When the jury found Brenda Lund not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, the DA was furious. Having built a reputation for himself as tough on crime, he could not accept defeat. When the judge sentenced Lund to an undetermined amount of time at Winnebago Mental Health Institute, he railed against moral depravity. Even more specifically, he punished my father by refusing thereafter to accept him as a credible witness in any criminal case in Winnebago County. My dad had been blacklisted, but his exile would not last indefinitely, as years later this same DA would face his own litany of criminal charges for accepting bribes to go easy on drunk driving. Hidden away in his federal prison, maybe he thought about Brenda Lund or other mothers he had prosecuted. Maybe he watched an internal film reel of all his burned bridges raging like wildfire.
I was ten years old the year Brenda Lund slashed her baby and tucked her into a five-gallon pail, eleven years old when my dad told me the vivid details of her story. I remember once asking my brother, Christopher, “When you’re with the family, do you ever feel like you’re floating?” “Yeah,” he said. “It’s called dissociation.” Sometimes my bones turned to liquid and I felt myself side-stroking through time. Newborn babies are nearsighted, able to focus short distances, six to ten inches, the distance between our eyes and theirs, but eventually their eyesight expands. They begin to see color, texture, and greater distances over the course of their newborn development. Growing up, coming of age, and developing a keen awareness of the world are similarly developmental. Brenda Lund was my first lesson in the complex tale of mother love and maternal instinct. Like certain species of birds or water bugs, even some mammals such as polar bears and sloth bears, maybe we were evolutionarily predisposed to devour our offspring in certain extenuating circumstances. We could not predict which urges or primal instincts would emerge from our human selves, and maybe the mysteriousness of motherhood is precisely what elevated it to the level of sacred in my eyes.
For all the glory I attached to motherhood, I could admit that sometimes I grew overwhelmed, as if parenting were a big millstone of which I’d become physically aware, heavy and awkward, in my numb baby-bearing arms. What would happen if I dropped it? Ryan and I rarely, if ever, planned our lives more than two days in advance. We could not look farther into the future than forty-eight hours. “Living in the moment” was equal parts philosophy and necessity. It would have been unbearable to think of school supplies lists in June; never mind middle school, high school, car accidents, sickness, college applications, weddings, and all the meltdowns, crises, and sleepless nights in between.
Some days, when our kids were hyped up on fructose and YouTube, because I was teaching new classes or because Ryan had a trial, we’d come suddenly to a breathless halt and wonder, with self-accusation and immense guilt, whether we’d ruined our children. We’d cope by telling jokes about their brains oozing from their ears from “too much screen time,” and we’d say something like, “You’re going to turn into a donut if you don’t drop the iPad immediately and eat these carrots.”
We were far, far away from being perfect parents, in some realm we could not name. Leo’s fingernails were black with dirt, and I’d swear I’d just bathed him. “I’m going to find that pot of soil you’ve been digging in,” I’d joke, to make it all OK. How often, I’d ask myself, do good mothers change the sheets on their children’s beds, and if I sprayed ours with lavender mist and simply changed the pillowcases instead, would that suffice? If I followed up candy binges with fresh grapes, might I be reinstated to good-mother status? “We’re keeping it together with spit and baling twine,” we’d say, only the twine was often unraveling or rubbing our skin raw.
Mothers like Tina Last continued to lurk on the periphery of my existence, so when Ryan called to say this woman—the neighborhood voodoo doll, my darkest possible alter ego—had been appointed by the public defender’s office as his latest client, after four years in criminal defense, I felt entirely responsible for her fateful emergence in our lives. She was my evil twin, my doppelgänger, the worst-case scenario for how motherhood might end, and she had finally and officially debuted in our lives, as I’d always known she would. The state of Wisconsin had charged Tina Last with child neglect after a neighbor observed her children without any signs of adult supervision for days on end and reported the family to CPS. I wondered how truly awful the criminal complaint would be, hopeful that as many degrees of bad parenting as possible would separate us.
Upon reading the initial observations, I remained a bit worried. Tina Last fed her kids Pop-Tarts for breakfast and PB&J for dinner, relying on the free hot lunch from school for their midday meal. That didn’t seem like child neglect. Hadn’t Ryan and I resorted to PB&J for dinner dozens of times, and although we packed four-healthy-food-groups cold lunches for Irie, Leo, and Fern, hadn’t we threatened hot lunch—the dreaded “pulsing heart” chicken breast—when we’d been too tired some mornings to stand at the counter, using the food pyramid as a checklist? What else did investigators expect from a mother of four,
