I thought I understood postpartum depression. I thought I knew the difference between what was real and what wasn’t—until one fog-covered night, shortly after giving birth, something happened that I still can’t fully explain. Eighteen years later, the Lindsay Clancy trial has dragged that dark postpartum memory back into the light, along with one haunting question: How completely can a mother’s mind convince her that something impossible is real?
This is a personal Barefoot Girl’s Diary entry about my own postpartum experience. It is not medical advice.
I Can Still See That Road
It was late at night somewhere in rural Ohio.
I don’t remember where I was going. Perhaps coming back from a medical appointment.
I don’t remember what had brought me onto that particular stretch of road.
Those details have disappeared over the last 18 years.
But I remember the fog.
I remember that perfectly.
It had swallowed everything.
There were no comforting city lights around me. No stream of headlights from other cars. Just rural Ohio darkness and a wall of pale fog reflecting against my headlights.
The road appeared only a little at a time.
A few feet of pavement.
Then nothing.
I gripped the steering wheel and kept going.
And somewhere behind me, my baby started crying.
I Heard My Baby in the Back Seat
There is something about your baby’s cry that a mother knows.
You don’t have to see your child.
You just know.
And I knew that cry.
My second son was still a baby, and I heard him behind me.
So I did what mothers do.
I started talking to him.
Hushing him.
Comforting him.
“It’s okay. Mommy’s here.”
I was trying to watch the road while listening to him cry behind me. The fog was so thick that my headlights seemed useless, and I remember being nervous about driving through it.
But I wasn’t confused about my baby.
My baby was in the back seat.
At least, that was my reality.
I wasn’t thinking, Did I just hear something?
I wasn’t wondering whether the wind or the car made a noise that sounded like him.
I believed my son was sitting behind me.
I could hear him.
And he needed his mom.
The crying continued.
I continued comforting him.
Then I came to a stop sign.
I stopped the car.
And I decided I needed to calm my baby before continuing through that fog.
I opened my door.
Stepped out into the darkness.
Walked around the car.
And opened the back door.
The Back Seat Was Empty
No baby!
No car seat holding my crying son.
No little face waiting for Mommy.
Nothing.
Just an empty back seat!
Even writing those words 18 years later gives me an eerie feeling.
Because you’d think that’s where the story ends.
You’d think my exhausted brain would immediately correct itself.
Oh. He’s not with me. I imagined hearing him.
But that’s not what happened.
I still believed he had been there.
And suddenly, I wasn’t merely confused.
I was terrified.
Where Did My Baby Go?
My mind didn’t immediately accept the obvious explanation.
Instead, I was trying to understand how my baby could have disappeared.
He had been there.
I had heard him.
I had talked to him.
I had been comforting him only moments earlier.
I knew what I had experienced.
So where was he?
I started looking for him.
Imagine that scene from the outside.
A young mother.
Alone.
Late at night.
Standing beside a car on a rural Ohio road surrounded by thick fog.
An open back door.
An empty seat.
And a mother searching for a baby who had never been inside the car.
But somehow, it became stranger still.
Then I Was Outside My Own Body
This is the part I’ve always struggled to explain.
Something changed.
I remember seeing myself.
Not looking into a mirror.
Not imagining what I probably looked like.
I remember experiencing myself as though I were outside of my own body, looking back at myself.
There was me—the frightened young mother searching for her missing baby.
And somehow there was another me watching it happen.
It was as though I had stepped outside myself.
I could see myself searching.
I could see the car.
I could see this woman desperately trying to understand where her baby had gone.
And yet I was that woman!
One part of my mind seemed to be watching while another part remained trapped inside a reality where my baby had been sitting in that back seat only moments before.
The fog surrounded everything.
The road disappeared into darkness in both directions.
My back door remained open.
My baby was gone.
Except he wasn’t gone.
He had never been there.
Eventually, somehow, reality returned.
My Son Had Been Safe the Entire Time
Nothing had happened to my baby.
He hadn’t disappeared from my car.
Nobody had taken him.
He hadn’t wandered into the darkness.
My son was safe with my family.
The terrifying reality I had been experiencing wasn’t reality at all.
And that realization has stayed hidden within me for 18 years.
Because before that night, I don’t think I truly understood that the human brain could do something like that.
I didn’t simply hear a strange noise.
For those moments, I experienced something that wasn’t happening as though it absolutely was.
I believed it.
I responded to it.
I acted on it.
And even when physical reality contradicted what my brain was telling me, it took time for my mind to catch up.
What Was Happening to Me After Having My Baby?
Looking back, the months surrounding that night were some of the most physically exhausting months of my life.
My boys were only 17 months apart.
After giving birth to my second son, I had a tubal ligation before leaving the hospital.
About a month later, I was in enough pain that I needed my gallbladder removed.
Then roughly another month passed.
My appendix started causing problems.
Another surgery.
I had essentially gone through childbirth and three procedures or surgeries within approximately three months while caring for a newborn and another little boy who wasn’t even two years old yet.
I was recovering.
I was exhausted.
I wasn’t sleeping normally.
And because I had repeatedly undergone painful medical procedures, I had also been taking pain medication. I know I was not taking them as prescribed, as I lost track of times and was taking them too often. I do not believe I was in the right mindset at that time to be managing my own medication, but I was taking them myself.
My body had barely recovered from one thing before something else happened.
Looking back now, I sometimes wonder how my brain was functioning at all.
Was This Postpartum Depression?
The Lindsay Clancy case is what recently made me start thinking about postpartum depression and that strange period of my life again.
I want to make something very clear.
I was never diagnosed with postpartum psychosis, and I’m not looking back 18 years later and diagnosing myself with it now.
I don’t even know whether I had postpartum depression.
At the time, I didn’t understand postpartum depression symptoms, postpartum hallucinations, or postpartum psychosis symptoms the way I understand them today. I was a young mother with two babies 17 months apart, recovering from childbirth and multiple surgeries, taking pain medication, running on broken sleep, and simply trying to get through each day.
I certainly wasn’t stopping to wonder why I was hearing baby crying when baby isn’t crying.
I was too busy, too exhausted, and at times too out of it to recognize just how unusual some of what I was experiencing actually was.
Even now, I don’t know what caused what happened on that foggy night.
Was it extreme exhaustion? Sleep deprivation? Postpartum hormonal changes? Medication? The physical stress of repeated surgeries? A hallucination? Dissociation? Or was it several of those things colliding inside an exhausted postpartum brain at exactly the wrong moment?
I may never know.
Eighteen years later, there is probably no way to separate all those pieces and determine exactly what happened inside my mind.
But now, when I hear women talk about postpartum depression, frightening postpartum depression symptoms, postpartum hallucinations, altered perceptions, or possible postpartum psychosis symptoms, I listen differently.
Because I know what it feels like when your own perception becomes unreliable.
I know what it feels like to hear something that isn’t there.
And, most unsettling of all, I know what it feels like when your mind creates a reality that feels more believable than the truth standing directly in front of you.
Hearing Baby Crying When Baby Isn’t Crying
One thing I experienced during that postpartum period wasn’t limited to that night.
I sometimes heard my baby crying when he wasn’t actually crying.
Sometimes he wasn’t even with me. Sometimes I would be in the shower and hear him crying in the distance.
After that scary foggy night, I would often hear him crying in the backseat when he was not even there, so that experience continued for quite some time. I would just tell myself it is not real. He is not there. Just keep driving and living the true reality.
I’ve since learned that hearing baby crying when baby isn’t crying is an experience other parents describe too. Exhaustion and being constantly tuned into a newborn’s cries can make ordinary sounds seem remarkably similar to your baby’s voice.
Most of those experiences weren’t anything like the night on that foggy road.
That night crossed some invisible line.
I didn’t merely hear him.
I incorporated the sound into my reality.
I believed he was physically behind me.
And when reality proved otherwise, my mind didn’t immediately accept it.
That’s what still unsettles me.
Postpartum Hallucinations and the Fear of Not Trusting Your Own Mind
The word postpartum hallucinations sounds frightening.
It should also be treated carefully.
Hearing something that isn’t there doesn’t automatically mean someone has postpartum psychosis. Sleep deprivation, medications, and other medical or psychological conditions can potentially affect perception too.
That’s why I won’t attach a diagnosis to my younger self simply because of one terrifying experience followed by related experiences during that time.
But I also won’t minimize what happened.
My reality was wrong.
That’s uncomfortable to admit.
I was absolutely convinced something was true when it wasn’t.
When I think back to myself standing beside that car, there is something almost haunting about realizing how confident I had been.
If your own eyes, ears, and mind tell you something is real, what are you supposed to believe?
Usually, we trust them.
That night, I couldn’t.
Then the Lindsay Clancy Trial Brought It All Back
Years passed.
My babies grew up.
The little boy I was desperately searching for that night is now 18 years old.
Then I began following the Lindsay Clancy case.
Clancy is the Massachusetts mother charged in connection with the deaths of her three young children. Her mental condition around the time of their deaths has become central to the question of criminal responsibility.
Listening to discussions surrounding her case brought back memories I hadn’t examined this closely in years.
I started reading about postpartum psychosis symptoms.
Hallucinations.
Delusions.
Disorganized thinking.
Changes in reality.
And I kept thinking about my experience on that foggy road that night.
That crying.
That empty seat.
That strange sensation of watching myself from outside my body.
For the first time in a long time, I found myself wondering:
What exactly happened to me that night?
What I Heard Was Nothing Like the Voice Lindsay Clancy Described
This is where I need to draw an important distinction.
When I say the Lindsay Clancy trial brought my own experience rushing back to me, I am not comparing what happened inside my mind that night to what Lindsay Clancy says happened inside hers.
They were profoundly different experiences.
I heard my baby crying.
Lindsay reportedly described hearing a male voice telling her to kill her children and herself.
Those are not the same thing.
The sound my mind created was the sound I had spent months listening for—the cry of my baby needing me.
And everything I did in response came from one instinct:
Protect him.
When I heard him crying behind me, I soothed him.
When I believed he needed me, I stopped the car.
When I opened that back door and couldn’t find him, I didn’t become violent.
I became terrified.
Where is my baby?
That was the reality my mind had created.
And even when I was standing beside an empty car on a dark Ohio road, surrounded by fog, experiencing that strange sensation of watching myself from outside my own body, I was still searching for my son because I believed he needed me.
That’s why I don’t want my experience confused with the reported command hallucination at the center of the Lindsay Clancy case.
My story isn’t meant to say I understand what she did because something happened to me too.
I don’t.
I understand what it feels like for your own mind to present something impossible as reality.
That’s the connection.
Not the violence.
My false reality told me my baby needed his mother.
And I tried to protect him.
That’s a distinction I cannot ignore.
But There Is a Line I Need to Draw
My experience gives me compassion for women whose minds become seriously unwell after childbirth.
It does not make me excuse mothers who kill their children.
I need to make that distinction very clear!
I am a mother who protects.
Even during the strangest experience of my life, when my reality wasn’t matching actual reality, the imaginary world my brain created revolved around protecting my baby.
I heard him crying.
My response was to comfort him.
I thought he needed me.
My response was to stop.
I thought he had disappeared.
My response was to search for him.
Every instinct was:
Find your baby.
Comfort your baby.
Protect your baby.
I never experienced an urge to hurt either of my children.
That doesn’t mean another person’s mental illness must look like mine. It doesn’t mean my experience proves anything about Lindsay Clancy or any other mother accused of killing her children.
It simply explains why I draw a very firm distinction between understanding altered perception and excusing violence.
I Believe Lindsay Clancy Was Mentally Ill—and I Still Believe in Criminal Responsibility
This is where my opinion may differ from other people following the Lindsay Clancy trial.
I can believe that she was seriously mentally ill.
I can believe she experienced symptoms that were frightening and abnormal.
I can believe her perception may have been profoundly affected.
My own experience makes it impossible for me to dismiss altered perception with, “Nobody could actually believe something that wasn’t there.”
Yes, they can!
I did!
But I still personally believe Lindsay Clancy should be held criminally responsible. That is just my opinion.
For me, evidence presented in the case suggesting planning and purposeful behavior matters.
Mental illness is real.
So is accountability.
I don’t believe acknowledging one requires pretending the other doesn’t exist.
Planning and an Altered Reality Can Be Complicated
There is something else I’ve learned while thinking about this case.
Planning doesn’t necessarily prove that someone wasn’t experiencing psychosis.
A severely mentally ill person can potentially perform organized actions while operating within a distorted understanding of reality.
That makes these cases incredibly complicated.
The real questions become much harder.
What did the person understand?
Did they know what they were physically doing?
Did they understand the consequences?
Did they appreciate that their actions were wrong?
Could they control their behavior?
Those are questions for courts and qualified experts examining the evidence—not questions my experience can answer.
My experience tells me only one thing with certainty:
A false reality can feel completely real to the person experiencing it.
That’s all.
It isn’t a defense for killing someone.
It isn’t proof that another person wasn’t responsible for their actions.
It’s simply something terrifying I learned about the human mind on a fog-covered road 18 years ago.
Postpartum Depression Symptoms Should Never Be Dismissed
There is a bigger reason I wanted to tell this story.
We need to take mothers seriously when they tell us something doesn’t feel right after having a baby.
We talk casually about exhaustion.
“Mom brain.”
Hormones.
Sleepless nights.
Being overwhelmed.
And yes, those things are incredibly common.
But there are circumstances in which a mother needs immediate professional help.
Severe confusion, hallucinations, paranoia, bizarre beliefs, extreme agitation, profound changes in behavior, suicidal thoughts, or thoughts about harming a baby aren’t things a family should simply wait out.
Learning about postpartum depression symptoms and postpartum psychosis symptoms can help families recognize when something has moved beyond ordinary new-parent exhaustion.
And I wish we talked about that more.
Postpartum Depression and Postpartum Psychosis Are Not the Same Thing
Another thing I’ve realized while researching this subject is how easily all of these terms get mixed together.
Postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis are not interchangeable. Even some postpartum depression symptoms can overlap with other postpartum mental-health struggles, which is one reason I think it’s so important that we stop casually labeling every frightening postpartum experience as psychosis.
A mother experiencing postpartum depression isn’t automatically psychotic, dangerous, or a threat to her children.
The same is true of postpartum hallucinations. Experiencing an unusual sound, image, sensation, or perception doesn’t by itself tell us exactly what is happening inside someone’s mind or establish that she has postpartum psychosis.
Even something as unsettling as hearing baby crying when baby isn’t crying doesn’t mean a mother is destined to lose control or hurt her child.
I especially want to make that clear because I don’t want another exhausted, frightened mother to find my story after experiencing something similar and immediately think, Am I becoming dangerous? Am I losing my mind?
My experience was frightening. It felt real. But it did not make me want to hurt my children.
At the same time, postpartum psychosis symptoms should never be brushed aside. Hallucinations, severe confusion, bizarre or fixed beliefs, paranoia, feeling profoundly detached from reality, or thoughts or commands involving harm to yourself or your baby deserve urgent professional attention.
There is an enormous difference between recognizing that the postpartum mind can experience strange things and assuming every strange experience means the worst.
That’s why understanding the differences between postpartum depression symptoms, postpartum hallucinations, and postpartum psychosis symptoms matters.
Sometimes a frightened mother needs reassurance.
Sometimes she needs rest and support.
And sometimes she needs immediate medical help.
The important thing is that we listen when she says something inside her mind doesn’t feel right.
There should be no shame in saying:
Something is happening to my mind, and I need help.
I Tell Mothers to Seek Help—But I Didn’t
Today, I can sit here 18 years later and tell another mother that if she is experiencing postpartum depression, frightening postpartum depression symptoms, postpartum hallucinations, or possible postpartum psychosis symptoms, she should tell someone and seek professional help.
If you’re hearing things that aren’t there, questioning what is real, feeling detached from yourself or your surroundings, or even hearing baby crying when baby isn’t crying, don’t be ashamed to tell someone what you’re experiencing.
I know that’s easier to say from the other side of it.
Because when your own mind is creating something that feels completely real, you may not recognize that you’re the one who needs help. You may be frightened, confused, embarrassed, or—like I was—unsure enough about your own reality that staying quiet somehow feels easier than trying to explain the unexplainable.
I know now that I should have told someone.
But 18 years ago, standing inside that strange version of reality, I didn’t.
But I also have to be honest.
I didn’t.
And that’s something I think we need to talk about too.
Sometimes when you’re the person standing inside that altered reality, asking for help isn’t as simple as it sounds from the outside.
After that foggy night, I didn’t immediately go home and tell my husband that I had spent part of a dark drive believing our baby was crying in the back seat of an empty car.
I didn’t tell the doctors I was seeing during those months, even though I was constantly in and out of medical care. The term postpartum depression was never even really on my mind during this time.
I simply stayed quiet.
Maybe I didn’t understand what had happened well enough to explain it.
Maybe part of me was frightened by what someone would think if I said it out loud.
And maybe the most disturbing reason was this:
I wasn’t completely sure what had been real.
How do you ask for help when your own mind is the thing you’re questioning? How do you know you are suffering from postpartum depression or if your world is real?
How do you explain that you heard your baby crying, spoke to him, stopped the car for him, opened the back door—and even after finding an empty seat, your mind didn’t immediately accept that he had never been there?
How do you explain feeling as though you had somehow stepped outside your own body and were watching yourself search for him in the darkness?
Today, I know I should have told someone.
I wish I had.
But that’s easy for the woman I am now to say about the young mother I was then.
Sometimes the very symptoms that mean someone needs help can also make it difficult for them to recognize that they need it, understand what’s happening, put it into words, or feel safe enough to tell someone.
So yes, my message to mothers experiencing frightening postpartum symptoms is still: please tell someone. Please seek professional help.
But I won’t pretend I did everything right.
I didn’t.
I went home.
I continued being a mother.
And I carried that strange fog-covered night quietly inside me for years.
Some memories fade around the edges with time.
That one still feels like fog.
Sometimes I Wonder What I Would Have Seen If I Had Kept Driving
This is the thought that still bothers me.
What if there hadn’t been a stop sign?
What if I hadn’t opened that back door?
How long would I have continued talking to him?
Five minutes?
Twenty?
Would the crying eventually have stopped?
Would my mind have corrected itself?
I don’t know.
And perhaps that’s why the memory still feels so dark.
I know now that my baby wasn’t there.
But the woman driving through that fog didn’t know.
She was listening to her son cry.
She was worried about him.
She was trying to get somewhere safely so she could take care of him.
Her reality was wrong!
But to her, it was reality!
Eighteen Years Later, I Still Remember the Fog
My sons aren’t babies anymore.
They’re young men.
Life moved forward.
But I can close my eyes and still picture that road.
I remember the darkness.
I remember those headlights disappearing into thick white fog.
I remember hearing my baby’s cry behind me.
I remember my own voice soothing him.
I remember stopping.
Opening that door.
And finding nothing.
Then I remember something even more disturbing.
I remember watching myself.
A young mother standing beside an empty car in the darkness, searching for her baby.
I can still picture her from outside herself.
Sometimes I wonder whether that was my exhausted brain trying desperately to pull me back toward reality.
I’ll probably never know.
Two Truths Can Exist at Once
Following the Lindsay Clancy trial hasn’t made me more willing to excuse mothers who kill their children.
It has made me more willing to listen when a mother says something inside her mind doesn’t feel right.
There is a difference.
I believe we can have tremendous compassion for women experiencing postpartum depression, frightening postpartum depression symptoms, postpartum hallucinations, or postpartum psychosis symptoms without removing the question of personal responsibility.
I know how disturbing an altered reality can feel. I know what it is like hearing baby crying when baby isn’t crying—and, in my case, becoming so convinced by that false reality that I believed my baby was physically with me when he wasn’t.
My night ended differently.
Eventually, that fog inside my mind lifted. Reality returned. I went home safely to my family, held my babies, loved them, and continued being their protector.
But altered realities do not always have quiet endings.
For some women, severe mental illness can lead into something much darker—situations in which children are harmed, families are destroyed, and lives are changed forever.
That’s the uncomfortable place where compassion and accountability meet.
I can believe a mother’s mind was profoundly unwell without automatically believing she bears no responsibility for what she did while living inside that altered reality.
We can demand better screening.
We can encourage mothers to speak without shame.
We can take frightening symptoms seriously.
We can get women help before a crisis occurs.
And we can still believe in accountability when another human being is harmed.
My experience taught me compassion.
It did not erase my belief in responsibility.
Mostly, it taught me something I wish I had never needed to learn:
There can be moments when the world inside your mind and the world outside of it are not the same.
And sometimes you don’t know which world you’re standing in until you open the back door.
And find it empty.
Where to Find Help for Postpartum Mental Health
If you are experiencing frightening postpartum depression symptoms, postpartum hallucinations, or postpartum psychosis symptoms, please don’t try to carry them alone. Reach out to your doctor or a qualified mental-health professional. If you feel you or your baby may be in immediate danger, seek emergency medical care right away. Postpartum Support International also provides resources to help mothers and families find appropriate professional support.
Blessings,
Mindy
The Off Grid Barefoot Girl
