The Tree of Knowledge

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I don’t want to write this, but I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion it’s needed.

What don’t I want to write? Well… I don’t want to write about the Clancy case anymore. For a million reasons, up to and including that it’s plainly obvious to me that she’s guilty in the legal sense (she knew what she was doing) and yet people are being stupid about it.

Nothing I am about to say exculpates her in any way. People can have mistaken ideas and kill someone under that impression, but unless the idea is that they’re in danger for their lives and there is SOME substantiation (like the other person was holding an object that looked like a knife or a gun and coming at them) they’re still guilty of murder and there’s no getting around it. If, after reading a lot of weird blogs, I become convinced that my neighbor is an alien from beta centauri and kill him, I should be given the penalty for murder, regardless of how much I believed I was saving the Earth.

I am convinced I know why Lindsey Clancy killed her kids (though not a 100% sure why all three of them, unless she figured that leaving the other two in the world associated with the case of their brother and mother was too cruel and they’d be put in foster care and decided that was a fate worse than death) and while utterly inexcusable, it is something that other people in our circles might be prone to in far, far less lethal circumstances. It is in fact something I fell into when I was a young mother, though of course I never considered killing the kid, only worried obsessively.

To explain how I got there: I have spent the last few days either helping family members move (I did say this move was complicated), cleaning or unpacking. (I’m switching to more unpacking over the other two, though some work on that remains.) Since I’m desperately, floridly, ADD, I need something to keep the mind going while I do mechanical, repetitive work. If it’s some task that’s half an hour or less, like say doing dishes, I can do stuff like plot or write the next chapter in my mind. But if it’s a morning or an afternoon or a whole day, at some point the mind turns off and takes the body with it.

The best illustration of this is when I went for a walk (a task that’s unbearable alone, or without distraction), walked two blocks, and found myself turning around to go back home. It was simple. Mind said “this is boring, let’s go home” at a level I wasn’t even aware of.

So, normally I listen to “mindless books” or books I’ve read before (First read in audio doesn’t work well for me.) But Jane Austen fanfic has been invaded by AI, whose cadences drive me nuts in audio worse than in reading. And none of my faves are up for re-read. So instead I put youtube on with one of the podcasters I like and let it cycle whatever. Unless it becomes offensive and I have to change it.

Anyway, one of the things it brought up was a female blogger talking about how Clancy was guilty. I let it stay on because it was interesting, particularly since she had initially been on Clancy’s side, and was explaining how knowing more changed her mind.

She brought up a few things I didn’t know, which I confirmed afterwards. Clancy had joined a mommy facebook group apparently devoted to blowing off steam about your kids. Look, I’m not going to judge stupid things moms say, because I was known to say “I am raising Abel and Cain, and I just want to know which is which” when I got tired of the boys fighting, and don’t want anyone to think I was either serious or ready to do something about it. BUT she said that her second child, Dawson, was the “most difficult person I’ve ever met” and how she didn’t like him, and in fact couldn’t stand him. That’s hard to discount as just blowing off steam, and there is nothing even vaguely jokey or deflecting about it. Particularly when the kid was 19 months old at the time. (Look, my kids have driven me insane several times. I’ve never not liked them, much less hate dthem. In fact I can’t even think in those terms. Also, he was the first child she killed.

The other thing I found out was that before the killings she looked up whether a psychopath could be cured. Most people, including the blogger whom I first heard this from, assume she meant herself.

The other thing, which is widely known, is that the woman was obsessed with “mommy books” and blogs on how to raise the kids, the best way to do this and that. How to optimize yourself as a parent and your children as a product. This is, to be honest, a temptation of educated, over-thinking moms all over. (Which is why I’m writing this blog.) She perhaps did it even more than is normal because she was a perfectionist.

I’m convinced she’d become convinced her son — not herself — was a psychopath, and also that she knew just enough to know psychopaths are dangerous, evil mass murderers. (No, it’s not true. Any number of psychopaths are decent, productive members of society. In fact, apparently, a good number of them are surgeons. It’s just we tend to hear about the ones who decide to flaunt social norms by doing evil stuff.) And therefore, not wanting to be blamed for unleashing that on the world, she decided to kill him. And to kill the other kids to prevent their being traumatized by the results of her crime. (Thereby proving SHE is a psychopath.)

Of course, she’s utterly guilty of the crimes. I’m also sure that she was treating that poor little boy very poorly whenever she could get away with it.

But that’s neither here nor there, because this is not about her. It’s not up to me to send her where she belongs, so I leave it in the hands of a higher power.

What I can do is help other people becoming caught in that kind of thought-trap.

Mind you most mothers who decide they’re raising a psychopath, or a potential serial killer or a never do well won’t kill their kids. Thank heaven most mothers are still decent human beings. BUT they’ll worry themselves sick over it, and might be much, much harsher with the kid than there is any objective reason to be.

How do I know this? I know it because I’m one of those mothers.

First let me point out I never read mommy books. The mommy blogs weren’t a thing yet, thank G-d, and the books had such appalling grammar I could never make it past the prologue. (The reason I had them at all is that all my friends were bombarding me with books with titles like “How to raise the strong willed child.” I wasn’t impressed. First, “Strong Willed” is a weird way to spell “stubborn” and second, I knew precisely how to handle that when it mattered. A quick smack on the bottom when too young to understand reason, and taking the computer cord away to enforce compliance, once they could reason. Most of the things I didn’t enforce compliance on, because they weren’t that important, and the kids eventually realized they were pushing against nothing and came around.) I don’t know how I’d be raising kids nowadays.

However, I read a lot of books on true crime and psychology, and I became very alarmed. That I know of my kids never harmed (let alone tortured) animals. However, both were notoriously hard to potty train (it runs in the family) and had the occasional bed wetting accident when over 3. Everything I read assured me this meant they would grow up to be mass murderers. And, of course, if you start looking at a toddler for signs of evil, you’ll find them. Mostly because toddlers are your original, untainted savages. And there’s nothing noble about savages. They’re just all impulse, no moderating reason. Our job is to make them into human beings fit for society.

I had nightmares and worried for years over this. My usual joke is that I should have stuck with cats, because cats lack the opposable thumbs to become mass murderers (eyes Indy and his hand-paws.) But the worry was real.

We are now awash in so much information on child rearing that the average mother can’t avoid it. And most of it is, to put it mildly, alarmist or sensationalist. It’s often being passed by neurotic mothers to neurotic mothers and growing in the telling.

I routinely watch younger women who have littles obsess over things like nursing styles or times, and nap times and…

My kids never took naps. They just didn’t. I remembered being a little kid who didn’t take naps, and rolled with it. (The up side is that until they were teens they slept 12 hours a night. That was nice.) As for nursing, second son weaned himself at 6 months. Since mom said I did the same, again, I rolled with it, into bottle with supplementation. Structured days? What’s that, when mom is an ADD writer?

They seem to have turned out all right. In fact, their failings are failings that I’m discovering more and more are hereditary. And by that I don’t mean just me, but as dad talks more about his brothers and sister as he gets older, I find their failings are things that have been going on for generations.

I don’t think any of you out there are evil or disconnected from reality enough to Clancy your children, but I read you worrying about it, and trying to “improve” your parenting styles to perfection and your kids into perfect and smart and good.

Look, our job IS to civilize them. This is hard work and can’t be done overnight. Yes, they will still sneak cat kibble after you tell them not to eat it. Yes, there will be battles campaigns wars fought over comic books and favorite toys. No, you can’t improve everything at once. Pick your battles. Work on what bothers you most.

Will your child grow up to be a psychopath? You’re in no position to know. Not when they’re under two. If they are, you will just have to try to make them the kind of psychopath who is a top surgeon and not the kind that boils the neighbors in a bag. (Yeah, hurting animal is a line you just do not allow them to cross.)

You just do the best you can, don’t make charts, and let the kid grow and develop, while curbing the worst stuff, one trait at a time.

And remember both the kids and you are human, and neither of you is going to be perfect, ever. Good-enough is a good goal. Also, you don’t own your kids, anymore than your ancestors own you, so don’t try to make them things that you can create, remove and mold.

Reading too many mommy books and blogs might give you the impression it’s all in your control and you’re a bad mother if you don’t control it. If you must read that cr*p, accept you’re a bad mother and roll with it. You come from a long, long line of bad mothers and here you are. And here your granddaughters and greatgranddaughters will be. Being bad along with you. And yet, raising kids who are, by and large, functioning human beings and no worse than the run of humanity will be.

Remember that the thing about eating from the tree of knowledge and being like gods was a LIE. You can eat from the tree of knowledge, but you’ll remain yourself, just a more panicked and neurotic yourself.

Don’t obsess. Don’t make it all about you and a reflection on you. Concentrate on making them functioning adults rather than perfect exhibits of your skill as a perfect mother.

And hey, as someone who was a mother of small children, and who did this, but it turns out not nearly enough?

ENJOY them while they’re little. Yes, it’s insane hard work. And yes, you pray — PRAY — with tears in your eyes for just a meal you can eat without getting up to feed/clean/fetch every two minutes, and for a potty break in which you’re allowed to sit there ALONE.

But it’s also the most wonderful thing in the world. The kids are, truly, innocent, in the sense that even when they do evil it’s because they don’t know they’re doing evil. And they’re enthusiastic. And everything is new and wonderful to them. You can show them MARVELS by lighting up a Christmas tree or making a braid with ribbon.

One of my favorite memories is of 3 year old (and yes, out of carseat, because my kids were ginormous, but in booster) younger son falling asleep against me in the car after a day at the amusement park. If I close my eyes, I can still feel his little, heavy head, just slightly sweaty, leaning against my arm. Others: reading to them with both of them on my bed. Building toy railroads with younger son. Going for walks with older son. Drawing with them, with everyone on the floor drawing on giant newsprint-sheets. Just… being with them.

It’s the greatest time ever, and you should enjoy it. Unless the house is actively unhygienic, let it go. No one will care if there was dust on the shelves 20 years from now. Unless you’re driven by internal insanity or desperate need, let work go too. Just for a few years. The yard? Bah. Let things grow. You can always uproot them later.

Just enjoy your babies while they’re babies. And later when they’re kids, and teens, etc.

And remember neither you nor them will ever be perfect. Just human beings like others. Only these ones are yours, and you’ll love them unconditionally. Until the end of time.

137 thoughts on “The Tree of Knowledge”

  1. On a lighter note, I am reminded of the kindergartner tribe from the late 90s cartoon, “Recess”. Literally they were depicted as savages with fur pants, face paints, spears, feathers….

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  2. Raising Perfect Children???

    Not possible when “you” are a Not Perfect person (and it’s impossible to make yourself perfect).

    But what do I know. I don’t have children. [Crazy Grin]

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        1. Getting into Theology here (which Sarah doesn’t like).

          There is a strong belief among Catholics (and maybe the Greek Orthodox Church) that Jesus was the only child of Mary.

          IE: Any brothers or sisters of Jesus were from Joseph’s earlier marriage.

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            2. One notes we are told that his “brothers” rebuked him. That was unspeakable insolence in a younger brother. Only an older brother can rebuke a younger brother.

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          2. “Any brothers or sisters of Jesus were from Joseph’s earlier marriage”.

            Or else they were cousins; the Greek word translated as “brothers” was often applied to any relative, not just siblings.

            I firmly believe that the proliferation of mommy blogs and parenting “experts” is one big reason birthrates are dropping like a rock. When you have it pounded into your head that being a parent is “the hardest job in the world”, rather than a normal part of life, and that any mistake will ruin your kid for life or turn them into a psychopath or a drug addict or whatever, is it any wonder young people shy away from it?

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            1. I also see it as part of the normalization of having only one or two children. With one, a mother may end up placing all her hopes… and all her fears… on one poor hostage to fortune.

              By the time they have three or five, it’s pretty clear that the kids are pretty resilient, it’s going to be okay, and they’ll figure it out.

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              1. It’s much easier to convince one-child (or, better, childless) wymyn that children are interchangeable plastic blanks to be molded to the New Soviet–oops!–I mean the Democratic Socialist Ideal. Any Problematic Behavior is Mom’s fault for not letting her kid be raised by Experts.

                Nobody with two or more kids and half a brain would buy it.

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            2. I’ve had a priest note that we do not, in fact, know that Peter and Andrew were brothers under the same rule. John and James, yes, because we are told they are the son of Zebedee.

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              1. The difficult bit was that even nephews and uncles and cousins could be adelphoi in the LXX Greek of the OT Bible. (Abraham and Lot were adelphoi, for instance.) Generally it meant that you shared a common ancestor within a few generations, but adopted children also counted. And posthumous children from Levitical marriage.

                In many Middle Eastern countries, people still use loose terms like “brother” for all sorts of relatives, even if they can also recite the exact genealogy they share.

                Anybody more remotely related was a syngenes, kinsman.

                Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History has some info about Jesus’ surviving kin from the House of David, and how they had no end of fun surviving later Roman imperial interest in the royal blood of normal farmers.

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                  1. I’ll butt in and suggest Deuteronomy 25:5 (cited by the Sadducees in Matthew 22:24, Mark 12:19, and Luke 20:28): “…Master, Moses wrote unto us, If any man’s brother die, having a wife, and he die without children, that his brother should take his wife, and raise up seed unto his brother.”

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              1. You forgot the sarcasm tag. Implied.

                Having a child did not stop us. We just took him with us. First camping trip was to take him to see grandma and grandpa at Miller Lake (off hwy 97). That is his great-grands. Also to let them know another great-grand (little sister’s oldest) had been born on their anniversary. Son was 6 weeks old.

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                1. Nah, I’m pointing to the things literally taught in school since the late ’80s.

                  Children Will Ruin Your Life.

                  Your life is literally over.

                  Getting pregnant is seriously worse than killing someone as far as your future life options go.

                  And then the parents wonder “wow, why don’t I have any grandkids?”

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                  1. Thinking back over when I was in school (yes, yes, dodging pterodactyls on the way to school every morning, etc. – truthfully from when I started kindergarten in 1967 to graduation from HS and starting college in 1980) compared to what I see now, admittedly from something of a distance, the societal female message seems to have moved from basically “don’t have kids while you are in high school” to “don’t have kids yet, don’t be in a hurry” with a lot of it out on the fat tail end of “don’t have kids at all” and the later two especially get reinforced across young ladies in their prime fertility years.

                    Then as the options dwindles towards only-technically-assisted, that messaging fails for some fraction and there’s a mad scramble for an acceptable gamete donor and a good MD to do the tech assist in the glassware.

                    Left as an exercise for the reader is to what degree, by whom, and to what end that messaging was shifted, because it didn’t shift itself.

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      3. I will note, for the record, God Himself did not raise perfect children, otherwise they wouldn’t have had to get evicted from the garden.

        In a way, the real fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil seems to be thinking we can beat God as His Own job.

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  3. One of the things that shocked me most deeply, when I first became a mother, was how willing I became–in the span between epidural and “Here’s your little man, he weighs 9 pounds six ounces”–not just willing but EAGER to end anyone or anything, with glee in my heart, if they or it threatened my son. Aside from the occasional slammed cabinet door, I’m not a violent person, but I caught myself actually hissing at a lady one day because her bratty kid was getting too close to my son’s stroller. The thought of harming either one of my own kids was and is one of hell’s own darkest nightmares.

    None of this qualifies me for Mother of the Year, however slim that year’s pickings. To me, it’s sort of the baseline for being a parent at all. I grew up in a home where nobody gave a damn whether I was secure or safe in any sense, and so I resolved that my kids would always know someone was on the wall for them. That’s probably the mindset of 75-80% of moms the world over.

    And personally, I’d fry Lindsay Clancy in duck fat and serve her to sharks. NGRI, my perky white butt.

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      1. Absolutely! I could never imagine wanting to kill either of my sons when they were small. Not even my oldest who started the Terrible Twos at 18 months, and, who, until very recently, was still in them. He’s 32.

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    2. My mother made an amazing embroidered blanket for my first born. She brought it to the hospital for me to take him home in. ( back when you were still encouraged to wrap babies in blankets and carry them in your arms on the way home from the hospital.)

      The next day, wrapping him up for the trip home, I found a stick pin she had accidently left behind in the blanket. I immediately became enraged, convinced she had done it on purpose, if she had been in the room I am sure I would have attacked her.

      Luckily, I was in the room alone waiting for hubby to come get us and I was able to come to my senses and realize that I was being ridiculous.

      In that minute or two I understood the terms Mama Bear, Bezerker, and crimes of passion all at once.

      But harm my own child. No. Not even when I was raising 4 teenagers in the house at the same time.

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      1. My mother is a saint. She was going through early menopause (hysterectomy) as I was hitting the “critical” teenage hormones. Surprised we did not kill each other. A lot of yelling. Actually I do know why we survived. I got shipped off to the aunt who had horses, for the summer. Behave, work, and I, the horse crazed teen, got to work with the horses. I earned my cowboy hat, boots, and hunting knife (still have the last, somewhere, the rest got worn out).

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  4. My Dad beat the devil/psychopath out of my siblings and I.  It was always worse if we made Mom upset.  It was also the 1960s so neighbors, church groups, and especially relatives were there to support her as well. America has gone downhill quite a bit since then.

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    1. I should point out my Dad used a folded belt on or posteriors after a short “pep talk” on avoiding future sessions, left no marks, and seldom had to punish us more than once for the same offense (like not cleaning up toys, talking back, or similar hooliganisms)… He passed away in 2011, Mom in 2024, and I am still afraid of getting into trouble.

      Some would claim I was “psychologically scarred”; but I don’t know what the inside of a jail smells like.

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      1. No belt. Wooden spoon on occasion, but mostly hand. Also, no bruising or marks. Which is amazing given I bruise really easy. Administered by mom. I too do not know what the inside of a jail smells like. Cousins, in a way had it worse, parents used switches. Guess who had to go get the fresh switch …

        Have had fingerprints taken. Required for federal employment (USFS, seasonal ’75 – ’78), and more recently for the CCL.

        Son? We never raised a hand to him. Also did not believe in timeouts. Timeouts punished us too. But we did believe in consequences. To the point where son was overheard telling friends to not disbelieve when dad or I outlined the rules and consequences. His response ending was “Don’t. Just Don’t.”

        As far as safety issues, we just prevented them. Yes, we were the parents who put their toddler on a leash. OTOH we were visiting Yellowstone, and other areas with dangerous to toddlers areas and wildlife.

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  5. I had the considerable advantage when I became a parent of having been the oldest of four (with the youngest being born when I was nearly 12). of being about the only teenage girl in the neighborhood (so had a lock on babysitting gigs), of being a summer camp counselor, and of being drafted repeatedly as a vacation bible teacher for the second and third-grade set … so I had lots of experience in child-wrangling when I had the one. No worries – I had already coped with a baby, with toddlers and school age.

    The other thing about it all – there were so many people telling me ‘enjoy your daughter when she is little!’ but I enjoyed her presence at every age, for a different reason at every age.

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  6. I just had to say, having recently having to see a surgeon who personally I abhor, I had to do a double take on the psychopath comment regarding surgeons. I’ve seen several variations on Personality Disorders in the stereotypical Surgeon from narcissistic to sociopathic but never considered psychopath. You have me reconsidering that oversight. ;-)

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      1. Sarah, what’s the psychology behind being willing and able to slice someone open?

        I think Conan Doyle knew something about that when he had Holmes tell Watson:

        “When a doctor turns to crime, he is the worst of criminals. He has knowledge, and he has nerve.”

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          1. I will point out that when we were out for an evening walk, while he was in medschool, we were threatened by a “homeless” who kept following us real close, muttering threats, and showing us a snake he was carrying that he said was poisonous (eh) and would kill us.
            Older son kept tensing. Finally he turned around, took his pocket knife out, and said, in the most matter of fact manner “Look, I can just remove your spleen. I can do it in two minutes. Done it dozens of times. You’ll be dead before emergency services can get to you. It’s easy, and I don’t mind. As I said, I’ve done it so much.”
            The guy backed off and went the other way. Nothing son said was a lie. He merely omitted the spleens he’d removed were from cadavers.

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      3. There was a fascinating article some years back about a neuroscientist studying psychopathic brain structures—which do, in fact, show up on an MRI. And his own brain structures showed up with psychopathy.

        Married, with a family, and all. And the more he looked at it, the more he realized that it was true—and his family knew it, too. (Including an anecdote from his brother that involved a dangerous cave.) It was particularly interesting when he realized that his mother not only knew, she averted the criminal expression by basically keeping him too busy to get into evil. (“Idle hands are the devil’s plaything,” after all.)

        The overall implied conclusion is that evil psychopathy is a combination of several factors, always including trauma, but also including no one to put up guardrails.

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    2. I had to have surgery at six weeks. My dad would re-tell the story of the surgeon coming up to him and momma and saying “If he comes out of the anesthesia, he should be fine” (or words to that effect) then leaving. This did not make a good impression on my father. (The story never included my mother restraining my six foot-3 inch 200+ pound, 29 year-old father so I can only assume some higher power was involved in the surgeon remaining in non-patient status.) So, yes, lack of empathy and surgeons do seem to go together.

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      1. When they took off my tonsils without anesthesia (Oh, they gave it to me, but they didn’t have time for it to take hold) mom heard me scream from the waiting room and at five foot three, maybe all of 140lbs, she powered through the corridors and it took six orderlies to prevent her breaking into the operating room.
        … our relationship was… complicated, but mom was a grand lady in many ways. A fighting woman.

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      1. If you’ve got it, flaunt it.

        If you’ve got it, flout it.

        If you’ve got it, flounce it.

        Those sentences conjure up very different (and amusing!) mental images.

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  8. I will be honest and say I am very glad I am in Essex County NOT Plymouth. Ms. Clancy’s trial was a hellscape to be part of and I’m not sure any of the Jurors (including our holdout) acquitted themselves according to the law (flawed as Massachusetts Insanity rules are) and considered ONLY the evidence presented as they should. It didn’t help that the Plymouth DA office is a hive of incompetence (several other murder trials have had severe issues in the last few years in the Plymouth district). The State has not yet stated whether they will retry this. Honestly, I fear there is NO county in Massachusetts where you will find 12 (+2-3 alternate) Jurors who have not been inundated with material that would be prejudicial to the case unless they were in a coma for most of August and September or are members of cloistered orders or are hermits. Add to this the disgraceful behavior of the press (particularly NBC 10 in doxxing the holdout) and we have the Massachusetts legal and court systems at their worst.

    I must say our Hostess’s theory of Ms Clancy’s motivation seems possible. Ms Clancy may have found a boisterous 3 year old boy a handful and with an 8 month old brother behind him and being severely depressed seen this as a route out. That said, I don’t believe her behavior meets even the lenient Massachusetts standard for the insanity defense. The problem seems to have been that the prosecution muffed their presentation and even more deeply muffed the jury selection (although Mass law is very odd on voir dire and the causes for exclusion are very limited, although if some of the 11 had made clear their positions in the surveys they would seem to have been excludable). Incompetent, politically inbred prosecutors failed to make the case, perhaps in an attempt to be forgiving. Unfortunately for me this forgivness reads like the old joke about the young man who having killed his parents asked for mercy as he was an orphan and the prosecutors fell for it.

    In any sane state this would be a chance for the legislators to step in and rectify the Massachusetts Insanity defense (defined almost solely by 2 major cases and Judicial boards having written vague guidelines for judges writing their jury directions in insanity cases). But here in Massachusetts, I suspect a large portion of the House and General Court (our senate like body) were wearing pink during the trial. So this stupidity will continue. I’m sorry to be a downer but I’ve been a Massachusetts resident for 42 years and this kind of nonsense only seems to increase with time.

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      2. With StarLink even more rare to find anyone with out internet.

        Possible. There are deep hollers, and western canyons, where even StarLink will not work.

        Then there is a matter of cost, which not everyone can afford regardless of the internet options.

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          1. I was about a day and a half ahead, only saw folks responding to snippets of Very Obvious Bait… and then suddenly people who I previously respected as not abjectly evil morons were screaming to remove my rights.

            I thought the joke about “making up to your wife for what you did in her dreams last night” was bad, and here we have theoretical functional adults wanting me to make up for what they heard someone else in an entirely different place did.

            Even when it was really obvious bait.

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          2. I saw a lot of discussion in the week or so before you posted anything about the case. It was impossible to get away from.

            Conversely, the only “Repeal the 19th” talk I saw was brief, scattershot, and in response to some appallingly bad Clancy takes. No think pieces, no threads. The only account I saw bring it up more than once or twice was a woman.

            I won’t speculate whose bubble is more representative. (Mine’s pretty narrow, and I like it that way.) But you came in late on a story that some people were getting absolutely flooded with, which might explain why it felt out of nowhere.

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              1. Probably a good time to be offline. It’s a depressing story, and the combination of people discovering it for the first time and bad takes kept it going for a long time.

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    1. Critical care nurses.

      Also pediatric intensive care nurses.

      Very dark sense of humor.

      I spent way too much time around them when my kids were little.

      Enough time that I sort of picked up that way of coping with stress.

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      1. I think it starts in pre-med, actually.

        My eldest had friends who were pre-med in college. She’d been out with them (a movie, IIRC, and gabbing in the food court). I picked her up from that – I wasn’t even a half mile down the road when she stated out loud that one of them had given her gonorrhea. Yes, almost went over the median…

        Little joke plushies that were labeled with various sexually-transmitted diseases.

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  10. I’m reminded of an article I read in Slate a couple of decades ago. The author had used family members for a project that needed sample brain scans, and he realized one of the scans looked like the scan you would get from a psychopath.

    Then he realized it was the scan of his own brain…

    He asked his family members if he was really a psychopath, and his brother promptly responded with a, “You remember that time when we…” story. 😅

    On another note, the only people whose theories I won’t at least listen to for the Clancy case are the ones so desperate to absolve her that they insist her husband, Patrick, did it and framed her. Given the evidence that he was away from the home when it happened, coupled with the Defense’s own admission that she did it, I find these sorts of people abhorrent.

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    1. The problem with parenting is that there are approximately 7 million ways that you can screw up your children for life, and 0 ways that you can do it to guarantee a good outcome. Ultimately, you just have to do your best, pray, and hope that somehow it all turns out okay.

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      1. It all boils down to God gave us all agency, and as agents to our own will, our kids, and ourselves will not allow someone to choose “the best path” every time. I’m actually thankful that my kids have such strong wills, it keeps me humble. But I admit, it also makes things very hard at time. Then again, I’m also battling my parents agency at the moment, so it goes all ways :-).

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      2. It all boils down to God gave us all agency, and as agents to our own will, our kids, and ourselves will not allow someone to choose “the best path” every time. I’m actually thankful that my kids have such strong wills, it keeps me humble. But I admit, it also makes things very hard at time. Then again, I’m also battling my parents agency at the moment, so it goes all ways :-).

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  13. My doctor’s office gave out a book during my second pregnancy that literally advised that for the birth of a second child, the first child might get jealous of all the gifts and attention, so have a stash of presents hidden away so that when grandma or neighbor brings over a cute outfit or toy, you can grab a present for older child too! Jealousy averted!

    Another lovely piece of advice in the same book was, “Don’t use big words around your kids, they won’t understand them. Keep it simple.” This was implying the use of simple vocabulary even when speaking to adults when children are near. I remembered that advice (mostly to laugh at it) a few years later when my older boy, then about three, came up to me with a large-ish rice bag (fabric one for a heat pack) and told me “Look, Mommy! I stabilized this on one finger!”

    Those two pieces of advice, if taken seriously (and I know people who have) would create entitled, yet simplistic thinkers who are now in or soon will be the young adults entering the work force, college, etc.

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  14. Undergrad Psych major; originally wanted Chem, but bad math grade (which made for fun late Junior year, when got Grad Check and Registrar said ‘You really ought to be taking Chemistry right about now … ” Had to go see both Chem Dept Chair and Psych Chair to change majors.)

    True for me, and commonly mentioned among my group – we picked Psych because we were worried about our own mental health.

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  15. ”Any number of psychopaths are decent, productive members of society.”

    CEOs. Appreciable fraction. Per the clanker underneath the DuckDuckGo search engine:

    ”Research indicates that approximately 3.9% of CEOs may exhibit psychopathic traits, which include charm, manipulation, and a lack of empathy. While not all CEOs are psychopaths, those with such tendencies are often more likely to ascend to leadership roles due to their skills in impression management.”

    I don’t see any studies where they looked at Sales.

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        1. And to head off any commie mommies from as a result fetching the bands, it also makes the kid a perfect fit for either the Faculty Oversight Board on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion or the Arrow of History Committee on State Security, so in any event, the kid has a bright, gainfully employed future.

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    3. ISTR a factoid from some pop-psych book — maybe Cleckley’s Mask of Sanity — that psychopathy is a “normal variation” appearing in about 1-4% of the general pop. DuckDuckClank agrees — even after I call it out and try to steer it away from being so buttkissily agreeable.

      @junior (posted Sept 22 at 2:52pm), The clanker and I “discussed” James Fallon, who included his own fMRI brain scan among scans from “normies” and those already diagnosed as psychopathic. He noted his own brain looked like it had a “family resemblance” to the psychopaths’. He also found that he had the MAOA-L allele (aka “the Warrior Gene”) that frequently appears in criminals. He attributed his lack of criminality to a lack of adverse childhood experiences (like abusive or neglectful caregivers), and speculated that some brains are congenitally “more vulnerable to bad parenting.” (My words, not his.)

      Judging from the salescritters I’ve met — especially the high-end, Big Ticket types — I’d be amazed if only 4% were psychos sired and schooled. Same for police officers and politicians. And there was one doctor I knew for a while, who ended up in prison for driving cross country to murder his ex-wife and (IIRC) her new man. >shudder<

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  16. After one particularly egregious incident, my brother dragged his son to the police station and sat him down to explain consequences. Had the kid absolutely convinced he was going to jail. He never did that specific offense again.

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  17. There’s a lady comedian named Jen Fulwiler who makes a big point about embracing the chaos being mandatory to have a big family. You have to accept that you cannot control everything.

    Guess what, society wants you to control everything. They throw abject fits when the toddler is loud, the baby cries, the teen acts like they don’t have perfect emotional control to deal with an adult who is not behaving well. It’s so standard that when it doesn’t happen, you’re left feeling weirdly off balance.

    I was actually at the Marine museum today (awesome, go, 100/10) with another more-than-2.4-children family, and when the kids were being kids and decided to thunder up the crow’s nest, we had a couple of old Marines bellow “SLOW DOWN“. (Really well, too) Then came to talk to us parents… to explain that with the rain and all they were focusing extra hard on not running in the big central area that’s polished glass-smooth, a little girl broke her nose last week.

    Not threats of being removed.

    Not scolding or “you are horrible parents” type nonsense.

    Just guys who’d dealt with (and been) the 19 year old version of our little hooligans, which is why the place is designed to actually work with kids and dumb teens and guys who were teens and have temporarily forgotten they’re quite a bit older.

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    1. There’s a pass/fail gate test for USMC Format Vocal Projection for Drill Instructors, where prospective DIs have to project the requisite drill commands loudly and distinctly enough for the grading instructor, standing waaaay over there at the distance detailed in the training manual, to clearly hear and distinguish that required list of commands. And they have to learn how to do so not by simple volume, as that will blow out their voice right quick and basic is still 13 weeks, but by proper use of their issue equipment. This is where they learn the distinctive USMC Drill and Cadence Voice thing that can still clench my stomach lo these many years after my last metal trash can wake up.

      So, not surprising the docents still have such on tap.

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      2. Got a little training in that courtesy of USAF. Was ‘Dorm Chief’ in Basic (Lackland, San Antonio), ‘Marching (yellow) Rope’ in Tech school (Keesler, Biloxi) – both positions got me off to the side of the formation, and I got to move up front to salute the really bored 2LT on the reviewing stand as we came out of class around noon. (And someone would carry my books for that little segment, which was cool.)

        Our Drum and Bugle Corps used to give us a bit of the George of the Jungle theme to march to. No vine-swinging calls, though.

        I must have been OK – I saw others relieved for ineffectiveness, though not many, and my flight/mass never got lost or scattered like sheep. But I don’t have a deep voice, so clear and audible, never ‘impressive’.

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      3. Brother is a Marine; I was Navy. But we grew up on a farm; learning how to ‘project’ out across the fields is also a thing that must use similar technique, as we both had it before any official military training.

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        1. There are a few different techniques for healthy vocal projection of speech, much as there are a few different ones for singing.

          It is important to remember that babies can use their vocal apparatus for hours, at concert hall volume, without much effort.

          One common trick is to make a baby noise, at which point your body may start to remember the old days.

          Anyway, the interesting bit about drill sergeant and farm techniques is that they work in open air, whereas actors and singers usually are working with the acoustics of walls, roofs, and floors.

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    2. OMG the “indulgent” parents.

      True story. One of my son’s baseball games. One of the boy’s had his entire family there (for a change). Parents were letting the younger children climb the chain link fence. I said something. Got told to mind my own business. Looked right at the parent and said “This type of fence is why the coach is blind in one eye. He was 4 when it happened.” Then walked away. Funny how the kids were told to get off the fence all of a sudden.

      FWIW, yes hubby is blind in one eye due to climbing a chain link fence when he was 4. These days medical has advanced enough that his sight could have been saved. It tore the cornea and iris, but did not affect the back of the eye. 70+ years ago, OTOH, no. Today he could have the two fixed to avoid the problems he has with bright lights. But the fear of sympathetic eye reaction of his good eye, no matter how remote, is too high of a risk.

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  19. Lindsay Clancy eh? [spit] Yes, nobody is ever responsible for anything.

    I’ll see your post-partum deprtession (is it still post-partum when the kid is three years old?) and raise you “cannabis induced psychosis.”

    “A Toronto man who argued he was suffering from cannabis-induced psychosis when he choked a seven-year-old girl three years ago while naked has been acquitted of assault charges.

    Ahmed Baig pleaded not guilty in the Ontario Court of Justice to assault causing bodily harm and assault by choking for the Aug. 2, 2023, attack in which he left his home wearing only a towel after vaping cannabis. His towel eventually fell off, and Baig started chasing a family he encountered in their driveway.

    “He ran into the driveway and picked up a seven-year-old girl. He threw her to the ground, punched her and strangled her. He then abruptly left the driveway, and a short time later was arrested by police. At the time of arrest, he wore only a T-shirt,” Justice Mara Greene wrote in a recent decision.”

    So yes, bro is FREE and NOT GUILTY despite having really done that and been caught stone cold. Oh and he smoked up voluntarily, so it isn’t a poisoning.

    Now, if I go drinking, get raging sh1t-faced drunk and beat the snot out of some woman in the street, wake up the next day and remember nothing… am I guilty? Oh yeah. I’m so very guilty.

    But if I smoke a ton of weed, green out, beat up a kid and wake up the next day remembering nothing… that’s “cannabis induced psychosis” and I’m INNOCENT!!!

    But it gets even better, because if the kid’s dad had laid Mr. NoPants out with a hearty kick to the [name of body part here] and done the poor lad an injury while he was in the middle of choking the daughter, the cops would have arrested… the dad. No cannabis induced psychosis for the dad, that guy threw hands against an innocent member of [protected group name here].

    Welcome to the Demented Dominion, my friends. This is what we put up with here.

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    1. I have said for years that if you drink alcohol voluntarily, you should be legally responsible for the actions you took while drunk. (If your drink, which you thought was non-alcoholic, was spiked without your knowledge, then and only then should you not be held responsible for what you did while drunk). And the same should apply to voluntarily taking any other mind-altering substance that you knew to be mind-altering before you took it.

      Note that I apply that both to things like drunk driving, and also to beer goggles. Get drunk and sleep with someone you wouldn’t have slept with if you were sober? That’s only r__e if your drink was spiked. If you knew you were drinking alcohol, you don’t get to duck the consequences of the choices you made while impaired. (I apply that to both men and women equally, too).

      (Word censored because I suspect WordPress would throw the comment in mod jail otherwise).

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      1. I should also note that I don’t condone people taking advantage of a drunk person. “Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker” is the slogan of a cad, a rake, a user. Someone who sees other people not as people to be respected, but as tools to be used for his (or her) own pleasure, indifferent to how they will feel about it afterwards. It’s morally wrong.

        BUT… trying to make that illegal runs into all kinds of inconsistencies, and denies the agency of the person who voluntarily drank herself (or himself) into impairment. I’m against that, too. Again, the only way you should be legally held not responsible for your actions is if you had no knowledge that you were drinking alcohol. (Which is entirely possible, I’m told: for example, apparently orange juice can entirely hide the flavor of the vodka it’s spiked with. I have no personal knowledge, as I have no interest at all in vodka. A decent glass of wine with a meal, sure. Anything stronger? No thanks, I do not intend ever to get drunk. I prefer to be in control of my own actions, thankyouverymuch).

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        1. I am one who remembers everything when I’ve had too much to drink. Happened twice. First time I was not drinking. I got *dizzy and left the party. I was sick for the entire weekend. Sick, sick, not just hangover headache.

          Second time. I got drunk on one wine flip (half glass of wine and 7-up/sprite). I was sick for three days.

          I can (could, alcohol is absolutely **not happening ever again with mechanical valve) now drink a glass of wine or margarita if eating a solid meal (steak dinner, Mexican dinner, Thanksgiving, etc.) But I nurse it the entire meal, if not the entire night.

          (*) Didn’t then. But I suspect shenanigans and less than honor intentions. Too bad I am one to realize I needed to leave.

          (**) Technically could still. Just do not care that much for alcohol so why bother?

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          1. I decided to give up alcohol when I went on warfarin. (It’s possible to dose around alcohol, but I decided that one less confusing factor was a benefit.) Considering my family (mostly associated with Mom’s side) has a history of addictive behaviors, “zero” was a lot easier to deal with than “a little”. Never needed AA, but… OTOH, Overeaters Anonymous might be the end-stage 12 step group. Going to an AA meeting when OA wasn’t available was a challenge. Doughnuts. Yikes!

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            1. Yes, currently the warfarin is the trigger for “no, just no”, now. But really 100% gave it up when the AFIB started, even before put on Eliquis.

              I really never drank enough to make a difference anyway. Except for dinners out? I tend to “lose” the wine glass after a few sips.

              College? A lot of drunk plants. Beer? Do not like it. Never have.

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              1. Swearing off American (mainstream, circa 2001) beer was easy after three trips to Deepest Bavaria. “Making love in a canoe.” describes the homecoming tipple.

                Had a bit of wine (Trader Joe’s), from a couple of cases I bought in Cali when we moved in 2003. By 2012 it was almost gone, so $SPOUSE and I both decided to quit. [She never had addiction issues…]

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        2. I’ve often thought that a big part of what’s going on with all of this “campus rape culture” and false accusations stuff is the fact that our culture is no longer willing to recognize cads and rakes for what they are. Young people are taught that casual sex is fun, that women want it just as much as men do, and that as long as its all between consenting adults, everything should be just dandy.

          So when young women get picked up by a guy who just wants sex, and they feel bad when he never calls them back, they don’t have the words to explain what happened. They should have enjoyed this, right? And they start thinking, If all sex between consenting adults is good, but what happened to me was not good, then I must not have consented. It must have been rape!

          Reading about some (not all, I should emphasize, but definitely some) of these he-said-she-said incidents, it becomes clear that “he” was a user, but not a rapist. And while some of the false accusations are clearly “she” trying to get back at him using the legal system, many of them seem like she doesn’t have a word other than “rape” to explain why what happened to her was bad.

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          1. There’s also a cultural mismatch issue– most cultures have a way to deal with the, ah, assumptions going into an interaction. (I think the most common recent phrasing was rape via false pretenses– came up with how King Arthur was conceived.)

            Without assuming any kind of bad will, here’s two major failure states:

            There are a lot of folks who assume if they didn’t agree to it, explicitly, in writing, then they didn’t agree to it.

            There are a lot of folks who assume that whatever they want is actually the universal baseline norm and anyone who wants something different should be upfront about this major deviation.

            Once you bring in bad will, the most obvious failure state is “I will say, do, and imply anything that will get me what I want in this moment, and any costs should rightly be borne by someone who is Not Me.”

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        3. From personal college experience I can testify that vodka improves the flavor of Gatorade. We called the result, “Green Slime.” (We also only did it once, with 1 Oz. Bottle of vodka, so we were very restrained college students).

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  22. Just went to the mordor west library to pick up the last repairman jack novel I have left to read, and noticed a relevant book on display.

    “There are MOMS way worse than you”. The cover is a mom Giraffe birthing a baby.

    So perhaps this is an idea that has been lurking for a while, since it does take time to

    Write a book.

    Interest a publisher.

    Publish,

    Distribute to library,
    and it is copyrighted 2022.

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  24. What disturbs me about the ‘feminist’ reaction is the emphasis on empowering. Restoring power where it justly belongs is good. Granting power for its own sake, without responsibility and without regard for those upon whom the power is exercised is manifestly evil. When those who suffer the exercise of power are an inconvenience and their suffering is treated as a positive good, you’ve raised Power to a virtue in and of itself, rather than a thing to be directed to moral purpose.

    This is diabolical. That is not an exaggeration. It is an exultation of evil, by people who can, by their own choices, no longer tell obvious good from obvious evil.

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    2. And that diabolical aspect is why the response of stripping power from those with no connection other than being female is so evil.

      And far more worrisome, since the ‘feminist’ response was much smaller than even the early round of mobs for BLM– but the “strip basic adult human rights from women” reaction was picked up by main stream speakers.

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      1. Communists love collective punishment.

        That whole “repeal the 19th” thing being the wide response, and “We need to shut down white women until we know what going on” being the response to the other suddenly-widely-reported murders of children by their own mothers makes me think the commies actually won the culture wars.

        And if they haven’t won yet, the call for collective punishment of all women because of the misdeeds of a few signals that the alleged normal people are perfectly willing to surrender the culture war to the commies.

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        1. I know there’s a strong element of psy-op to it getting traction at all.

          That doesn’t mean I’m going to forget about who latched on to that nonsense and turned their dang brains off.

          It was “interesting” how the complementary crime– “man kills wife, children, and self” — was unobjectionable, going off of the lack of reaction when a quick search found a handful had happened during the trial.

          Not, ‘in the last few years’.

          Not, ‘one case this year.’

          The main reason that men killing their kids don’t also kill their wives in the deal is because the wife is not physically available, being separated or divorced; that situation is common enough that “missing, last seen with non-custodial parent” triggers all kinds of energy to find the kids while they still have a pulse.

          But the folks who are supposedly so outraged about the horror of this case, looking at others?

          Crickets. Or reaching for ‘but nobody defended the murderer.’

          (Which I could also disprove, via finding a case where the murderer’s body wasn’t quickly found with that of his victims. Folks like completed stories, and they like stories with hope; lacking an ending, of course they’ll hope for something less horrific.)

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          1. You’re assuming that similar events merit similar reactions. Humans aren’t wired that way. We allocate our attention based on heuristics (which are exploited by news outlets and amplified by social media algorithms), not by some absolute ranking of importance.

            The lack of discussion about comparable cases doesn’t mean much one way or the other. Clancy was the case that reached critical mass. (And, yes, the wave of true crime TikTok accounts pushing conspiracy theories was absolutely fuel for the fire.)

            You can also think of it in terms of communication costs. If you have some point you want to make about, say, the justice system, which case should you use: the one that’s all over the news or the obscure one you’re going to have to explain from scratch? The former is quicker, clearer, and more likely to spark discussion, so it snowballs.

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            1. I am assuming no such thing; I am refuting the argument of “this crime is highly unusual, horrific, and specific to women as an entire category, which justifies stripping their rights as being fully human adults” by demonstrating that, at best, it got attention because the inverse crime is much more common.

              I did not even touch on the aspect where those preening ‘mature’ chronological adults were so lacking in basic self-examination that they could not do the most basic of emotional checks to recognize “hey, I am being manipulated; this is why I am responding more strongly to this story than to various others which are highly similar.”

              The issue is not that folks had an emotional response.

              The issue is that they allowed themselves to be controlled by it.

              The irony of that failure being exactly what they were accusing half the species of having as an inherent lack, justifying treating them as less than fully functioning human adults, is just a cherry on top.

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              2. “this crime is highly unusual, horrific, and specific to women as an entire category, which justifies stripping their rights as being fully human adults”

                This is not the argument I saw being made. The primary “Repeal the 19th” talk I saw was in response to the reaction to the Clancy trial, not the murder itself. “If women are so algorithm-fried and groupthink-oriented that they think Patrick Clancy murdered his kids, they shouldn’t be allowed to vote.”

                This is a dumb position to hold for reasons discussed here extensively, but it clearly doesn’t apply to cases where there was no such reaction.

                To the extent that “Repeal the 19th” talk touched on the case itself, it was usually in response to the feminist claim that women shouldn’t be held accountable because they’re hormonal. “If that’s the case, women shouldn’t be allowed to vote or hold office either.”

                In essence, women are either responsible adults or they aren’t. Feminists don’t get to have it both ways.

                Taking your opponent’s argument to its logical conclusion is a standard debate tactic going back to Socrates. Absent other evidence, it does not mean that the speaker actually thinks women shouldn’t vote.

                Out of the Repeal the 19th posts I saw, your argument applies to only a tiny fraction of them. So you must have seen an entirely different set of posts, because your argument doesn’t make any sense for the ones I saw.

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                1. Which takes it right back around to the post about four earlier:

                  The Tree of Knowledge

                  Out of the Repeal the 19th posts I saw, your argument applies to only a tiny fraction of them.

                  Ah, yes, I feel SO MUCH BETTER that there’s a VARIETY of arguments demanding MY rights be stripped because THEY are emotional about something the algo spoon-fed them.

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                  1. I do find it concerning that we were apparently exposed to two separate sets of arguments on the same topic. I’d expect to see the same arguments in different proportions, not distinct arguments. It makes discussion difficult if you’re not starting from the same place.

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                    1. It’s what you would expect of a psy-op pile-up, since they’re not restricted to a normal range of variations by reality — which is why my focus is on who heard the arguments, and grabbed them with both hands, then went running around finding a lighter for their hair. (A single psy-op would be indicated by identical claims showing up without a natural range of variations, in a wide range of areas– for example, the “repeal the 19th” conclusion.)

                      People who had previously been sane enough to go “hey, someone on TikTok said an inflammatory thing that was not rationally supported; I have never heard of them, they are stupid” suddenly flipped over to “someone on TikTok said an inflammatory thing that was not rationally supported, women are stupid and evil, we should punish them.”

                      Thus, as I described it on TwiX, I am alarmed that people I previously respected started spouting sharia bullshit.

                      It calls all their prior stances into question.

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  25. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » I HATE TO REVISIT  THE CLANCY THING AGAIN, BUT OTHER WOMEN ARE DRIVING THEMSELVES TRULY CRAZY IN AN

  26. The Bible says that Jesus was tempted in every way that we all are. That’s why I know for sure that He had a little brother who, er, “pestered” Him.

    🤔

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  27. That was spectacularly intelligent. I told my daughter when she had her first child enjoy them. She was the perfect type to obsess over them hitting every milestone. And here I see I’m not the first to say this. But this is a trap that many good parents fall into. Your children can be fun. And all kids even in the same family are different. Obviously there are family traits, but they aren’t cookies either.

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    1. Mine, in their thirties, still surprise me. (And often delight me.) The one thing I can say is that none of the things I TRIED to instill (other than decent humanity) seemed to take. However the minor, incidental things we did, seem to have hit like an anvil for good or ill.

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  28. On the subject of considering success in parenting;

    One of my favorite stories to relate on parenting is about when we were at a get-together at an ‘old fashioned’ amusement park (Knoebels, for anyone who might be familiar) and waiting in line to ride one of the roller coasters again. David, my eldest, turns to me and says

    ‘Dad, we really need to get going after this one, because I have to work tomorrow!’

    I was sort of flabbergasted; I had to leave earlier for work, but my INTERNAL immediate response was [But I wanna ride some MORE!!], with the immediate follow on of {OHMIGhOd, I’ve raised a responsible adult!!!}. So, of course, I agreed that he was absolutely right, and we would start getting everything together to head home. And we did.

    One of my memories that always brings tears to my eyes; He was 17, and I couldn’t have been prouder. He has gone on to do mission trips, and cares for the elderly in a nursing home. Is also a dedicated geek and gamer ( but I used to take them along to cons when his younger brother was still a toddler ) with a fannish wife, so a well rounded individual!

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  29. Late bedwetting as a sign of a monster? Oh boy.

    You know what I was told? That’s it’s a typical thing with neurodiversity, in that there are actually WIRING issues (certain sensations don’t get hooked up as early.) IOW, those earlier assertions were standard-issue “pick on the outlier” crap.

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    1. I’d guess specific flavor of “pick on the weird kid” was the ’tism angle– if there’s a high functioning autistic in a highly social group, they really do make an outstanding scapegoat for any horrific crime.

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