Struggling, sleep-deprived moms are propping up their phones in their bathroom, hitting the record button and throwing ice at it while screaming for a whole minute. “Instead of having a screaming match with my toddler,” one mom wrote in a social media post, “I throw ice into my tub. It allows me to feel angry without being destructive.” Moms are also setting up ring lights to film themselves hysterically sobbing in front of their small children. Others are filming their crying babies with the caption “Me too, Lindsay,” in solidarity with Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mom who killed her three children—ages 5, 3, and 8 months—and is currently on trial for murder.
This brain rot has spread like wildfire, as the algorithms made sure it would, and in the momosphere—the network of TikTok moms and mommy influencers and mom bloggers—it has been almost universally embraced as a healthy, liberating way for mothers to exhibit their rage. Part of this comes from how Clancy’s case has been understood: Her defense argues that she was in the grips of postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings, and has pointed to the many medications prescribed by different doctors to treat her depression symptoms in the months leading up to the killings. To the moms of TikTok, an overwhelmed and overmedicated mom practically begging for help is something, maybe an extreme version, of what they see in the mirror. Which is why Clancy has been claimed as a martyr, rather than a monster who acts as a cautionary tale.
