“He thrust his hand into the embers, so delighted at its warmth.”
My son stopped reading his children’s version of Frankenstein abruptly.
“Why would he put his hand in the fire?”
I explained the creature had no parents to orient him to the world, so his discovery of many things was quite brutalized. I could almost see memories play across my son’s eyes, film strips of having his little hands kissed a hundred times, being pulled away from stove tops, then introduced to them, our hovering as he learned his way around pasta and pancake preparation and on from there.
That night my husband and I pulled out our rather tattered unabridged copy of the tale and read further. Victor creates life, recoils from what he has made, and abandons it. The creature acquires language and knowledge by peering through somebody else’s window, then turns murderous; Victor spends much of the remainder of the novel oscillating between remorse and self-pity without acquiring much corresponding aptitude for responsibility. When the creature murders Henry Clerval and Victor is arrested for the crime, Victor awakens in prison attended by a hired nurse whose compassionless disposition appalls him. He turns from her in “loathing,” offended that somebody could speak so unsympathetically to a man just pulled from the edge of death. This audacious grievance, from a man whose abandoned creation has just murdered his best friend.
Victor is hounded by the creature; tormented by it. He is also continuously making decisions under the same character defects that created the monster in the first place, and his great failure is his reluctance to take sufficient ownership of what he has made. Victor becomes so absorbed by his own suffering that he loses sight of the more consequential fact: people are dying because of what he made and repeatedly failed to confront.
Rage Performance
I have become suspicious of how motherhood is narrated, typically as injury. It’s assumed injurious nature makes for popular content, probably because commiseration feels relatable and tends to dismantle feelings of isolation. Social media is an unusually accommodating arena for this. Commentary needs enough conviction for virality but very little accountability for what happens after it does, and then comes some truly terrible advice.
I see mothers on TikTok locking themselves in bathrooms, screaming and smashing ice into bathtubs beneath banners about maternal rage, as if the rehearsal of anger becomes medicinal because the thing being shattered is innocuous. It is theoretically cathartic, but really it’s just inviting women to feed their rage, film it, and gather praise for chronic self-expression. The evidence is decidedly less romantic. A 2024 meta-analysis covering 154 reports and 10,189 participants found that activities reducing physiological arousal reduced anger and aggression; arousal-increasing activities did not support the catharsis theory.
I am a mother of six children. I am no stranger to anger. I yell like a football coach. I run hard, my kids run hard, and we are intense people. I used to swear like a sailor, so I forced myself to learn difficult words every week and use them in everyday conversation until eventually I could reach for them in intense moments, too. Every night I read a good novel. After Frankenstein we picked up Dracula; Dostoevsky sits on my shelf for when I am ready. I work in communications, so I am chronically online, and I have to develop safeguards through which to funnel my analysis and develop my judgement. I could take endlessly to Instagram and continue excavating every legitimate reason I am angry, or I can take myself somewhere that beckons me to elevate my thinking. The former feels more honest in the moment. The latter makes me a better person. I am a different mother approaching my children and a different kind of advisor to my husband when my intake of information reaches out of myself, my emotions, and my curated algorithmic feedback loop.
We have become so proficient at naming the forces acting upon human beings that we are increasingly reluctant to tell people they can act back. Pull away at someone’s essence bit by bit, replace complex growth with pathological titles, and eventually a chimeric caricature forms. The algorithm knows what to do with you, even if the dinner table does not. You become intelligible to calculational trends as you become foreign in real relationships.
Exonerating Evil
The Lindsay Clancy trial tests how quickly explanation becomes exculpation. Her defense does not dispute that Clancy killed her three children. They argue postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder vitiate her criminal responsibility. Her family has described suicidality, paranoia and repeated efforts to obtain psychiatric help; prosecutors contend that she remained capable of deliberate action.
During the ongoing trial, a TikTok mother with no apparent connection to the family launched a fundraiser for Clancy’s parents that has now raised more than $964,000. The organizer celebrated securing the family’s cooperation by announcing, “We got the family!” The spectacle is stranger than ordinary sympathy. We have begun treating adversity as so determinative that suffering itself can become a kind of exculpatory credential. Establish the woman as sufficiently wounded and judgment begins to look cruel. A social ritual emerges, requiring proof of how thoroughly we can empathize with the forces acting upon her: her illness, her treatment, her marriage, her exhaustion, the failures around her, until the woman who killed three children becomes the victim, even to the extent of now widespread narratives of accusing her husband, Patrick Clancy, of the murders his now ex-wife admitted to committing.
Raising nearly a million dollars around the family of an accused child murderer is what happens when catastrophic thinking about adversity joins sentimental fatalism. If suffering is presumed to overpower agency, then the more catastrophic the suffering, the less morally permissible it becomes to judge conduct. Eventually commiseration ceases to accompany judgment and replaces it.
This is the dark bargain: the more thoroughly suffering is treated as determinative, the more agency begins to look like an unreasonable demand. That bargain reaches much farther than a courtroom. We begin to narrate whole lives according to the forces that injured them, until those forces acquire more explanatory authority than anything the person might still choose, repair, endure, or become.
Postpartum psychosis is a psychiatric emergency, and postpartum depression can become overwhelming. Women experiencing either deserve proportionate to the severity of the situation. A diagnosis can identify pathology without becoming a prophecy about the woman who receives it. In one prospective study of women hospitalized with postpartum psychosis, 74% reported good functioning nine months later and 88% had resumed their previous employment and household responsibilities. A four-year study of women experiencing first-onset postpartum psychosis found that more than two-thirds had no major psychiatric episode outside the postpartum period. Postpartum depression follows similarly heterogeneous courses. Among 507 women diagnosed with postpartum depressive disorders, researchers identified three trajectories over the following year: 50.4% gradually remitted, 41.8% partially improved, and 7.8% remained chronically severely depressed. A systematic review estimates it affects roughly one in 1,000 women and cites a 4% infanticide rate among untreated cases, and still infanticide is aberrational even within this severe disorder. The Clancy case remains an aberration of postpartum psychosis outcomes, statistically speaking.
The condition is surmountable. A competent network identifies pathology, redistributes burdens, treats disease, teaches skills, restores confidence, corrects distorted thinking, and keeps reminding the woman that there remains a person underneath the diagnosis capable of recovering capacities the illness has diminished. A pharmaceutical cannot tell a woman how to encounter suffering, what obligations must surpass suffering, what constitutes an honorable life, or why the restoration of her faculties matters beyond the relief of symptoms. Those are questions of philosophy, religion, family, and experiential formation. We impoverish women when we pretend clinical vocabulary can answer all these needs, and worse, that when it can’t, any behavior is acceptable because it was likely inevitable.
Suffering Is Not Destiny
Industries can deform us, and illness can attenuate our capacity to function optimally, but we are drowning in reactionary coddling and our culture is becoming darker for it. Cambridge professor and alleged plagiarist Jason Arday, who was found dead in his London home this month shortly after allegations of plagiarism and claims about his falsified personal record intensified, illustrates what happens when an industry begins manufacturing the story required to prop up its chosen candidates.
Cambridge celebrated Arday’s appointment through an extraordinary account of autism, developmental delay and ascent to academic prestige, explicitly presenting his appointment within the university’s efforts to increase minority representation. After his record came under scrutiny, even James Cleverly argued that universities had failed to perform proper due diligence because they wanted a young Black academic they could promote as a “poster child.” Arday need not have killed himself. His shame was not a necessary terminus of disgrace: he could have told the truth, absorbed the consequences, and rebuilt his life, but by then his alleged lies and the institutional mythology built around them had become so enormous that collapse could begin to look more conceivable than reconstruction. We don’t have a redemptive social narrative anymore: we have cancel culture and GoFundMe pages, but there isn’t much on the spectrum in between the two in the public arena.
What forms us, then, has to be deeper than whatever deforms us. We send children into schoolyards where a careless remark about them can dampen an entire day, and then we bring them home and share with them truer remarks about who they are and how to combat the jerks. Over time, with instruction, the schoolyard matures; children develop better social judgment and the opinions that once felt dispositive shrink back to their proper size. Adults require the same kind of formation. We need families, communities, institutions, and traditions capable of reminding us that disgrace can be survived, appetites can be governed, failures can be repaired, and suffering can become generative of meaning, maybe even good legacy, rather than terminal.
Increasing Capacity
Some things require treatment. Some require assistance. Some require discipline or repentance. Some things in us should just be starved. We have to take our thoughts captive, and when they become intrusive or overpowering, we have to be earnest about the resources we reach for and the ends toward which they direct us. All the pharmaceuticals all the prestige academia can confer cannot manufacture honor in a human life, especially when suffering is continuously saddled with reactionary claims, negative connotations, and disjointed theories about what will finally satisfy our deepest needs.
A noble life requires more than symptom management. We must distinguish what has happened to us from what we will do with it, what deserves amelioration from what requires endurance, what should be expressed from what should be starved, and what genuinely diminishes our agency from the habits and narratives that persuade us to relinquish it. We will all be acted upon. We are still responsible for what we give ourselves over to.
There are terrible fates with which we ought to interfere. There are also victories we ought to stop talking ourselves out of.
Jillian Tymo is a researcher, writer, and host of the podcast “Rebranding Motherhood,” founded by Dr. Abby Johnson and produced by ProLove Ministries. She examines culture, politics, and religion through her work and academic studies at Georgetown University.
Instagram: @jilliantymo @rebrandingmotherhoodpodcast