So Where Were the Children’s Fathers?

How do you untangle the web of responsibility when a mother’s illness leads to the death of her kids?

That’s the question we’ve been grappling with these past few weeks, as it plays out for a national audience in court, in the murder trial of Andrea Yates in Houston, and locally in the tragic Simi Valley case of Marlene Heath.

The circumstances differ significantly. Yates has confessed to drowning her five children but is pleading innocent by reason of insanity. A conviction could bring her the death penalty. Heath was sentenced last month to one year in jail after she admitted leaving her two toddlers alone in a hot van in her driveway while she took a three-hour nap after a drinking binge. Her sons died of heat exhaustion.

But there is one theme that joins the two: the notion of culpability. Both mothers claim to have been incapacitated when their children died--Yates by recurring mental illness and Heath by her long-standing addiction to alcohol.

And a question has emerged in both cases: Where were the husbands--the children’s fathers--when all of this was going on?

Last week, I wrote that Heath deserved stiffer punishment for the deaths of her two sons. Nearly every reader who wrote or e-mailed in response agreed.

“I think Marlene Heath should sit in a car with the windows rolled up for at least three hours when it’s 90 degrees outside and see how it felt to her little kids,” e-mailed one woman, in a typical response.

Several readers drew connections between the Heath case and the murder trial of Yates.

“I ache for those poor kids--all seven of them,” wrote Julie Riddle, a mother of three. And both fathers “bear some responsibility and should be held accountable, in some way,” she said.

Yates had been previously hospitalized with mental problems, had tried to commit suicide twice and, by the time she killed her children, was frequently psychotic, paced the floor in circles, pulled out chunks of her hair and refused to bathe or eat.

Her husband had brought in his mother to help with the children, but Andrea’s best friend testified that he ignored her pleas that he get her the treatment she needed.

That makes Russell Yates “equally guilty for killing those kids,” wrote one reader, a grandfather with two grown children. “I think he ought to be on trial as well.”

Heath’s husband’s inaction drew harsh comments as well.

“What if Mr. Heath had threatened to move out and take the children with him? Might that have been the ‘rock bottom’ event that would have snapped her out of her denial?” asked Jackie McCoy of South Pasadena.

The husbands of both women failed in “their duty to protect their children,” e-mailed another reader, who described herself as “a mother of three who fights addiction every day of my life.

“The hardest part of being a parent is choosing your child’s health and safety above ALL ELSE,” she wrote. “If they are to argue that their wives were too ill to care for their children, then they must bear the responsibility for having knowingly left their children with an incompetent person.”

I’m sure Phillip Heath and Russell Yates would say their wives were great and loving mothers ... when they weren’t either drunk or catatonic.

Therapists consider our mutual reliance on denial folie a deux, a sort of conspiracy of silence that enables a couple to pretend that everything in their fractured lives is OK.

“It’s like saying ‘We’re both nuts, but we agree together not to notice and not to say anything to anyone else,”’ explains psychiatrist Martin Karasch, medical director of a chemical dependency program in Laguna Beach.

Certainly, it’s hard to disrupt a family, to deprive your children of a parent who, at his or her worst, might be dangerous, but at best is kind and loving.

“You think of how much it’ll shake your life, so you keep telling yourself it can’t be that bad,” said one reader, who admitted she “shopped from doctor to doctor because I didn’t want to hear what they were saying.”

She recently committed her husband to a residential program for treatment of schizophrenia and abuse of alcohol. She shudders now when she thinks of all the times she put her children at risk by leaving them alone with their dad while she traveled for her job.

“Somehow, denial felt more comfortable than the very scary reality that something was wrong,” she said.

But the reality is less frightening that the alternative, testified some readers.

“It took just once,” said a San Diego nurse who left her alcoholic husband six years ago, after she learned that, while she was out of town for her father’s funeral, her husband left their children--one 9 and the other 4--home alone at night while he went out drinking.

“I changed the locks, threw his stuff out on the front lawn and never let him back in when I found out what he’d done,” she wrote. “It’s up to the parents who are not in the ‘disease’ to make sure the kids are not endangered.”

Because our children can’t afford the luxury of delusions about a parent’s fitness, or storybook versions of happy families that blind us to destructive demons.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Tuesdays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@la times.com.