Last week I said the unthinkable to my seven-month-old daughter. As we await Lindsay Clancy trial verdict… I have a confession that so many other mothers will judge: ANNABEL FENWICK ELLIOTT

‘I hate you,’ I hissed at my seven-month-old daughter in the early hours of the morning last week. And then again through my tears, with extra emphasis: ‘I hate you.’

Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. I would leap through flames for my much-wanted baby. And I never would have said those words out loud if she’d been old enough to understand them.

But I’d been up most of the night with a dreadful cold, and it was the fifth time I’d rocked her back to sleep, only for her eyes to ping open the moment I laid her down. In that moment, my frustration felt a lot like hate.

So, as I watch the trial of Lindsay Clancy, like so many other mothers across the world who are gripped by it, I can’t help but feel a pang of empathy.

Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse and suburban mom-of-three, is far from your typical child abuser. And yet, she stands accused of strangling her kids and then attempting suicide.

Hundreds of pink-clad women have lined the streets outside the Massachusetts courthouse where her fate is being debated. And the sentiment from so many of them? ‘It could have been me.’

That’s alarming. As are the videos all over social media of mothers confessing that they too can’t cope with their young children – some of them extreme in their nature to warrant reports to Child Protective Services.

Clearly, this case has hit a nerve. And we’d be foolish to ignore the kneejerk outpouring of pain.

Of course, flashes of mom rage are trivial in comparison to the full blown postpartum psychosis Clancy’s lawyers are claiming she was gripped by. I’ve never heard voices or had thoughts of harming my children or myself. I cannot wrap my head around what she did, and I certainly don’t excuse it.

But I have had several bouts of mom rage, mostly in the dead of night, when my son was little, as I have with my daughter. Times where I have yelled into the abyss and punched walls, and subsequently thought to myself, ‘If anyone else could see me now, I would die of shame.’

Rather than keep it to myself, though, on one occasion I made a TikTok video about it. It’s since been watched and shared millions of times and the response was almost unanimously supportive. I’m seeing a similar surge in solidarity as a result of Clancy’s trial. It tells me, once again, that too many women feel entirely out of their depth when it comes to the early days of motherhood, and have too little support.

Humans aren’t designed to raise babies in relative isolation, without a village to help them. Throughout most of history, and still in some cultures around the world, infants are cared for in shifts by many family members and neighbors at a time.

It’s not surprising that our nervous systems are forced into overdrive given we do most of the parenting alone or with one other person, often with both parents juggling careers.

Thankfully, the vast majority of mothers who suffer from mental health issues do not go on to murder their children. In tamer circles, clips of mothers smashing ice cubes in bathtubs have been going viral of late, as a way for women to release anger without hurting their kids.

But many become violent, and plenty of us nearly do.

My husband vividly recalls a night not that long ago when we awoke at 3am to the sound of me sobbing. He rushed into the bedroom I was sharing with the baby, to find her crying alone on the mattress and me on a chair, rocking back and forth, my head in a pillow.

The urge to shake her out of frustration that I couldn’t soothe her had been so strong, I’d had to put her down and move away.

In other moments, it’s taken all my willpower to stop physically lashing out at my son, now four, particularly when we were in the toddler phase. I can absolutely see why it happens, without condoning it.

My patience was thin at best before I even had children. And I’ve always responded much worse to sleep deprivation than the average person appears to. Any less than eight hours a night and I feel physically sick, turn deathly pale, and struggle to string a sentence together. So, I knew I’d find parenting hard, and for years I questioned whether I was even cut out to be a mom.

I’ve also suffered from severe bouts of depression in the past. Bad enough to leave me bedbound, tears dripping down my cheeks in the manner of a leaking tap, for no apparent reason, for weeks on end.

Luckily for me, I found a medication – Bupropion – that has kept it under control for nearly 20 years and those episodes are now a distant memory. But I remember how stranded from reality I felt back then and how incapable I would have been with a baby, let alone several children.

I live in the UK, where maternal mental health is taken very seriously. When I was expecting my son and debating whether to come off my antidepressants during pregnancy, I had free access to a psychiatrist who suggested we try reducing the dose first.

We did and sure enough, that chemical imbalance in my mind reverted and the depression crept back. Straight away, I was advised to up my dose again. We all agreed that it was imperative to my health and that of my unborn child’s that I was mentally strong.

After my boy was born, as is standard here in England, I was regularly checked up on at home by ‘health visitors’ – all of them warm, kind and highly trained to spot signs of trouble in new moms.

When I compare that to the care Clancy received in the US – a merry-go-round of tele-health professionals and avalanche of medication, without meaningful oversight or therapy – I am sickened. No wonder so many women are demanding reform.

But nor can I comprehend how more action wasn’t taken by those around Clancy – by the medical community in particular – to keep those kids safe given how sick she clearly was. Her mother testified that Clancy had confessed to ‘thoughts of harming the children.’ That alone should have been enough of a red flag.

When my husband walked in to see me wailing into a pillow that time, he immediately scooped up our daughter and tucked me into bed, then looked after her for the rest of the night and all morning, waking me only to breastfeed. I was simply exhausted. Had I been in the throes of psychosis, I know that family wouldn’t have left me alone or inadequately treated.

I keep saying I’m lucky, but shouldn’t that be the bare minimum for new mothers, given the monumental challenges they face when their hormones are in freefall? Postpartum psychosis is not even listed as a disease in the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Surely it should be.

There are still people who scoff at ‘depression’ and class it merely as laziness. All I can say is thank goodness enough doctors finally took it seriously towards the end of the 20th century and developed treatments for it. My life, and many others’, would look very different without Bupropion in it.

Whatever the outcome for Lindsay Clancy – jail or a psychiatric institution – her life is over. So are her children’s.

If any good at all can come from this, I hope it’s an uptick in awareness. And the realization that when an otherwise loving mother expresses a desire to harm her kids, she might just do so, so we’d best take her seriously.