The Lost Daughter
What If You Regret Having Kids? What if You do Something Terrible? Let's at Least Talk About it.
As this Substack is often about parenting (because it is my daily reality), and as my days are often taken up with parenting, and as I am still often my dark, comflicted self—even amidst all the dressing up and silly games and love and affection I pour out on my daughters—I simply had to watch Maggie Gylenhall’s first directorial feature that came out recently on Netflix, The Lost Daughter—in which a professor vacationing to a small Italian beach town, Leda, comes face to face with a young mother, Nina, and her young daughter whose relationship, in turn, reminds Leda of something in Leda’s own past she has never dealt with and continues to haunt her. It’s a slower film, and yet one that burns with a psychological and thriller-like intensity as we slowly find out through flashbacks why the main character Leda has become the way she is, and what about this certain young mom and her daughter perturbs her so—The Lost Daughter is based on a book by the mysterious author Elena Ferrante. In the film, modern day Leda is played by Olivia Coleman. Coleman’s vulnerable and open face in the film seems to register and react to everything going on in the action around her, telling the characters own silent story and emotions without Leda or Coleman needing to say much of anything. When Leda does speak, she tends to be curt and serious.
“Motherhood is a crushing responsibility” Leda says to a woman who is pregnant and happily expecting on the beach. Leda in her younger days felt that crushing responsibility and lack of self that so happens when kids consume your life, especially if you are a mother or the primary caretaker. The younger version of Leda is played by Jessie Buckley (from I’m Thinking of Ending Things) and she also does a great job registering the anger and frustration that can rise up out of daily situations with ones kids.
The simple way to describe The Lost Daughter is that it’s about the dark side of motherhood—the complexities of both loving and resenting your kids that can happen to some women—and about how certain choices can haunt us. Fathers abandon their kids all the time of course, but it’s a bigger cultural sin for a mother to. As if it’s breaking some natural bond in preternatural way.
The Lost Daughter is not a perfect film, but I think it’s an important one for the topics it brings up. It’s ambiguous ending lends itself to arthouse theater, but it has just enough suspense to keep you interested and watching. It’s not a popcorn watch however, and probably should come with a certain trigger warning for some women (or stay-at-home-parents, ha).
I mean, I love staying home with my kids. I really do. I even like cooking dinner and meal planning. But what I really hate are the never-ending chores—laundry, dishes, picking up toys, diapers, wipes, washing bottles. It’s fine at first. I’m a homebody and I don’t mind the work. But day after day it starts to get to you. Along with the never-ending nature of the job of childrearing itself. You’re never off. It’s a 12 hour shift wherein you might have to wake up at night with your clients too. At least other people in their 9-5 jobs get a lunch break and a government mandated 10-minute smoke break every few hours.
I tend do okay in the mornings, but the afternoons start to drag and by the time Cat comes home I’m either a wildly impatient with everything or else dead—inside and out.
The days are long and full of joy but also frustration and tedium. Sometimes, especially in a pandemic, I feel like I’m in that book Room, by Emma Donoghue,(adapted into a movie with Brie Larson) where a woman and her son have been held kidnapped and held captive and never left their house for years on end (covid is the kidnapper). One night I pick a fight with Cat on Friday night after I’ve had a couple beers (never a good idea) and tell her how frustrated I am.
“I regret having kids,” I say to her. Not sure how much I mean what I’ve just said. Sort of. Sort of not. I say it in such an extreme manner mainly to show her unbearable my days can feel.
In reality, if I can ever take a step back and look at things not through some clouded fog of anxiety and exhaustion, I often realize that I was simply tired for a couple days or nights or even weeks. Emerson, for a period of time, had been waking up for an hour and a half each morning at three or four or five in and I was simply fucking exhausted from this. Was Emerson having another sleep regression? Was she sick? Who knew? It all never ends! There’s always something.
Abandoning your kids is not much talked about of course and I even refrain from sharing too many of my thoughts about it here. But I’m sure every parent has had days or hours when the dark thoughts come. What if my life had been ---? What if this? What if that? What if I could just get away? Go away? Start over? There was at time when men would do this of course. They might even start another family on the other side of the hill, as if they just got it wrong the first time and the second family was sure to be better. When the reality is, parenting can be a crushing responsibility for all involved.
In some ways, I wonder if us millennial parents are just weaker or more selfish or prone to complaining more about parenting (we probably are). And yet I think it’s also better to talk about these things than just grin and bear it and get a divorce once the kids are out of the house or have an affair or a mid-life crisis or whatever else happens with people (especially from our parent’s generation).
We (especially the younger generation) are getting better about talking about all sorts of mental health issues—let’s keep the conversation going around parenting and mental health as well. Because if you’re mentally healthy, your kids will be too.