Mommy is going away for a while

There are so many ways to fail at motherhood, or so they tell a mother.

May be bossy or aloof.

It can stifle or neglect.

You can go wrong in motherhood in such a specific way that you are assigned a bad mom archetype:

the stage mom, the refrigerator mom, the permissive mom.

She can be always on the lookout, like a helicopter mom, or be intimidating, like an anti-hero mom.

But what he cannot do, that which is so taboo that it rivals murdering his offspring, is leave.

The mother who abandons her children haunts family narratives.

He becomes a creepy, tabloid-esque figure, an exotic exception to the common figure of the hopeless father, or a sketch in the background of a plot where his absence gives the protagonist a story of origin that drives it.

This figure elicits ridicule (think of the wacky American president played by Meryl Streep in “Don't Look Up” who forgets to save her son while fleeing the apocalypse) or pity (see “Parallel Mothers,” in which a actress abandons her daughter for lousy roles in television shows).

But lately the missing mother provokes a new response: respect.

In Maggie Gyllenhaal's film “The Dark Daughter,” the abandoning mother is Leda (played, over two decades, by Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman), an up-and-coming translator who abandons her young daughters for several years to pursue her career (and to have an affair with an expert on Auden's work).

In HBO's "Marriage Secrets," a gender-reversed remake of Ingmar Bergman's 1973 miniseries, the mother is Mira (Jessica Chastain), a Boston technology executive who he flies to Tel Aviv, Israel, to have an affair disguised as a work project.

And in Claire Vaye Watkins' fictional autobiography, “I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness,” the mother is Claire Vaye Watkins, a novelist who leaves her baby behind to smoke a lot of pot, sleep with a guy who lives in a van and confront his own troubled upbringing.

In all these cases, the children are not completely abandoned; They are cared for by their parents and other relatives.

When a man leaves like this, it's not unusual.

When a woman does, she becomes a monster or perhaps the anti-heroine of a dark maternal fantasy.

Feminism has given women choices, but a choice also represents exclusion, and women, as people, don't always know what they want.

As these protagonists grapple with their own decisions, they also run up against the limits of that freedom, revealing how women's choices are rarely socially supported but always harshly judged.

A mother who loses her children is a nightmare.

The title of “The Dark Daughter” refers in part to such an incident, when a girl disappears on the beach.

But a mother abandoning her children is a daydream, an imagined but repressed alternative life.

In “And Just Like That…,” the follow-up to the television series “Sex and the City,” Miranda, now the mother of a teenager, advises a teacher who is considering having children.

“There are so many nights I would love to be a judge and come home to an empty house,” he says.

On Instagram, the airbrushed illusion of motherhood is being challenged by displays of stark desperation.

The group Not Safe for Mom, which publishes confessions of anonymous mothers, throbs with empty threats of rejection of the maternal role such as:

“I want to be alone! I don't want to make your lunch!!”

Being alone is a mother's reasonable and functionally impossible dream.

Especially in recent times, when the escape routes have been sealed off:

Schools and offices closed, daycares suspended, jobs lost or abandoned in crisis.

Now the house is never empty, and you can't leave either.

During a pandemic, a fearless middle-class girl can still “have it all,” as long as she can handle work and kids at the same time, from a living room with no laws or rules to follow.

Every absent mother has her reasons.

The academic married to Leda has prioritized his career over hers, and this makes his decisions understandable and even empathetic.

But in “I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness,” Watkins doesn't give his fictional evil doppelganger any exculpatory circumstances.

Ugh I was having feelings so I made a Bumble and now I have to figure out how to delete Bumble.

— Morgan T Mon Nov 26 03:51:10 +0000 2018

Claire has a doula, daycare, a breast pump thanks to Obamacare, a steady job virtually guaranteed for life, several therapists, and the most understanding husband in the world.

When she begins to sleep in a hammock on campus, her husband tells her:

“I think it's great that you're following your…heart, or…whatever…is going on.”

Nothing obvious prevents her from being a capable mother, but, like Bartleby, the giver of life would actually prefer not to.

By empowering Claire, Watkins suggests that there are burdens of motherhood that cannot be solved with money, lightened with the help of the other parent, or cured by a mental health professional.

The problem is motherhood itself and its ideal of total selfless devotion.

Motherhood had made Claire a “blank space,” a figure who “didn't seem to think much” and who “had difficulty completing her sentences.”

As these women discover, their menu of life choices isn't all that extensive after all.

They long to be offered a different position: Daddy's.

Claire wants to “be a bit of a bad man.”

When Mira abruptly leaves, she assures her husband:

“Men do it all the time.”

These women can leave, but they don't completely get away with it.

In the end, Mira loses both her job and her boyfriend and begs for her old life back.

Leda's abandonment becomes a dark secret in a thriller with a violent denouement.

Claire is the only one who is curiously immune to the consequences.

She follows her selfish impulses into the desert, where she spends her days crying and masturbating alone in a tent.

Then she calls for her husband, who flies out for her, happy baby and all; in the end, she Claire claims a life where she can "read and write, nap, teach, relax in a bathtub and smoke," and see her daughter on breaks.

By failing to mete out a cosmic punishment on Claire, Watkins refuses to ease the reader's judgment.

But it also makes it harder for us to care.

When I was pregnant, I had a fantasy too.

In it, she was single, childless, still very young, and living an alternate life in a pickup truck in Wyoming.

Reading “I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness” broke the spell.

While Claire was smoking weed bongs and having new sexual partners, she seemed to me neither a monster nor a hero, but perhaps worse: she was boring.

Though these stories attempt to reveal the complex emotional truths of motherhood, they indulge in their own fiction:

the one where a mother only becomes interesting when she stops being interesting.

The anti-heroine of the moment, in movies like "The Lost Daughter" and novels like "I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness," commits a mother's worst sin: abandoning her children. (Liana Finck/The New York Times)

The anti-heroine of the moment, in movies like "The Lost Daughter" and novels like "I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness", commits the worst sin of a mother: abandoning her children. (Liana Finck/The New York Times)

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