\
  The most prestigious law school admissions discussion board in the world.
BackRefresh Options Favorite

NYT: It's heroic for women to abandon children to fuck strangers

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/14/movies/bad-moms-lost-daug...
Smoky Spot
  01/14/22
Mommy Is Going Away for a While The antiheroine of the mome...
Drab Stage
  01/15/22
these people are genuinely sickb
Fluffy Mental Disorder Office
  01/14/22
...
Spruce Station Sneaky Criminal
  01/14/22
...
Smoky Spot
  01/14/22
...
aquamarine stag film twinkling uncleanness
  01/15/22
...
Boyish disgusting heaven lettuce
  01/15/22
...
Fluffy Mental Disorder Office
  01/15/22
and sad.
180 quadroon shrine
  01/15/22
“novels like “I Love You but I’ve Chosen D...
Abusive Stain Public Bath
  01/14/22
Post the full text
infuriating point
  01/15/22
Author: Hess and Marc Aaron Tracy[17] were married on Nov...
filthy hunting ground base
  01/15/22
...
Racy nibblets
  01/15/22
Always
garnet glittery queen of the night patrolman
  01/15/22
...
aquamarine stag film twinkling uncleanness
  01/15/22
US needs to spread American values to the world!!
Offensive telephone
  01/15/22
*preheats oven*
sapphire sickened piazza international law enforcement agency
  01/15/22
TBF, her main points seem to be: 1. There's more judgemen...
trip hideous business firm
  01/15/22
I love you so much GTTR. If you had an identical twin, I wou...
Fluffy Mental Disorder Office
  01/15/22
this is just clever jewish rhetorical trickery. you can't...
sapphire sickened piazza international law enforcement agency
  01/15/22
Yeah but it's not glamorized. It's more like "yes every...
trip hideous business firm
  01/15/22
but 'everyone' doesn't have these thoughts. that's the tric...
sapphire sickened piazza international law enforcement agency
  01/15/22
...
aquamarine stag film twinkling uncleanness
  01/15/22
Fair
trip hideous business firm
  01/15/22
...
Bat Shit Crazy Submissive Gas Station Weed Whacker
  01/15/22
...
rose beta reading party field
  01/15/22
...
adventurous blathering stead
  01/15/22
...
dull tripping pervert
  01/15/22
tcr this is how they get the gullible ones. BTW, this very ...
impertinent mauve ceo
  01/15/22
...
180 quadroon shrine
  01/15/22
...
dark pit
  01/15/22
SIX STEP ATTITUDINAL CHANGE PLAN Step 1. Some practice so o...
mahogany temple athletic conference
  01/15/22
...
Honey-headed talking gaping dilemma
  01/15/22
...
Smoky Spot
  01/15/22
...
Racy nibblets
  01/15/22
this is some xo pearl clutching. I don't think there is a t...
Bisexual out-of-control home dopamine
  01/15/22
Nice to get daily confirmation that satan is real
comical address genital piercing
  01/15/22


Poast new message in this thread



Reply Favorite

Date: January 14th, 2022 8:34 PM
Author: Smoky Spot

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/14/movies/bad-moms-lost-daughter.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43785936)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 10:51 AM
Author: Drab Stage

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.

By Amanda HessIllustrations by Liana Finck

Jan. 14, 2022

Image

Listen to This Article

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

There are so many ways to do motherhood wrong, or so a mother is told. She can be overbearing or remote. She can smother or neglect. She can mother in such a specifically bad way that she is assigned a bad-mom archetype: stage mother, refrigerator mother, “cool mom.” She can hover like a helicopter mom or bully like a bulldozer mom. But the thing she cannot do — the thing that is so taboo it rivals actually murdering her offspring — is leave.

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.

In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film “The Lost Daughter,” she is Leda (played, across two decades, by Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman), a promising translator who deserts her young daughters for several years to pursue her career (and a dalliance with an Auden scholar). In HBO’s “Scenes From a Marriage,” a gender-scrambled remake of Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 mini-series, she is Mira (Jessica Chastain), a Boston tech executive who jets to Tel Aviv for an affair disguised as a work project. And in Claire Vaye Watkins’s autofictional novel “I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness,” she is also Claire Vaye Watkins, a novelist who leaves her infant to smoke a ton of weed, sleep with a guy who lives in a van and confront her own troubled upbringing.

Image

In each case, her children are not abandoned outright; they are left in the care of fathers and other relatives. 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. In the “Sex and the City” reboot “And Just Like That…,” Miranda — now the mother to a teenager — counsels a professor who is considering having children. “There are so many nights when I would love to be a judge and go home to an empty house,” she says. And on Instagram, the airbrushed mirage of mothering is being challenged by displays of raw desperation. The Not Safe for Mom Group, which surfaces confessions of anonymous mothers, pulses with idle threats of role refusal, like: “I want to be alone!!! I don’t want to make your lunch!!”

Being alone: that is the mother’s reasonable and functionally impossible dream. Especially recently, when avenues of escape have been sealed off: schools closed, day care centers suspended, offices shuttered, jobs lost or abandoned in crisis. Now the house is never empty, and also you can never leave. During a pandemic, a plucky middle-class gal can still “have it all,” as long as she can manage job and children simultaneously, from the floor of a lawless living room.

Cards on the table: I am struggling to draft this essay on my phone as my pantsless toddler — banished from day care for 10 days because someone got Covid — wages a tireless campaign to commandeer my device, hold it to his ear and say hewwo. I feel charmed, annoyed and implicated, as I wonder whether his neediness is attributable to some parental defect, perhaps related to my own constant phone use.

Do I want to abandon my child? No, but I am newly attuned to the psychological head space of a woman who does. The Auden scholar of “The Lost Daughter” (played, in an inspired bit of casting, by Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard) entices Leda by quoting Simone Weil: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Attention is a loaded word: It can mean caring for another person, but also a powerful mental focus, and a parent can seldom execute both definitions at once.

Leda wants to attend to her translation work, but she also wants someone to pay attention to her. To be blunt, she wants to work and to have sex. Often in these stories, the two are bound together in a hyper-individualistic fusion of romantic careerism. In “Scenes From a Marriage,” Mira plans to tell her daughter, “I have to go away for work, which is true” — only because she has arranged a professional obligation to facilitate her affair with an Israeli start-up bro. Her gateway drug to abandonment is, as is often the case, a business trip. Mira first strays at a company boat party; Leda tastes freedom at a translation conference; Claire embarks on a reading tour from which she never returns.

The work trip is the Rumspringa of motherhood. Like the mama bird in “Are You My Mother?,” a woman is allowed to leave the nest to retrieve a worm, though someone, somewhere may be noting her absence with schoolmarmish disapproval. In Caitlin Flanagan’s 2012 indictment of Joan Didion, recirculated after Didion’s death, Flanagan dings Didion for taking a film job across the country, leaving her 3-year-old daughter over Christmas.

Image

Still, there is something absurd about the fashioning of work as the ultimate escape. It is only remotely plausible if our desperate mother enjoys a high-status creative position (translator, novelist, thought leader). When other mothers of fiction leave, their fantasies are quickly revealed as delusions. In Nicole Dennis-Benn’s novel “Patsy,” a Jamaican secretary abandons her daughter to pursue an American dream in New York, only to become a nanny caring for someone else’s children. And in Jessamine Chan’s dystopian novel “The School for Good Mothers,” Frida is sleep deprived and drowning in work when she leaves her toddler at home alone for two hours. Though Frida feels “a sudden pleasure” when she shuts the door behind her, her fantasy life is short and bleak: She escapes as far as her office, where she sends emails. For that, she is conscripted into a re-education camp for bad moms.

Five Movies to Watch This Winter

Card 1 of 5

1. “The Power of the Dog”: Benedict Cumberbatch is earning high praise for his performance in Jane Campion’s new psychodrama. Here’s what it took for the actor to become a seething alpha-male cowboy.

2. “Don’t Look Up” : Meryl Streep plays a self-centered scoundrel in Adam McKay's apocalyptic satire. She turned to the “Real Housewives” franchise for inspiration.

3. “King Richard”: Aunjanue Ellis, who plays Venus and Serena Williams’s mother in the biopic, shares how she turned the supporting role into a talker.

4. “Tick, Tick … Boom!”: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut is an adaptation of a show by Jonathan Larson, creator of “Rent.” This guide can help you unpack its many layers.

5. “The Tragedy of Macbeth”: Several upcoming movies are in black and white, including Joel Coen’s new spin on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.”

Each of our absent mothers has her reasons. Leda’s academic husband has prioritized his career over hers, and this makes her decisions legible, even sympathetic. But in “I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness,” Watkins lends her doppelgänger no exculpatory circumstances. Claire has a doula, day care, Obamacare breast pump, tenure-track job, several therapists and the world’s most understanding husband. When she starts sleeping in a hammock on campus, her husband says: “I think it’s cool you’re following your … heart, or … whatever … is happening … out there.” Nothing obvious impedes her from capable mothering, but ​​like Bartleby, the Child-bearer, she would simply prefer not to.

In heaping privileges upon Claire, Watkins suggests that there are burdens of motherhood that cannot be solved with money, lifted by a co-parent or cured by a mental health professional. The trouble is motherhood itself, and its ideal of total selfless devotion. Motherhood had turned Claire into a “blank,” a figure who “didn’t seem to think much” and “had trouble completing her sentences.” As these women discover, their menu of life choices is not so expansive after all. They long to be offered a different position: dad. Claire wants to “behave like a man, a slightly bad one.” As Mira abruptly exits, she assures her husband, “Men do it all the time.”

These women may leave, but they don’t quite get away with it. Mira eventually loses both job and boyfriend and begs for her old life back. Leda’s abandonment becomes a dark secret in a thriller that builds to a violent end. Only Claire is curiously impervious to consequence. She follows her selfish impulses all the way to the desert, where she spends her days crying and masturbating alone in a tent. Then she calls her husband, who flies out to her, happy tot in tow; eventually Claire claims a life where she can “read and write and nap and teach and soak and smoke” and see her daughter on breaks. By exacting no cosmic punishment on Claire, Watkins refuses to facilitate the reader’s judgment. But she also makes it harder to care.

When I was pregnant, I had a fantasy, too. In it I was single, childless, still very young somehow and living out an alternate life in a van in Wyoming. Reading “I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness” broke the spell. As Claire ripped bongs and circled new sexual partners, she struck me not as a monster or a hero but something perhaps worse — boring. Even as these stories work to uncover motherhood’s complex emotional truths, they indulge their own little fiction: that a mother only becomes interesting when she stops being one.

Site Information Navigation

© 2022 The New York Times Company

NYTCoContact UsAccessibilityWork with usAdvertiseT Brand StudioYour Ad ChoicesPrivacy PolicyTerms of ServiceTerms of SaleSite MapHelpSubscriptions

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43787908)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 14th, 2022 8:37 PM
Author: Fluffy Mental Disorder Office

these people are genuinely sickb

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43785954)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 14th, 2022 8:37 PM
Author: Spruce Station Sneaky Criminal



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43785958)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 14th, 2022 8:37 PM
Author: Smoky Spot



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43785960)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 10:36 AM
Author: aquamarine stag film twinkling uncleanness



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43787820)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 10:37 AM
Author: Boyish disgusting heaven lettuce



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43787826)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 10:59 AM
Author: Fluffy Mental Disorder Office



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43787938)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 1:37 PM
Author: 180 quadroon shrine

and sad.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788644)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 14th, 2022 8:39 PM
Author: Abusive Stain Public Bath

“novels like “I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness,”

At least they admit it

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43785970)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 10:32 AM
Author: infuriating point

Post the full text

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43787809)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 10:38 AM
Author: filthy hunting ground base

Author:

Hess and Marc Aaron Tracy[17] were married on Nov. 2, 2019, at Brooklyn Historical Society in Brooklyn, New York, by Rabbi Matt Green.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Hess#Personal_life

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43787833)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 10:57 AM
Author: Racy nibblets



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43787934)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 11:20 AM
Author: garnet glittery queen of the night patrolman

Always

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788042)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 11:27 AM
Author: aquamarine stag film twinkling uncleanness



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788071)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 10:52 AM
Author: Offensive telephone

US needs to spread American values to the world!!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43787912)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 10:58 AM
Author: sapphire sickened piazza international law enforcement agency

*preheats oven*

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43787937)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 11:18 AM
Author: trip hideous business firm

TBF, her main points seem to be:

1. There's more judgement placed on a deadbeat mom than a deadbeat dad. That's absolutely true but not surprising.

2. She seems to cast aside the idea altogether at the end and does not seem to be defending it, merely pointing out the trend:

These women may leave, but they don’t quite get away with it. Mira eventually loses both job and boyfriend and begs for her old life back. Leda’s abandonment becomes a dark secret in a thriller that builds to a violent end. Only Claire is curiously impervious to consequence. She follows her selfish impulses all the way to the desert, where she spends her days crying and masturbating alone in a tent. Then she calls her husband, who flies out to her, happy tot in tow; eventually Claire claims a life where she can “read and write and nap and teach and soak and smoke” and see her daughter on breaks. By exacting no cosmic punishment on Claire, Watkins refuses to facilitate the reader’s judgment. But she also makes it harder to care.

When I was pregnant, I had a fantasy, too. In it I was single, childless, still very young somehow and living out an alternate life in a van in Wyoming. Reading “I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness” broke the spell. As Claire ripped bongs and circled new sexual partners, she struck me not as a monster or a hero but something perhaps worse — boring. Even as these stories work to uncover motherhood’s complex emotional truths, they indulge their own little fiction: that a mother only becomes interesting when she stops being one.

I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness needs to be adapted to film just for this lol:

Only Claire is curiously impervious to consequence. She follows her selfish impulses all the way to the desert, where she spends her days crying and masturbating alone in a tent.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788038)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 11:20 AM
Author: Fluffy Mental Disorder Office

I love you so much GTTR. If you had an identical twin, I would white knight her.



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788043)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 11:21 AM
Author: sapphire sickened piazza international law enforcement agency

this is just clever jewish rhetorical trickery.

you can't come right out and ENDORSE women leaving their kids. so you kind of subliminally implant the acceptability of the idea in a giant equivocal word-salad.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788049)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 11:22 AM
Author: trip hideous business firm

Yeah but it's not glamorized. It's more like "yes everyone has these fleeting thoughts when things get stressful, but these women who do it suck and are boring

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788053)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 11:25 AM
Author: sapphire sickened piazza international law enforcement agency

but 'everyone' doesn't have these thoughts.

that's the trick: they've now normalized the idea that 'everyone has these thoughts' at the cost of some vague, token disapproval (which can later be withdrawn).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788064)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 11:39 AM
Author: aquamarine stag film twinkling uncleanness



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788105)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 11:39 AM
Author: trip hideous business firm

Fair

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788106)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 11:41 AM
Author: Bat Shit Crazy Submissive Gas Station Weed Whacker



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788120)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 11:45 AM
Author: rose beta reading party field



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788141)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 11:59 AM
Author: adventurous blathering stead



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788216)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 12:04 PM
Author: dull tripping pervert



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788233)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 12:11 PM
Author: impertinent mauve ceo

tcr this is how they get the gullible ones. BTW, this very article demonstrates that in 2022 it is NOT true that deadbeat moms get it worse than deadbeat dads. That was absolutely true for a very long time but in our current eat pray love and victim culture, women are glorified if they say or do anything that is self centered especially when (which is always) they can spin some yarn about fighting back against some kind of patriarchal oppression, #metoo, etc. this is another rhetorical tool they use — take some concept that was unobjectionable 5 or 10 years ago but no longer true due to their own “progress” but continue beating the drum to portray a preferred group as a perpetual victim.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788272)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 1:39 PM
Author: 180 quadroon shrine



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788652)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 1:02 PM
Author: dark pit



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788501)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 1:10 PM
Author: mahogany temple athletic conference

SIX STEP ATTITUDINAL CHANGE PLAN

Step 1. Some practice so offensive that it can scarcely be discussed in public is advocated by a RESPECTED expert in a RESPECTED forum.

Step 2. At first, the public is shocked, then outraged.

Step 3. But, the VERY FACT that such a thing could be publicly debated becomes the SUBJECT of the debate.

Step 4. In the process, sheer repetition of the shocking subject under discussion gradually dulls its effect.

Step 5. People then are no longer shocked by the subject.

Step 6. No longer outraged, people begin to argue for positions to moderate the extreme; or, they accept the premise, challenging, instead, the means to ACHIEVE it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788529)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 1:19 PM
Author: Honey-headed talking gaping dilemma



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788567)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 1:14 PM
Author: Smoky Spot



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788543)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 1:15 PM
Author: Racy nibblets



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788550)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 1:17 PM
Author: Bisexual out-of-control home dopamine

this is some xo pearl clutching. I don't think there is a trend of mothers abandoning their children.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788557)



Reply Favorite

Date: January 15th, 2022 1:17 PM
Author: comical address genital piercing

Nice to get daily confirmation that satan is real

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5007628&forum_id=2#43788559)