Blenders, Hammers, and Knives: Postpartum Intrusive Thoughts and Unthinkable Motherhood

SUMMARY

“Intrusive thoughts” are common symptoms of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders such as postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder. These thoughts can include horrific flashes of violence involving one’s baby and frequently lead to shame and fear on the mother’s part, but rarely result in real-world violence. Clinicians tend to downplay the importance of these images’ content and calm women by reminding them that they will not act on their impulses. This article leans into the dark nature of intrusive thoughts. I intersperse theoretical and ethnographic reflections with vivid fragments of narratives about intrusive thoughts collected from several years of ethnographic research conducted with postpartum women in the United States. I explore the fear, rage, and repulsion that characterize the thoughts themselves and the racism, classism, and sexism involved in clinical, institutional, and interpersonal responses to them. I suggest that dwelling on the “unthinkable” images contained within intrusive thoughts may be important for understanding and accepting the realities of mother love.

The Blender

A woman enters the kitchen warily, a three-week-old bundle in her arms. The bundle is asleep, but the woman knows that might not last. She creeps over the threshold, the linoleum cold under her bare feet. She will be fast. The cup of water is right there. She will just creep in and grab it before anything can happen. But there are so many weapons here. The blender—the baby would fit in. Just squish him in, push down the head, and he’d be just the right size. Press on and … NO. Grab the water. The water is next to the sink, which is next to the knives. His neck is so thin, so delicate, the knife would go right through his skin, like slicing a nectarine—NO. She grabs the water, dashes out, tripping and stubbing her toe. She cries out. The baby stirs but does not wake.

“Did you hear what I told you?” she is telling me. She would reach through the phone if she could, shake me, to make me understand. “I said I thought about putting my baby in the blender.”

It is Thursday afternoon, deep in winter, and I am in the middle of my weekly three-hour shift on a helpline for those struggling with postpartum mental health concerns. I know what this is. I have taken a class, done a training, attended a conference session on this topic. I need to tell her she is not a monster, that she will not blend up her baby like a nectarine smoothie.

“I heard you,” I say. “You are not going to hurt your baby.”

I explain that she is experiencing what are called “intrusive thoughts.” I explain that intrusive thoughts are different from psychotic thoughts. With psychotic thoughts, you might want to put your baby in the blender. You might think this was a logical and reasonable thing to do. Psychotic thoughts can be dangerous. With psychotic thoughts, you might do something. I do not say the words infanticide or murder. I do not say anything about what she might do. I just say “act on these thoughts” or “be a danger to your baby.” The point is her baby is safe. With intrusive thoughts, you are aware that these thoughts are weird, are bad. You are horrified at the image that pops into your head. You are horrified by these thoughts, right? By this image of the blender and your baby?

There is a long pause.

“Oh God, you must think I’m a monster.”

They are just thoughts, I tell her.

Just Thoughts

From Kleiman and Wenzel (2011, 24–25), Dropping the Baby and Other Scary Thoughts:

• What if I take this pillow and smother the baby?

• What if I press so hard on his soft spot that it crushes his skull?

• What if I take this knife and stab the baby?

• What if I get so mad I shake the baby?

• What if I throw the baby over the railing or down the stairs?

• What if I just drive my car off the bridge with the baby inside?

• I could just snap her little neck with such little effort.

• I could pull off his limbs and see the blood spurting all over the place.

• A chainsaw could slice his head right off.

• I could poke my baby’s eye out.

• What would happen if I put the baby in the microwave or the freezer?

Since the fall of 2015, I have been documenting the intrusive thoughts of postpartum mothers.¹ I did not, at the time I began, know what an intrusive thought was, much less how pervasive such thoughts are among those struggling with mental health after the birth of a baby. I did not seek these stories. I was interested broadly in the diagnosis, treatment, and experience of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMADs) among birthing mothers (while fathers, non-birthing mothers, birthing trans-men, and non-binary parents also experience PMADs, they were not represented in my research.)

But the thoughts emerged unbidden. Blenders. Knives. Windows. Pillows. And always followed by shame.

You must think I’m a monster.

My work, like that of so many ethnographic projects, began with a sense of disquiet about my own experiences. When my first daughter was born, she had what was euphemistically termed “colic.” There was nothing “wrong” with her, exactly—other than being born a bit early, with parts not quite fused and pipes not quite functioning the way they would if she had been on time. It was normal for her gestational age, I was informed. She would grow out of it, I was assured. And she did. But first, for three months, she screamed. Refusing to eat, refusing to sleep, she cried and cried and cried.

I never thought of putting my daughter in a blender. But I had thoughts that made me feel shame. And I wondered the same things most mothers with PMADs do: What’s wrong with me? Am I a terrible mother? Why can’t I do this thing that millions of women do every day? And why did no one tell me it could be like this? How did I not know?

Three years later, I began trying to answer these questions. I first interviewed obstetric and mental health clinicians at hospitals and outpatient practices in Providence, Rhode Island, about their work. Clinicians who specialized in perinatal mental health then kindly allowed me to sit in on clinical team meetings, patient intake sessions, and group therapy sessions to get a sense of the work they did and the experiences patients with PMADs were having. In 2016 and 2017, I conducted forty-five semi-structured interviews with nine Providence-area mothers and their families. Postpartum women diagnosed with PMADs participated in a series of longitudinal interviews in their homes.

This research was followed in the summer of 2017 by thirty-eight interviews with ten middle-class Chinese families in Luzhou, Sichuan province, China. Postpartum patients with depression symptoms participated in longitudinal interviews, with follow-up interviews conducted in summer 2018. In this article, I draw on my US-based research.

The interview studies accompanied a year of professional training and practice during a sabbatical in 2017–18. I earned a certificate in maternal mental health and postpartum doula certification. I provided doula services in the homes of seven postpartum women in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. I volunteered weekly for a postpartum support helpline. I also attended home visiting sessions for caseworkers serving low-income mothers of infants in Rhode Island.

In all these encounters, intrusive thoughts—common symptoms associated with postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder or anxiety—were among the hardest things for postpartum mothers to talk about and for me to hear. Even saying the words aloud could fill women with self-loathing. I learned to be careful about asking. But still, the stories would come. Can openers. Bathtubs. Stairs. Often, the mothers seemed to be seeking not absolution but damnation—a reckoning with themselves, perhaps an acknowledgment of their own monstrousness.

Did you hear what I told you? I said I thought about putting my baby in the blender.

In her book Moral Failure, the philosopher Lisa Tessman (2014) discusses how morality is not just about actions and not just about words. It is also about thoughts—thoughts that may come unbidden but which are no less dangerous for the lack of volition that produced them. These thoughts feel particularly repulsive, Tessman argues, when they intersect with mother love.

Tessman gives the example of a mother sacrificing her child to save another or a whole group of others. For Tessman, such cases are tragic and may involve only good intentions or even acts of heroism—but they are also, by their nature, inexcusable. Even if done to save others, even under circumstances of extreme duress, to purposefully kill or let die your own child is, for most people, still ethically unacceptable. Mothers, so the thinking goes, do not harm their children—and (good) mothers do not even think about doing so. “It is not only that performing an unthinkable act is non-negotiably prohibited—merely considering … performing an unthinkable act is also non-negotiably prohibited,” Tessman (2014, 51) writes. She goes on to note that “experiencing some acts as unthinkable is partly constitutive of (a certain kind of) love, such that if one were to not experience some acts as unthinkable, this would reveal a lack of (this kind of) love” (Tessman 2014, 51).

While anyone can have unthinkable thoughts, a mother’s unthinkable thoughts tend to particularly disturb due to a biological mother’s supposedly inherent ability and desire to care for her children (Lauritzen 1989; Noddings 2013; Rubin 2018). Andrea Ford (2020, 623) notes that US norms celebrate the “innate maternal instinct” that supposedly resides within all childbearing women and “the idea that certain traits or processes are hard-wired.” When nature doesn’t work out as expected, the result is (self-)blame and moral judgment. If the brain of a good mother instinctively wants to and knows how to care for her baby, then the brain of one who pictures death for her baby must be the brain of a mother who is very, very bad.

In other words, “just thoughts” can have major moral consequences. Throughout their book, Dropping the Baby and Other Scary Thoughts, widely read and recommended for perinatal women seeking help for intrusive thoughts and for their clinical providers, Kleiman and Wenzel (2011) insist that intrusive thoughts are common and not overly worrisome. Not only do women experiencing these thoughts almost never act on them, but the vivid content of the thoughts, according to Kleiman and Wenzell, hold no special significance beyond their capacity to disturb. “Although a mother who is engulfed with the concern that her impulse to smother her baby with a pillow might take exception to this claim, it’s true that the clinical significance is the level of suffering, rather than the content of thought itself,” they write (2011, 29).

This may be true in terms of clinical significance. But for most women I met, it was precisely the content of these thoughts that felt immensely significant. And so the mother who thought of slicing her baby like a nectarine and putting him in the blender did not accept my reassurances. Perhaps she would not do it, but that was almost beside the point. She had thought the unthinkable. She knew she had sinned.

Intrusive thoughts are often described visually, and it is their pseudo-hallucinatory nature that mothers often find particularly distressing. Lisa Stevenson (2014, 11) argues that images come to be “precipitates of experience,” paraphrasing Walter Benjamin (2006): they are not necessarily “true,” but they do show us something real—a “condensed and concentrated form of the original” (Stevenson 2014).

You will not really put your baby in a blender. But if you take all the frustration and fear and desperation to be free of the overwhelming responsibility to mother your baby, and you condense it into an image—well, then slicing up your baby and blending him like a smoothie is not a terrible approximation of a kind of horrible truth. Stevenson (2014, 13), referring to Freud, notes that with regards to our darkest desires, “We do not always want the truth in the form of facts or information; often we want it in the form of an image. What we want, perhaps, is the opacity of an image that can match the density of our feelings.”

As Roland Barthes (1981) famously argued, images also have a unique ability to instantiate death. Dillon (2011), drawing upon Barthes’ analysis of a photograph of his dead mother, refers to photographic images as “death-in-life.” The picture of Barthes’ mother brought her back to a kind of life—and yet, in that process of reanimation, it also reaffirmed her death. The image a mother has of dismembering her infant son, on the other hand, signals life-in-death—for within the fantasized specter of infant death is contained the pain of mothering a live infant.

Flashes

What mother among us living in a secure and protected household has not once in her life had to suppress the wild impulse to throttle a child—even a helpless infant—within an inch of her or his crying, complaining, demanding life? … Yes, we have all done these or similar things with (at least we like to think) little harm done.

(Scheper-Hughes 1993, 340–41)

Sometimes, when the baby won’t stop crying, she thinks, I understand why people shake babies, beat them, throw them, starve them, silence them. Suddenly, I understand, and it is terrifying. She tells this to her mother-in-law one day as they walk in the park. The baby is in her stroller, trying to pull off her cute little pink socks with cute little pink elephants on them, and put them in her cute little pink mouth. It is a beautiful late spring day, warm but not too warm, with a hint of summer’s approach in the humidity in the air. The sun is shining; the birds are chirping, the squirrels are scurrying, the children are playing. Her daughter laughs adorably at a puppy passing them on the path. She has a sudden flash of the puppy with her daughter in its mouth.

“Oh yes, I understand,” the old lady is muttering, motioning with her hand as if to flick off a particularly annoying bee. “I used to imagine throwing Daniel against the wall all the time to make him stop crying. I’d have a flash of what he would look like, sliding down the wall, so surprised.” She chuckles to herself and then looks at her daughter-in-law curiously, suddenly aware that she is aghast. “Oh honey, don’t worry. All mothers think these things, don’t they?”

The nineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot—infamous in the history of women’s health for his haunting photographs of women suffering from what he diagnosed as “hysteria”—believed that the flash of a camera could reveal a hidden madness (Baer 1994). Conscious memory might not process certain traumas, but Charcot believed a photograph could induce a flashback that became somatized as a catatonic state. Ulrich Baer (1994, 62) emphasizes that in Charcot’s analysis, “the core of a hysterical attack … is a memory, the hallucinatory reliving of a scene”.

Like Charcot’s subjects facing a camera, a flash of intrusive thoughts could induce traumatic responses in postpartum women. But this trauma was not usually associated with a memory. None of the women I talked with had ever acted out the content of their thoughts. According to clinical experts, they almost certainly never would. Rather than painful reminders of the past or snapshots from the future, these flashes instead produced haunting visions of alternative worlds, split-second moments when the subjunctive violence within—what if I threw my child to the dogs?—took the form of an image. The puppy taking the baby in his mouth was neither a flashback (to a previous trauma) nor a flash-forward (a premonition of a future act), but rather a flash-out to a world in which a new mother was not politely chatting with her mother-in-law on a beautiful spring day but rather acting out a murderous rage.

The first clinician to explain postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) to me told me that this is how compulsions start to rule mothers’ lives. A flash, and then a fear. A postpartum mother will do anything, the clinician explained, to make sure she does not enter that violent alternative world.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder outside of motherhood is often associated with the repetition of rituals—the repeated washing of hands, turning on and off lights, tapping a foot three times—little dances to ward off the feared outcome of not doing it correctly. The mothers I met acted in much the same way, but their rituals were often more obscure. Avoid the kitchen at all costs. Check repeatedly to make sure the knife is still there, that you didn’t stow it in your sleep, where, in a hazed panic in the middle of the night, perhaps you might use it. Is the baby still breathing? Did you leave a pillow in the crib? If you pick the baby up, might you throw him out the window? Best to avoid the window too, and always carry the baby strapped tightly in his detachable car seat so it’s not possible to act too rashly.

Just in case.

I think of the mother who had to check her baby three times before she did anything in the morning—three times before brushing her teeth, before putting on underwear, before washing her face—to make sure the baby was alive. If she missed a time, she would rush to the baby’s side, certain that her failure had doomed the child to death by negligence. She acted as if her checking—exactly three times!—determined her baby’s fate. But she knew that the world created by her rituals was not “real.” Right?

Part of my job on the helpline, and the clinician’s job in the longer term, was to convince the terrified mother that a flash was not reality and that the alternative world would never come to pass. “Participants practicing ritual act as if the world produced in ritual were in fact a real one,” Seligman and colleagues write of the ritualistic nature of everyday life. “They do so fully conscious that such a subjunctive world exists in endless tension with an alternate world of daily experience” (Seligman et al. 2008, 25–26). To effectively treat OCD in postpartum women was to make them conscious of this tension and convince them that the world of daily experience—the one without dead babies or murderous mothers—was the only one they would ever inhabit.

Charcot has been criticized for creating a misogynistic myth of the madwoman, frozen in strange poses that served to titillate male viewers (Goetz 1999). And yet his images continue to fascinate with their mystery. What were these women thinking about? Why did they stare into the camera the way they did? Was it really a traumatic memory they were reliving or was it a trauma of the present, where bodies were transformed into emblems of ruined womanhood, preserved in a flash of an image produced for the intellectual amusement of men?

Or were they just playing along?

While Charcot associated hysteria primarily with a history of sexual abuse, many others of his time believed the condition was caused by sexual frigidity or a failure to conform to the expectations of heterosexual marriage. Perhaps it is no accident, then, that intrusive thoughts so often included tools of heteronormative domesticity. The blender. The puppy. The can opener. Later in life, the “hot flash” produces the “menopausal woman,” crazed and flushed with ruined sexuality, her nightgown soaked through with sweat and rage (Krajewski 2019; Lock 1994). The end of a woman’s fertility thus becomes an echo of the peak of it: the mad (grand)mother, no longer birthing babies, but, in the loss of her ability to do so, once more becoming mad in flashes.

When Thoughts Are Not Just Thoughts

The woman talked a mile a minute, clutching the baby wrap to her chest as she paced back and forth on the stained corporate carpet in the windowless office. She is going to start an online store selling these wonderful baby wraps. No, she is going to sell homemade jewelry. As soon as she gets out of here, she’ll start a business, go back to school, tutor children, clean the house, quit smoking, quit drinking, learn French. After half an hour of this oration, the therapist congratulates her on her progress and sends her out.

“She seems a little… wound up,” I suggest meekly.

“She’s doing great,” the therapist counters. Sure, the patient is a little manic—but when she came to her, the therapist explains, she thought her baby was the devil. She saw him with horns, in flames. “She knows he’s not the devil now,” she says.

This distress … provides reassurance that these thoughts are anxiety-driven and not psychotic. In fact, your anxiety is an indication that you are aware of the difference between right and wrong. We know that it can make you feel like you are going crazy, but you are not. Simply put, your worry about these thoughts is a very good sign.

(Kleiman and Wenzel 2011, 30–31)

Are you upset that you thought about putting your baby in the blender? Do you know that your baby is not the Devil? Are you scared when you think about throwing your baby out the window? Or does that feel like the right thing to do?

On June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates—one of the most famous modern cases of a mother turning the unthinkable into reality—drowned her five children in the bathtub of her home. She said Satan told her to do it, to save her children from the fires of hell. Drowning her children felt right at the time—her thoughts were “egosyntonic,” as psychiatrists put it. Most experts believe that Yates was suffering from postpartum psychosis—a condition, distinct from the anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders associated with “egodystonic” intrusive thoughts, that afflicts approximately one out of every thousand postpartum mothers and is considered a psychiatric emergency (Spinelli 2009; West and Lichtenstein 2006). The Yates case was shocking because it was so rare. Even in instances where a mother develops postpartum psychosis and is left untreated or improperly treated, as Yates was, the vast majority of psychotic mothers do not harm their babies (or other children), let alone kill them (Spinelli 2009). Maternal infanticide is “both compelling and repulsive,” as one clinician put it during a conference panel I attended, but it is very unusual—even among those who see their babies in flames.

Still, the specter of infanticide is what animates initial clinical encounters for many women with postpartum mental illness. Is this mother crazy or just upset? Does she need to be separated from her baby for the baby’s safety or kept close to her baby to promote healthy bonding? The stakes of this decision are high, and it is not always an easy call—especially for emergency room clinicians, who are often the first point of contact for ill women and are rarely trained in perinatal mental health.

In addition to not feeling badly about your bad thoughts, psychosis is also characterized by periods of disconnection from reality, erratic or bizarre behavior, or both. But the condition also waxes and wanes between periods of confusion and periods of lucidity in which the person seems normal. And mothers with OCD or anxiety may also exhibit behavior that appears erratic or bizarre. The following, for example, are things that mothers I met with egodystonic intrusive thoughts have done:

A woman who was terrified that she would drop (or perhaps throw) her baby while walking down the stairs insisted on always scooting downstairs on her behind.

A woman who was afraid she would stab her baby with a knife insisted on locking her baby in a room every time she cut vegetables.

A woman, afraid that she would drown her baby, did not bathe him for weeks; a friend finally detected a problem from the baby’s smell.

She thought her baby was the devil. She saw him with horns, in flames.

Non-psychotic mothers also may read evil into their little devils. When I was struggling with postpartum depression and anxiety, I briefly thought that a red birthmark on my daughter’s forehead was a sign (from God? from the fates?) meant to punish me for not being a good enough mother by marking my daughter as damaged goods.

All of this can make it difficult for all but the most seasoned clinicians to determine who might be a threat to their own child. With boundaries between dangerously crazy and sympathetically struggling not always clear, clinical and legal professionals must decide when what happens in someone’s head is “just a thought” and when it is a warning of an imagined future possibility in which thoughts become actions.

There’s a Lot You Can Do With a Hammer

There is a lot you can do with a hammer, the woman explains. It was when she saw the hammer, and the nails, in her husband’s open toolbox that she finally took herself to the emergency room—the right ER, luckily, where the doctors knew she would not really smash her baby’s head in and checked her into the hospital rather than checking her into jail. “You’re not crazy; this is pretty common; you are not going to hurt your baby,” the clinician reassures her at intake—though afterward, she confides that this woman is “very ill.”

***

The mother holds the newborn limply in her arms. The psychiatrist peers at her chart and recounts her history. Immigrant from Brazil with two other children. Severe depression. History of sexual abuse, a suicidal mother. Frequent flashbacks—vivid, frightening thoughts about seeing her mother with a knife. Is she suicidal? Yes—maybe—yes. Has she hurt her children? The mother looks down, ashamed. At one point, she admits, she got frustrated and threw her previous baby on the bed. Her baby was fine, but after that Child Protective Services (CPS) came around sometimes. “Have you thought about hurting your baby this time?” the psychiatrist asks gently, nodding at the limp bundle. The woman looks down, silent.

In her ethnography of a Yucatan psychiatric ward, Beatriz Reyes-Foster notes that the delusions of psychiatric patients in Mexico are frequently dismissed as nonsensical, meaningless ravings. Among the largely indigenous patients treated in the clinic where Reyes-Foster worked, the insistence that people’s delusions were “just thoughts” became, she argues, a tool of colonialist oppression. “The way these experiences of delusion are understood, treated, and erased reveals the colonization of the psyche, the demand for the patient to let go of the beings, objects, and realities that inhabit the ward alongside them,” Reyes-Foster (2018) writes.

In the US postpartum context, the thoughts and visions of the colonized or oppressed are often taken seriously—with potentially devastating consequences for Black and brown mothers. The white woman who thought of bashing in her baby’s brains with a hammer may well have lost her baby to CPS if she had shown up at a different emergency room, where there were no perinatal mental health specialists who knew that violent thoughts did not imply violent actions. But she still would have had a better chance of having her thoughts dismissed as meaningless misfirings of the brain than the Brazilian mother would have.

Clinicians and law enforcement often are willing to believe that white, middle-class women with troubling thoughts are not really dangerous and are instead victims of their own anxious fragility, unable to understand that they love their babies too much to hurt them. Mothers of color, on the other hand, often don’t have the benefit of being told their murderous fantasies are “just thoughts.” Unthinkability, like so many other dubious benefits of white motherhood, is enmeshed with white privilege.

When it comes to Black mothers, the state often intervenes at the slightest hint of maternal failure (Roberts 2002; Bridges 2017). Roberts (1993, 14) attributes this to the application of “culturally-biased standards” that “mistake Black childrearing patterns as neglect,” as well as a general willingness “to intrude upon the autonomy of Black mothers.” These intrusions may come even when there are no obvious threats of violence. A Black mother need not fantasize about putting her baby in a blender to invite the scrutiny of CPS.

The perinatal mental health clinicians I interviewed during my fieldwork told me that among women who arrive at an emergency room reporting violent thoughts, women of color are much more likely to have their thoughts taken at face value—and thus to face a legal, rather than medical, response (see also McLemore et al. 2018). Poor women of color are also more likely to have CPS involvement in their homes and have that involvement for longer periods (Bridges 2017). When they show up to hospitals with injured children, they are more likely than their white and middle-class counterparts to be reported for abuse (Braveman and Ramsey 1997; Hill 2006). Much like men of color, who are more likely than white men to be diagnosed with psychosis when reporting the same symptoms, mothers of color are more likely than white mothers to be designated as both “crazy” and dangerous (Metzl 2010).

The imagined potential for violence by Black and brown mothers during the perinatal period also has as its inverted counterpart the potential for violence against Black and brown mothers. Scholars of “obstetric racism” recount stories from birthing women of color, ranging from physician use of disrespectful language to negligence in prenatal care to mishandling of complications, to outright physical violence (Davis 2019; Scott and Davis 2021; McLemore et al. 2018). The postpartum period, my research suggests, may be rife with similar abuses.

Ilana was a Black Latina teenage mother living in Providence who was struggling to climb out of a deep depression sparked by the birth of her daughter. Several sessions into our interviews, she admitted to having horrible visions of herself smothering her baby with a pillow. Ilana had taken months to recover from a pelvic injury that occurred during a traumatizing birth in which the nurse chided her for crying out in pain and refused to provide pain relief because, as Ilana recounted her saying, “You should have thought of that when you got yourself pregnant.” She was now being bullied online by the baby’s father and his friends. The response of the police when she reported this harassment was to send a social worker to her home to assess whether she was abusing her baby. She and her mother gave up on the police and instead responded by throwing her baby’s father’s belongings out their apartment window.

In addition to being the recipients of violence and being accused of being perpetrators, poor women of color are most likely to be under pressure to fulfill a “good mother” mandate that is nearly impossible to achieve (Paxson 2004; Rubin 2018; Keefe, Brownstein-Evans, and Rouland Polmanteer 2018). Keefe and colleagues (2018, 223) note that “Black and Latina women are frequently only recognized as good mothers when demonstrating extraordinary strength, while the inadequacy of resources challenging their mothering efforts is ignored.” Some elements of this dynamic extend to low-income white women as well. My interlocutors who received food assistance or other social services were so used to being judged for their inadequacy in mothering according to the norms of middle-class parenting that they often spent their time with me apologizing for this perceived failure.

Laura, a white doula client of mine who used WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children), food stamps, and Medicaid and who was raising her newborn daughter and toddler son alone, was at pains to assure me that her son did not usually watch TV as much as he did while I was there. She also kept apologizing for the Dole fruit cups she was feeding him. “I know it’s better to have fresh fruit,” she nervously explained. “It’s just so much faster, and it’s hard to cut up while I’m also watching his sister, and …” She trailed off. “Also, there’s no soda in that sippy cup, only water.” I hadn’t mentioned the fruit, the TV, or the sippy cup, but I got the sense I may have been the first helping professional she encountered who hadn’t.

Some of these dynamics were also displayed when I shadowed a home visiting program that provided parenting education services for women assessed to have an “at-risk” infant. In the common room of a halfway house, I watched as a caseworker taught an exhausted young mother how to make baby toys out of socks and tennis balls. “See?” the caseworker, also a woman of color, lectured the Puerto Rican mother. “It’s easy to provide your child with the educational stimulation she needs.” Thus, in one sentence, she implied that the mother was negligent (for not providing her baby with proper toys) and lazy (for not doing something she could easily have done if she had tried).

In her work on the lack of privacy rights afforded to those who rely on government programs, Bridges (2017) has shown that social workers have almost limitless access to their clients’ personal information and homes. If a social worker feels that a mother dependent on government programs is not mothering in desirable ways, the mother may be at risk of losing her parental rights. It is no wonder that Laura was so anxious to assure me that her child was not watching TV or drinking soda.

Laura did not tell me about any intrusive thoughts. I doubt she would have, even if she had them. For someone used to being judged for not chopping up fruit, she surely knew well that admitting to visions of chopping up her son would not be likely to end well.

Thinking and Enacting Infant Death

I argue that a high expectancy of child death is a powerful shaper of maternal thinking and practice as evidenced, in particular, in delayed attachment to infants sometimes thought of as temporary household ‘visitors.’ This detachment can be mortal at times, contributing to the severe neglect of certain infants.

(Scheper-Hughes 1993, 340–41)

“I was very worried she was gonna die, like I was very convinced she was gonna die. I thought about it all the time …. Basically, the reason why I didn’t wanna spend time with her was because I was afraid of getting attached to her because I was so sure she was gonna die. And I remember thinking, I wish whatever is gonna happen would just happen, I wish she would just die because I can’t, like I can’t bear waiting for it.”

— “Amanda,” Rhode Island interviewee, 2017

Few works on postpartum motherhood elicit the sheer horror and revulsion evoked by Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s Death without Weeping (1993). Scheper-Hughes’s vivid prose about mothers who, she claims, were driven by poverty and hunger to repeatedly neglect their newborns—an experience she renders in gruesome detail, with illustrative photos of dead children in coffins to match—resulted in a barrage of criticism (Mayblin 2012). Scholars accused Scheper-Hughes of grossly misreading her interlocutors’ experiences (Nations, Corlis, and Feitosa 2015; Nations and Rebhun 1988; Rebhun 1994), of engaging in colonialist research that reinforced racist stereotypes (Franch and Lago-Falcão 2004; Sigaud 1995), and of missing an entire universe of emotional and moral experience that surely indicated that these mothers were devastated by their infants’ deaths and did everything possible to prevent them (Nations, Corlis, and Feitosa 2015).

Death Without Weeping became a boogieman for those committed to decolonized scholarship of motherhood and reproduction because it implied for some that Scheper-Hughes believed poor mothers of color did not love their children the way rich white mothers did and that this lack of love made them capable of doing things white mothers would never do (see Mayblin 2012; Rebhun 1994). Her detractors drew upon their own research to insist that the mothers Scheper-Hughes had written about did love their babies, that they mourned their babies deeply as all mothers should and surely did, and that they would never do anything to harm them.

I have no quarrel with the impulse to push back against racist and colonialist depictions of women in the Global South, and there is plenty to criticize about Scheper-Hughes’s depiction. Still, the vehemence of the reaction points to how threatening Scheper-Hughes’s de-romanticization of motherhood—and, more specifically, her suggestion that mothers could feel detached enough from their children to bring them harm knowingly—really was.

Re-reading Death without Weeping alongside stories of blenders and knives in the Global North casts a different light on Scheper-Hughes’s tale. I read her text less as a case of racist mother-shaming and more as an effort to illuminate the capacity that all mothers have to harm their children—or, at least, to allow harm to come to them. Rather than demonizing mothers for their lack of emotional investment, perhaps Scheper-Hughes was admiring them for their restraint—for how few children they let go under the circumstances they were dealt, and how many children they did bond with, nurture, and save, despite obstacles that no mother should have to contend with. “Within the physically threatening context of shantytown life, where so much greater vigilance is required to keep an infant alive, even the smallest lapse in maternal attention and care can sometimes be fatal,” she notes (360). In other words, in the favelas where she did her fieldwork, “just thoughts”—a certainty that a baby is going to die, a misinterpretation of what a cry means, a feeling, common among women with PMADs, that the “baby doesn’t love me”—can become fatal actions. Perhaps her point was that there was nothing extraordinary about these mothers. Under the same or even much less desperate circumstances, any mother might do the same.

Conclusion

In a widely cited 1996 article, Kleinman and Kleinman argue that images of suffering offer prurient fascination for well-heeled onlookers. They point to the example of a famous photograph taken by the photojournalist Kevin Carter, which depicted what turned out to be a largely staged scene of a hungry vulture descending upon a starving child. The image, which won Carter a Pulitzer Prize and may have contributed to his suicide two years later (Ow Yeong 2014), implied to the viewer that the child had been abandoned to nature by a family too weak, victimized, or callous to look after their children (Kleinman and Kleinman 1996). What was implied but not shown in this photograph was a mother who, in the kind of desperation the onlooker could never possibly understand, had left her child to die.

In their discussion, Kleinman and Kleinman (1996) critique the voyeurism and ethnocentrism inherent to this kind of “trauma porn.” Their explanation is hardly necessary now. When I show Carter’s image to my twenty-first-century college students, they are repelled more by the voyeurism of the photo itself than by the scene it depicts. They are fascinated and disgusted, as the photographer intended. But they also immediately grasp the racist, misogynistic, and white savior-ish assumptions embedded in the image: that Black mothers cannot or will not take care of their own, that they are to be pitied and need saving, and that the colonialist past that produced a famine capable of in turn producing this grotesque tableau was not the responsibility of the same people patting themselves on the back for rescuing dying children.

What, then, shall the reader make of the imagery I have shared in this article? My interlocutors’ narratives are likely, I realize, to both fascinate and disgust. This is probably why I have felt the need to share them and why I cannot get them out of my head—the blender, the stairs, the pillow, the hammer—all these ordinary tools of murderous motherhood. Why I am still, a decade later, haunted by my own flash-fantasies—the sudden, terrifying capacity for violence that I felt in the first few exhausting weeks of caring for a newborn who would not stop crying. The thoughts that were just thoughts, but which nevertheless resulted in the kind of moral failure that devastated the women I worked with in ways I was lucky to escape.

Kleiman and Wenzell (2011, 26) estimate that 91%—91%!—of mothers experience some sort of upsetting, obsessive (though not necessarily violent) intrusive thought at some point in pregnancy or early motherhood. The fact that almost none of them put their babies in blenders attests to mothers’ strength and their ability to ensure that thoughts remain thoughts. As Cheryl Mattingly (2014) notes, however, the expectations of “super-strong motherhood” that these numbers imply tend to fall most on poor women of color, who are already the most burdened, distrusted, and despised and the least likely to be given the benefit of the doubt. And so, beyond the voyeurism and the getting-it-off-my-chest-ism, there is a seriousness of purpose to my sharing these stories. To brush off thoughts as “just thoughts” to be eradicated with medication and therapy, without taking seriously the content, purpose, and contested meanings of those thoughts, is to deny the “precipitates of experience” that these thought-images may be capable of revealing, and the calls for action they might provoke.

In my conversations on the helpline, in interviews, in clinics, and in women’s homes, I encountered mothers enduring the unendurable. There were mothers who were caring on their own for multiple older children, in addition to their newborn, while holding down three jobs; mothers who had returned to work days after giving birth, still sore, seeping blood and milk; mothers who had lost their jobs or their homes or their parents or their partners; mothers who were enduring endless sleepless nights alone with their babies while suffering from crippling depression. For these mothers, the call for action seems simple: mothers need maternity leave, material support, emotional support, psychiatric care.

But beyond calls for more support, I am also calling for something more radical. Because I also met mothers who did have material and emotional support. I met mothers who had good mental health care, who planned for and welcomed their babies into families that were ready for them, who had maternity leave and supportive partners and spacious homes and stable incomes. But some of these mothers, too, imagined themselves cutting their babies with chainsaws or throwing them out the window. These mothers did not want for food, shelter, or safety, but they felt overwhelmed with responsibilities they were not prepared to handle, and they mourned a life that was lost the moment their baby entered the world.

I met mothers with and without material hardship who whispered with shame that they were filled with regret about bearing a baby they were no longer sure they wanted or could care for. I met those who told me they realized that they were not cut out to be mothers and now felt trapped in a life that felt intolerable. I met others who loved being mothers, but this last one—well, this last one just put them over the edge. Many, many others were simply angry, frustrated, and terrified—for no good reason other than that caring for a baby can be, and often is, infuriating, frustrating, and terrifying. Understanding and validating these mothers’ experiences too thus requires digging deeper than structure, circumstance, or psychology. It also means rethinking mother love itself.

What would it mean to both call for more support for mothers and also to openly accept and validate a mother love filled with as much anger, fear, and regret as it is with joy and fulfillment? What would it mean to recognize that, yes, you did fantasize about putting your baby in a blender—and there was, perhaps, a reason you had that fantasy? What would it mean to take the content of intrusive thoughts seriously without punishing a mother for having them?

In a New York Times article articulating what she refers to as “mother rage,” writer Minna Dubin (2019) writes:

Mothers are supposed to be martyr-like in our patience. We are not supposed to want to hit our kids or to tear out our hair. We hide these urges because we are afraid to be labeled ‘bad moms.’ We feel the need to qualify our frustration with ‘I love my child to the moon and back, but….’ As if mother rage equals a lack of love. As if rage has never shared a border with love. Fearing judgment, we say nothing. The rage festers, and we are left under a pile of loneliness and debilitating shame.

The blender, the hammer, the knives. They are just thoughts. You will not hurt your baby. In fact, you are desperate to protect her, treasure her, hold her tight, and help her thrive. But a part of you, right then, at that moment, did want to hurt her. A part of you wanted to maim, to destroy, to make disappear. A part of you feels capable of anything.

And maybe that’s ok.