Mommy Is Going Away for a While

 

 

The antiheroine of the moment, in movies like “The Lost Daughter” and novels like “I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness,” commits the mother’s ultimate sin: abandoning her children.

 

 

"The mother who abandons her children haunts our family narratives. She is made into a lurid tabloid figure, an exotic exception to the common deadbeat father. Or she is sketched into the background of a plot, her absence lending a protagonist a propulsive origin story. This figure arouses our ridicule (consider Meryl Streep’s daffy American president in “Don’t Look Up,” who forgets to save her son as she flees the apocalypse) or our pity (see “Parallel Mothers,” where an actress has ditched her daughter for lousy television parts). But lately the vanishing mother has provoked a fresh response: respect."

When a man leaves in this way, he is unexceptional. When a woman does it, she becomes a monster, or perhaps an antiheroine riding out a dark maternal fantasy. Feminism has supplied women with options, but a choice also represents a foreclosure, and women, because they are people, do not always know what they want. As these protagonists thrash against their own decisions, they also bump up against the limits of that freedom, revealing how women’s choices are rarely socially supported but always thoroughly judged.A mother losing her children is a nightmare. The title of “The Lost Daughter” refers in part to such an incident, when a child disappears at the beach. But a mother leaving her children — that’s a daydream, an imagined but repressed alternate life."

read article by AMANDA HESS