all, of this is luck. Certainly not the commitment to caring for my daughter and protecting her from harm. But are these personal characteristics a matter of choice? Is it not a part of nature that we are so constituted as to want to protect and care for our offspring rather than harm them? The selfish gene and all that? I was certainly conscious of my love for my daughter, and of the choices I made to do the best I could for her even amidst the ambivalence. But were those choices the result of having a will that wills what it wills?
By free will, I mean not the freedom to do as we will, but the more fundamental ability to will what we will. Ex nihilo. It is the ability to formulate the desires that we feel inside of us before we even think about whether we can realize our desires. If we have a will that is given to us by nature, further shaped and cultivated into unconscious drives by the circumstances in which we have been thrust by fate, and if there is so much contingency and unpredictability in how we think, feel, and act at any given moment in our lives, it seems incredible that we could ever believe in free will and personal responsibility. Putting compatibilism aside for the sake of argument, I am inclined to believe that free will is an illusion, and that everything in life may be luck all the way down.
At least as yet, I have not been so “luck-pilled” as to believe definitively, as argued in an upcoming book authored by Aaron Rabinowitz, based on his PhD dissertation, which I have had the good luck to review, that everything comes down to luck. I am reluctant to embrace luck-pilling without reserve if only because I remain fond of, and influenced by, the Stoic concept of prohairesis, which is essentially the idea that, as human beings with reason, we have the capacity to agree or not agree with the judgment we might instinctively make in response to immediate experience, and then to act accordingly. But I do believe the book (dissertation) is correct to observe that “[h]umans have struggled with anxiety about the pervasiveness of luck since the concept first arose in ancient societies, and attempts to address the problem have shaped the modern world.” Also, that “the problem of luck has persisted because resolving it requires letting go of a tenacious group of deeply rooted illusions centered on the need to feel that people mostly get what they deserve.”
In ancient Greek tragedy, audiences watched as characters succumbed to their fates, suffering the consequences of circumstances beyond their control. Oedipus killed his father and married his mother despite measures undertaken early in his life specifically to avoid this fate. In the account of tragedy that the Greek philosopher Aristotle gave, audiences may have been inspired to feel pity for Oedipus, but also fear that their own lives could similarly go awry. The vicarious experience gave rise to catharsis, often construed as a purging of emotions that perhaps also fostered sympathy for human beings in general as largely undeserving of tragic, unlucky outcomes that might befall them.
In modern American life, we might think of luck as the equivalent of the ancient Greek preoccupation with fate. But unlike the ancient Greeks who took fate seriously, we downplay luck in part because we believe so fervently in agency and desert, tending to attribute tragic outcomes in life like poverty and crime primarily, if not exclusively, to human choice. We prefer to let humans fend for themselves because we attribute tragic outcomes not to the contingencies of fate, but to choice and personal responsibility. As far as we are concerned, people get what they deserve. But what if everything, or most everything, is luck? What if free will—which is not to be confused with freedom, autonomy, or other conditions of self-determination—is only an illusion?
***
The Case of Lindsay Clancy
Which leads us to the case of Lindsay Clancy, the woman recently put on trial for allegedly murdering her children. I say “allegedly” because a central question of the trial was not whether Ms. Clancy killed her children, but whether she murdered them. That is, whether postpartum psychosis stripped her of sufficient capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her acts and thereby obey the law. Many people insist that Lindsay Clancy “deserves” to be imprisoned for murdering her children. Others agree with her defense that she was not in her right mind when she killed her three children, and that she should have been found not guilty by reason of insanity. In other words, she should not be punished for having the bad luck to suffer from postpartum psychosis.
Her defense does not mean she should not be held accountable, though what it means to be held accountable in her case is a matter of dispute in itself. But as evidence from the trial demonstrated, Clancy was not a neglectful mother. She loved her children. She always wanted to have children. She felt deep anxiety about whether she was being a good mother to each of her children. And she was frightened enough by harmful thoughts to seek help from family and mental health professionals.
A person of faith—you know, those who are inclined to believe it is for God to judge—might suggest that only God knows what went through Lindsay Clancy’s mind in that fateful hour when, as she admitted, she strangled her three children to death with an exercise band, then cut her wrist and neck and jumped out a second-story window, only to survive the fall and end up in a wheelchair.
To any sane person, the horror of these admissions is unfathomable. To many, it is equally unfathomable that the law should make any distinction between killing and murdering her children. How could a woman not know what she is doing when it is the lives of her own children at stake? Never mind pesky legal details about premeditation. It is a matter of “common sense,” the hidebound opinion of conventional wisdom. At the very least, a woman who takes the life of her own children is no longer deserving of being treated as a human being. She is a monster.
To be sure, her act was monstrous. But is—was—Lindsay Clancy a monster? Personally, I do not presume to know. I am not Lindsay Clancy. I do not know Lindsay Clancy. And while I am aware of the journals and expert testimony that were presented at trial to shed light on her deteriorating mental health, I surely have not been privy to every ebb, flow, flinch, pang, and shock of thought and feeling that passed through her body and mind in the moments, or in the months, before she killed her children.
It is likely that Lindsay Clancy also cannot account for every ebb, flow, flinch, pang, and shock of thought and feeling that passed through her body and mind in those critical moments. Can anyone give a full accounting of every streak of thought and feeling in every moment of their lives? Even more to the point, do we have control over those currents of thought and feeling within us, and how they determine the decisions we make and the actions we undertake? As her defense attorney argued, Lindsay Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis. She heard voices telling her to kill her children in the moments before the deadly act. Hallucinatory experiences may seem farfetched to some, but as for me, I recall when, months prior to being diagnosed with a tumor located in the Broca area of my brain, I experienced seconds-long episodic seizures when, hard as I tried to speak, I felt like an invisible force was clamping my mouth shut. I had lost the ability to speak. In short, I can attest viscerally to how the brain can malfunction.
Finally, what about the reactions and decisions of family, friends, and most important, medical professionals who were responsible for her treatments? Surely, it should be easy to acknowledge that Lindsay Clancy had little control over how the community of people around her supported, or failed to support, her as her mental health deteriorated in the months before she killed her children.
As for me, I was initially misdiagnosed with an “old stroke” after a CT scan showed a lesion in my brain. It was only after months of tests that a radiologist and neurologist figured out, after an MRI scan, that I had a brain tumor. Years later, after surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and over 25 MRI scans as part of regular monitoring, I sometimes marvel at the extraordinary good luck of my diagnosis and, so far at least, successful treatments. In an alternative world in which I had not been diagnosed and treated early enough, the tumor could have grown until one day I had a seizure while driving a vehicle and accidentally killed myself and other people. I was lucky.
Lindsay Clancy was not so lucky.
None of this is to excuse or condone her horrific act. But it behooves us all to try to understand it. Perhaps she did contemplate and plan the killings in the days, weeks, or months leading up to the fateful deed, and perhaps it was because, as the conservative pundit Matt Walsh put it in dismissing the seriousness of postpartum depression and psychosis, she was a selfish parent who could not handle the difficulties of being a parent. If it is that simple, then perhaps we can indeed expect copycat killings by, as our prominent (and repugnant) conservative put it, “unbalanced women.”
But mental health, or lack thereof, is a real and complex phenomenon. It is also almost certainly a reflection, at least in part, of bad luck. It may be the constitutive bad luck of family inheritance, or perhaps the circumstantial bad luck of living in a society that does not do enough to address mental illness. In the case of Lindsay Clancy, her defense attorney argued that she suffered from postpartum psychosis. Of course, the prosecution called in expert testimony to dispute this attribution, but if the defense is right, and it seems that all but one juror agreed with the defense, then the key point is that Lindsay Clancy was not in control on the day she killed her children. Whether it was the result of constitutive bad luck or circumstantial bad luck, it was undoubtedly a case of bad moral luck.
If so, it is appropriate to ask, could her husband, family, and medical professionals have done more to support her? To be sure, this question was a matter of fierce dispute at trial and in the broader societal discourse around the trial. And despite the conspiracy theories, Patrick Clancy is not on trial. Nor are Lindsay Clancy’s extended family or the medical professionals who treated her. Nor should they be. But if we want to prevent the so-called copycat killings that so concern Matt Walsh, perhaps what we should consider is not Lindsay Clancy’s public execution as Walsh advocates, but a greater appreciation of the severity of mental illness that causes a woman to be “unbalanced” in the first place, and the bad luck of women who suffer from it.
We might also think about how we can do more as a society to detect and sufficiently treat mental illnesses like postpartum depression and psychosis. If there is one thing we have learned from the victories of the feminist movement, and progressive movements in general, it is that we can always do more to overcome the institutional inadequacies that impair the full flourishing of human life.
***
The Good Luck of the Feminist Movement
For generations, even centuries, women have had the misfortune—bad luck—to be born into patriarchal societies in which they were expected to bear the burdens of postpartum caregiving while men continued to blithely live their regular lives outside of the home. Many women may have had the good luck to have supportive extended families or communities that helped ease the burdens of postpartum blues. Many other women, of course, did not. In either case, motherhood was their role and they were expected to intuitively perform this role as an essential and welcome contribution to the family and to society. It was hard work, but the work was worthwhile.
Complaining about the burdens of caretaking was selfish and reprehensible. As Matt Walsh put it, “[a] lot of people aren’t going to want to hear this but much of the ‘depression’ that parents (and not just moms) suffer after child birth is due not so much to hormones but to the fact that children, especially babies, are demanding and difficult and require us to subordinate our own needs and desires for their sake. The more selfish you are, the more of an adjustment it’s going to be.”
As noted, Matt Walsh also wrote that “[i]n a just society, or at least a vaguely sane one, the only debate we’d be having about Lindsay Clancy is what method of execution to use, and whether or not it should be done publicly (it should),” a comment that brings to mind public executions witnessed in The Handmaid’s Tale. Mr. Walsh is entitled to his opinion, but his “just society” is certainly not one I want to live in. Meanwhile, conservative activist Michael Young wrote that he would no longer bother to talk about “the radicalization of men again, because *NOTHING* on the right — not Nick Fuentes, not Alex Jones, not Andrew Tate—even comes close to being as insane and evil as the women supporting Lindsay Clancey after she murdered her 3 children in cold blood.” Of course, Nick Fuentes is a Holocaust denier and is responsible for some of the most vicious and violent trolling of women, while Andrew Tate has been indicted for sex trafficking.
I resisted feminism for a long time. Feminism, of course, has a long and complex history which has come in waves distinguished by their unique set of concerns. First-wave feminism was concerned with gaining political and legal rights like suffrage. Second-wave feminism was concerned with reproductive rights and gaining social equality in family and the workplace. Third-wave feminism arose at a time when Rush Limbaugh was fulminating about so-called “feminazis.” And then fourth-wave feminism coincided with the #MeToo movement and other such concerns. All throughout, the fundamental concern has been to expand the rights, opportunities, and protections of women after generations and centuries of outright patriarchal oppression.
I regret being the author of an op-ed on why people hate feminism in the wake of the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Fortunately, I did have the good luck at the time to reflect appropriately on the disease of sexual harassment—the explicit harassment of groping and insinuation, as well as the insidious and demeaning harassment that made us cringe when watching the hit show Mad Men—that women have faced for the longest time. A year earlier, I had written a long essay on why men should be asking not what they have done right, but what they have done wrong. And two years prior, I had written an article on rape culture in Trump nation. Years later, as the father of a daughter who regrets my postpartum failings, and who unequivocally supports women’s liberation from patriarchy, I am an unapologetic feminist who decries all manifestations of patriarchal domination, oppression, and exploitation.
The trial of Lindsay Clancy has highlighted the mental health challenges of postpartum depression and psychosis. While we should certainly not ignore how the postpartum blues affect men as well, we should be able to acknowledge how society can fail to accommodate the needs of women who traditionally have been expected to bear the brunt of the postpartum blues on their own. The question of accountability has focused exclusively on Lindsay Clancy. But if luck is a central factor in our lives, we also need to reflect on the accountability of society as a whole and whether it is constructed so as to minimize the horrible bad luck that befell Lindsay Clancy and her family.
For generations, American society and its institutions have failed women in countless ways. Women could not vote. Women could not pursue professional aspirations deemed inappropriate by normalized expectations about their social roles. Women could expect to be ignored if they spoke their minds about political matters even as the men who rule the country made policy that affected the lives of everyone. Women often could not protest mistreatment in the home without suspicions of ingratitude or ulterior motives that diverted attention from the abuse they suffered. If actresses complained about Harvey Weinstein, they were ignored. If there is a guiding light to feminism, it is in how women have struggled to advance the rights, opportunities, and protections that women have long deserved as human beings, and of which they have been deprived by the culture, institutions, and conventional wisdom that prevailed in their time.
It is a fair point to say that, in killing her children, Lindsay Clancy deprived her children of the opportunity to benefit from the victories of the feminist movement, and of the victories of other progressive movements in American history. Perhaps it is also fair to say that tragic outcomes like those that befell the Clancy family might become even less likely as society invests more resources in detection, treatment, and support for severe mental illness. Certainly less likely than if our response is to publicly execute afflicted women post-tragedy, as Matt Walsh has suggested.
In both cases, it is not only about addressing the needs of women that have long been ignored or downplayed. It is also about recognizing the role of luck, good and bad, in our lives, and how failing to appreciate how much luck matters means that society will continue to fail not just women, but all of us. With that in mind, when I think about the recent trial of Lindsay Clancy, I am grateful to have had the good luck to have become even more of a feminist than I already was.
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