Just how screwed up can it make you to get pregnant by an affair, hide your pregnancy from everyone by claiming a wheat allegy made you bloat up, and tell the lover (who was buying baby stuff for the kid
) you're going to leave your husband, but then not?
Pretty screwed up.
Enough, apparently, that you might give birth on the toilet and not notice it until you've flushed the newborn, and then to not call for help, put the nonresponsive kid in the trunk of the car and block it out entirely. At least that's the story of a UK woman, Claire Jones, who was just given a suspended sentence of 48 weeks for concealing the birth. The inquest said it was impossible to tell if the baby was stillborn or died from drowning.
Let me admit something: I feel dirty writing about a tragedy like this. It's voyeurism to a nasty degree. I can't pretend to judge whether Jones is telling the truth about how unaware she was of what was happening and how she blocked it all out—I do believe it's possible, because our brains go to some crazy lengths to protect us from things that it deems to much for us to take. As hard as it is to imagine not knowing you've given birth, it comes up often enough that it must happen sometimes.
What strikes me about this one though, as opposed to the teenagers of whom we usually hear stories like this, is that Jones apparently wanted the baby and wasn't actually pretending to herself that she wasn't pregnant. And yet, it seems, from her description, that the stress of the lying and the cheating by itself was still enough to put her that far over the edge. I think this should be a testament to destructive power of lying. Keeping a secret like that is destructive and crazy-making, pure and simple.
But it also speaks to a society that makes adultery out to be the worst thing in the world, something that it's OK to be violent over and even kill over, something that is assumed to automatically destroy families (although the reality is most marriages survive it). This is the attitude even though it's incredibly common and by some arguments both sexes are wired for it. That kind of culture can make fessing up more scary than giving birth alone and unaided.
I obviously don't know that that's the problem here and that this particular thing wouldn't have happened in a culture with a different attitude. Sometimes people just break, or just do awful, inexplicable things that can't be blamed even partially on external conditions. But awful stuff like this is only relevant to the rest of us if we're going to ask why, and is there anything society could do differently. And often there is.
I grieve for her, her baby, her husband, the baby's bio dad, and everyone else involved. May healing come in whatever form it's needed.
More by this author:
