Thanks for this insightful post.
i would think she would be thinking about the what-ifs that could happen by not helping LE to get to the truth? Like...what if he gets by with a lighter sentence and what if he does this to our biological child?
I don't think that is a part of the ego-protective process.
Most of us have a difficult time with the notion that a father could kill a child and then stuff her body in a culvert. And we are watching from afar. Even so, many of us are dealing with that difficulty by separating him from what we know of human interaction--he was simply a monster, inhuman, and by declaring how WE could never have responded as SM is responding.
SM's current reality is that the man she trusted and married and likely climbed into bed with every night murdered their child and hid her body. First off, there is nothing she can currently do to change that reality. No amount of legal "justice" can bring her child back or ever restore her to that place of trust. I recall when someone I knew called it quits on a marriage that was moving in abusive directions and had in fact been pretty dysfunctional for awhile. She had children and was physically and emotionally overwhelmed. She also had some counseling/mentoring connections and I remember what her closest mentor advised her to do, which was to focus only on those things that were immediately necessary, which in her case were caring for the children and going to work every day. Now, there were many other things that she was going to have to face up to immediately--things like the divorce process, possible housing change, how to augment her income facing single parenthood, all that. But first she had a critical need to focus only on the daily tasks of simple survival.
There's a reason we take casseroles to people who are dealing with the death of a loved one. It's because in the freshness and shock of grief, even such simple things as making a sandwich become overwhelming and we need the cocoon of protection and care that friends and loved ones can provide.