Musings on Duxbury Tragedy

I didn't know about the Duxbury tragedy when I held a grief ritual last night. When someone has their grief process in ritual and then re-enters the community of the ritual, they are received and asked, "Have you grieved enough yet?"

No. We have not.

Now we grieve for this family. The loss of these beautiful children.

We grieve for a society that puts so much pressure on mothers that this one broke like this.

We grieve for something that is more subtle and hard to describe.

I want to name something I know to be real, and that I know many mothers have experienced. Many have experienced impulses to harm our children. It does not mean that we will.

It means that it is 3 am and they have kept us up all night and the part of our psyche that is being destroyed by parenting without enough support wants an end to the relentlessness of it. Just for a moment.

My fear is that this incident makes it feel less safe for mothers to talk about these feelings and impulses. And then they do not get the support they need to PREVENT THESE TRAGEDIES FROM HAPPENING AGAIN.

My request, is that we do not demonize this woman, but that we grieve for how much suffering she must have been in. That instead of vilifying her, we feel the pain of everyone's loss here. Really feel it. Take a breath into how it would be to be her and have such a break in reality from psychosis that you murder your own children.

And if we are to vilify anyone for this, that it be the entity of capitalism that keeps us oppressed and unsupported.

And that we check in with our new mothers. With the mothers of many and see if we can bring them a meal or give them a break in some way.

We have lost community. I often grieve that we do not raise our children in community. We are in isolation, doing the impossible all the time.

Please, if you are a mother, and you are having these "bad" thoughts about harming your children, find out now who the people you can truly talk with are, so that you can get the support without the punishment of government threats.

Also, if it feels aligned for you in the thread of comments to be truthful if you are a mother who would never harm your children and had those kinds of "bad" thoughts when your children were small, share that with mothers you think might be on the edge, so they do not feel along and pathological in their thoughts. Simple empathy can go a long way to prevent these awful tragedies.

I love my son more than anything and I had those thoughts.