Evil Doesn't Ask Anything of Us

Photo by Haberdoedas on Unsplash

My fourteen-year-old asked me what I thought about the mother on trial for killing her three children.

She’s studying child development this semester, and they’ve been learning about postpartum depression. This case landed in the middle of her homework in a way it probably wouldn’t have a year ago.

She couldn’t understand how a mother could do that to her own children.

I knew the easy answer already. She was evil. Conversation over.

Instead, I told my daughter that postpartum depression can go far past sadness. In rare cases it tips into psychosis: hallucinations, delusions, losing touch with reality completely.

I was careful not to say that’s what happened in this case. I don’t know that. A courtroom full of people is still trying to determine it, and I can’t do that from my couch.

Sometimes a person does something horrifying because of severe mental illness. Sometimes they do it for reasons that have nothing to do with illness at all. From the outside, especially when the outcome is unthinkable, we’re quick to decide which one we’re looking at.

She got quiet. Then her face changed.

If you have a kid this age, you know the look. Old enough to understand what you’re saying, young enough that you can still watch one of their assumptions about the world disappear in real time.

She didn’t ask the next question directly. Could that happen to you?

I answered it anyway. I told her that if I ever felt myself becoming afraid of my own thoughts, disconnected from reality, or like I might hurt myself or someone else, I would tell her father. I would tell a doctor. I would say it out loud.

She needed to know that asking for help wouldn’t make me dangerous. Hiding that I needed it might.

I didn’t give her the monster talk. I gave her the mother talk.

I’ve been thinking about it since. There are explanations adults love because they let us put a locked door between ourselves and terrible things. Evil is one of them.

Call someone evil, and you don’t have to wonder whether anybody noticed she was unraveling. Whether she asked for help. Whether the help was enough.

You don’t have to explain uncertainty to a fourteen-year-old.

I could have told her there are good mothers and bad mothers, good people and monsters, and she’d have slept easier that night. But she’s old enough to notice the world doesn’t divide itself that cleanly. She’s going to watch adults meet people at their worst and explain them in one sentence, before anyone even has the facts.

I’m not trying to teach her to excuse terrible things. I’m trying to teach her to resist the relief of a simple explanation.

Because evil asks almost nothing of us. Illness does. It makes us ask who knew, who tried, whether there were warning signs, whether there was treatment, whether it failed.

Those questions don’t undo what happened. They don’t make dead children less dead.

They just refuse to turn tragedy into something simple enough for the rest of us to feel safe from it.

I don’t know if I explained any of this perfectly. But I didn’t hand her a monster so she could sleep better.

She’s fourteen. She’s old enough to know the scarier answer is that the person everyone wants to call a monster was a human being first.