The (Mis)adventures of Jyl: Clear Lake City, Texas

This week, Jyl is the reason we have a disclaimer on the blog…

Welcome back, misadventures. There are places in America built around the illusion that terrible things can’t happen there. I call these places suburgatory. Neighborhoods with perfectly manicured lawns and slow-curving cul-de-sacs. Church and school parking lots filled with rows of shiny, new SUVs. Clear Lake City, outside Houston, was one of those places in 2001. Quiet in the way suburban neighborhoods often are, where suffering disappears behind closed doors because people have been trained not to inconvenience anyone else with it.

Then Andrea Yates drowned her five children in the bathtub.

The story exploded across American television with the usual breathless horror reserved for women who violate the sacred doctrine of motherhood. News anchors spoke in flattened, stunned tones. Commentators circled endlessly around the same question: how could a mother do this? America likes its monsters simple, especially female ones. It likes women either sainted or damned. Nurturing or broken. Virgin or witch. The public consumed the Yates case the way it consumes all female tragedy: as a spectacle.

Before she became one of the most infamous women in America, Andrea Yates was a nurse, a mother, and a woman suffering from severe postpartum depression and psychosis that had already led to suicide attempts, hospitalization, and half-assed psychiatric intervention. Doctors reportedly warned against additional pregnancies because of the risk of future psychotic episodes, but the couple went on to have a fifth child anyway. By then, Andrea was already spiraling into terrifying delusions centered around sin, damnation, and spiritual corruption, ideas reinforced by the extremist religious teachings influencing the family at the time. After the murders, Rusty Yates admitted he had resumed leaving Andrea alone with the children despite medical advice that she should not be left unsupervised

In other words, this was not a sudden, inexplicable break. This was years of visible psychiatric collapse unfolding in plain sight while nearly every person and societal construct surrounding her kept pushing her deeper into isolation, exhaustion, and religious fear, as if motherhood were so natural, so expected, and so divinely built into women that instinct and prayer would somehow be enough.

For over twenty years I have worked as a healthcare professional, and I am telling you right now: women are treated differently. I have watched postpartum women apologize for crying, apologize for panic attacks, apologize for exhaustion severe enough to make their hands shake. I have watched mothers describe symptoms that would trigger immediate alarm in almost any other patient population, only to be brushed aside as hormonal, overwhelmed, dramatic, or simply struggling to “adjust” to motherhood. Women are expected to absorb astonishing levels of psychological distress while continuing to function normally for everyone around them. And when they can’t, society, and sometimes their own families, turn on them with terrifying speed.

It’s important to point out that not all postpartum mental illness leads to violence. Postpartum depression is common and very treatable. Postpartum psychosis is rarer, but it is a true psychiatric emergency capable of producing hallucinations, paranoia, delusions, suicidal and homicidal ideation, and complete breaks from reality. Andrea Yates was not just tired, emotional, or failing to cope. She was profoundly mentally ill. The horror is that people saw it happening and did nothing.

American culture romanticizes maternal suffering to a degree that borders on pathological. We praise women for self-erasure and call it devotion. We expect mothers to function on no sleep, no autonomy, no support, and somehow emerge grateful for the experience. A “good mother” is still often defined by how completely she can disappear into everyone else’s needs without complaint. And if she can’t, she is seen as problematic.

That is part of what still enrages me about the Andrea Yates case. Too many people treated it like an isolated act of feminine evil instead of confronting the systems surrounding it. Religious extremism. Reproductive pressure. Inadequate medical and psychiatric care. Social isolation. A culture that glorifies childbirth while abandoning women and children immediately afterward. America loves mothers while they are pregnant. After that, they are expected to survive on endurance and guilt.

You cannot force women into motherhood while gutting maternal healthcare. You cannot demand childbirth while treating psychiatric care as optional. You cannot romanticize sacrifice and then recoil when untreated suffering turns catastrophic. The hypocrisy would almost be funny if it were not so deadly and heartbreaking.

Because the uncomfortable truth underneath the Andrea Yates story is that she was visibly ill long before anyone died. A husband, doctors, hospitals, family members, religious organizations, and social systems that all recognized, at least to some degree, that something was terribly wrong, yet the burden of surviving it still fell almost entirely on her.

Women are exhausted from living inside systems that treat maternal suffering as normal. Tired of being told that burnout is devotion and self-destruction is strength. Drained and disheartened from watching politicians scream about protecting children while voting against healthcare access, mental health funding, paid leave, childcare support, food assistance, and reproductive autonomy. This country demands extraordinary sacrifice from mothers while offering startlingly little in return beyond judgment if you’re not perfect.

Andrea Yates became one of the most hated women in America because it was easier to call her a monster rather than confront the bigger issue. If she was simply evil, then the rest of society remained innocent. But if we give any attention to the fact that she was a catastrophically ill woman unraveling inside a society that expects mothers to endure anything, then the story becomes so much darker than a true crime headline.

This does not condone what happened. It insists we look directly at what the case exposed: that women are still expected to survive impossible psychological pressure quietly, gracefully, and without inconveniencing anyone else. That has to change, because somewhere tonight, behind a closed door, another mother is probably being told what she’s experiencing is normal, to sleep when the baby sleeps, pray harder, and count her blessings.

If you or someone you know is struggling with postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, or postpartum psychosis, please reach out:

Postpartum Support International (PSI): postpartum.net

National Maternal Mental Health Hotline: 1-833-TLC-MAMA (1-833-852-6262)

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 anytime in the U.S.

Jyl Glenn is a writer, editor, formatter, anthologist, poet, and a medical-legal writer and consultant. Her lifelong love affair with horror began at a very early age when she was left unattended on the weekend Poltergeist debuted on HBO. And then she figured out she could read any horror book she liked as long as she hung out at the public library, even if the librarian deemed it not to be age appropriate. Jyl was born and raised in New York and now lives in Tulsa with her dog and kitten. She loves creepy art, dark poetry, and pink dinosaurs. When she isn’t dabbling in the macabre—she’s most likely asleep.

PLEASE NOTE: The views and opinions of the staff of Memento Mori Ink do not necessarily represent those of Memento Mori Ink or Crystal Lake Publishing. Thank you for understanding.