You have the cheek to claim that you’re the mother, Molly? Shame on you and your family for this cruel posturing

OF all the nauseating, stomach-churning, selfserving stuff that Molly Martens and her family have put out over the past few weeks, what her uncle trotted out in a galling interview hits a new low. He said: ‘Molly is their mother. A woman can give birth and a man can have children, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be good parents.’

Not content with bad-mouthing Jason Corbett, a dead man, not content with adding to the distress of his bereaved family and children, now some of the grieving widow’s clan are effectively targeting his dead first wife, too.

‘Motherhood is earned,’ Molly’s uncle Michael Earnest said in a blood-boiling interview with Newstalk yesterday, implying that she’s the first woman in the lives of the orphaned Corbett children to have deserved that honour. Their actual, and only, mother Mags died from an asthma attack when Sarah was 12 weeks old and Jack just a toddler aged two, and for that she has drawn the Martenses’ sly criticism. ‘Molly,’ Michael Earnest went on, ‘is an unreal mother.’ Well, at least he got that bit right.

It must be hard for the extended Martens family, with their seeming sense of entitlement and their high standing in the lawenforcement community in the USA, to find themselves thwarted by an ordinary family from Ireland.

Outrage

They must be people who are not used to losing and, in their apparent outrage and indignation and disbelief at being bested, the mask of concern for these orphaned children looks to have slipped.

So here is Michael Earnest talking about the removal of Jack and Sarah Corbett from the care of Molly Martens, a person of interest in their father’s killing, after a bitter but carefully mediated custody battle: ‘It was the most heart-wrenching scene I have ever had to be part of.’

And whose fault, Michael, was that? Now that Jack and Sarah’s actual father was lying cold in the morgue?

Molly Martens and her father have apparently given conflicting accounts of what happened before they called the emergency services to a ‘domestic disturbance’ on the night of August 2. They first said a fatal blow from a baseball bat was struck during an ‘ argument’, but later they reportedly made claims of self-defence. Either way, the police are apparently not looking for any outside parties for the killing of Jason Corbett.

So if Molly’s parting from the children was ‘heart-wrenching’, Michael, then how would you describe Jason’s parting from the chil- dren he adored? It appears increasingly clear to me that Molly Martens seems more concerned with herself than the children. She wants them, regardless of what’s best for them or their true parents’ wishes, and she’s going to have them. I imagine that before, Molly’s only ever had to stamp her pretty foot to get what she wanted.

Just consider the self- serving material she’s been posting on Facebook which is bound to disrupt the children’s attempts to settle into their new home, since they returned to Limerick.

‘Wherever you are, my love will find you,’ she gushed. ‘I was never the mom who was happy it was time for school again. I savoured my summers with you, my kids, my best friends. I would do anything right now to be getting you ready for third and fifth grade today; to be brushing out the tangles and making back-to-school glutenfree pancakes, to be packing your lunches with notes of love, and waiting all day to see how it went. I miss you munchkins.’

Happy

Nice try, but few would read this simply as the heartfelt lament of a bereft mother: this looks like mind games being played with a couple of vulnerable children. Mentioning their ‘third and fifth grade’ classes to invoke the friends they are almost certainly missing, reminding them of happy domestic scenes – cooking pancakes, brushing Sarah’s hair, packing their lunches – without mentioning the reason this happy scene has been disturbed.

When she sees pictures of them, Molly says, she ‘feels the snow on your mittens’, and remembers toasting marshmallows round the firepit – again, all likely to whet any homesickness they might be feeling. If Molly Martens cared about these children, she would be doing all she could to ease them into their new lives. Consider, too, this rather telling little vignette from Michael Earnest’s interview yesterday: The Martenses ‘took the extended family to see the children in the courthouse’, during the custody battle, and ‘Molly took photo albums with her to show them to the children, to try to lift their spirits’. I don’t think she was trying to lift their spirits. I think she was trying to supplant these grieving children’s memories of their dead dad with carefree images of happier times.

I’ll go out on a limb, here, and speculate that Jason Corbett didn’t appear in many of those pictures, no more than he features in the shots she’s been posting on Facebook for Jack and Sarah to see. And I can’t think of anything more cunning than attempting to manipulate the emotions of newly bereaved children during a court battle. That’s not just devious: that’s cruel.

Fraud

Jack and Sarah, said Michael Earnest, are ‘the sweetest, politest, most wonderful children. I’m not taking one thing from their father, but the majority of what they’ve got is from their mother.’ (Their real mother, you’ll have noticed, doesn’t merit an acknowledgement.) But, he went on, ‘Molly has not lost faith that her children will be returned to her’ – as though they’d been spirited away by a band of evil Irish childsnatchers.

Sorry, Molly, but the facts are these: you’re not their mother, the late Mags Fitzpatrick is.

Perhaps by grabbing every opportunity to address us simple bumpkins, and by repeating it often enough, the Martens family reckon they’ll convince us that Molly really is their mother. But she is not. It has been reported that she pretended to her neighbours that she was their birth mother: but as a matter of simple fact, she is not. The closest she could ever have been was their adoptive mother: and Jason seemingly went to great lengths to make sure she was not. He specifically nominated his sister and her husband as guardians because he did not want Molly to care for his children in the event of his death.

The Old Testament Book of Kings tells how King Solomon, faced with two women claiming the same baby, used his great judgment to trick the fraud into revealing herself. He drew his sword and said the fairest thing was to cut the baby in half. One of the women said, ‘It shall be neither mine nor yours – divide it.’ But the other cried, ‘Don’t kill him, give the baby to her.’ The king had his answer. The true mother was the one who would rather lose her child than see it torn apart.

King Solomon would have little difficulty in deciding who it is that cares most for Jack and Sarah Corbett, and where it is that they truly belong. And when she and her family next come here with another selfserving interview, a little more judgment wouldn’t go astray.