Key Points
Actress and writer Jenny Mollen has authored a nuanced defense of a social media post likening her 12-year-old son to a “toxic boyfriend.”
In the now-deleted caption, Mollen joked, “Your eldest son will be the most toxic boyfriend you ever have.”
In a blog post exploring the fallout, Mollen explained, “Parenthood has demanded a level of commitment and self-sacrifice from me that, in any other context, would be considered pathological.”
Jenny Mollen is offering up contextualization, explanation, and defense for a social media post in which she likened her 12-year-old son to a “toxic boyfriend.”
“Last week, the internet called me a child molester for posting a photo of myself holding my son,” Mollen wrote in the introduction to a lengthy blog post shared on Monday, which sifted through the fallout from that May 25 Instagram post. The image of Mollen embracing Sid, whom she shares with ex Jason Biggs, remains on her profile, but the caption has been deleted. In the blog post, she notes that it originally contained the line, “Your eldest son will be the most toxic boyfriend you ever have.”
In spite of the pushback, Mollen dug her heels in over the joke. “And he is,” she wrote on “The Best Friend Experience with Jenny Mollen” blog. “Parenthood has demanded a level of commitment and self-sacrifice from me that, in any other context, would be considered pathological. I’d never accept this kind of relationship under any other circumstances. And yet here I am, jumping through fire, constantly striving for affection and approval, waiting by the phone for a guy who can’t even drive.”
Mollen explained that the picture that prompted the controversial caption “was taken on a Monday night after he returned from a weekend away. There’s something devastating about realizing your children can survive without you, that they can be content somewhere else. Happy, even. And that the security you once felt in being their entire world was never meant to last.”
She then reflected on her own mother, who told her when she was Sid’s age that she “she didn’t know how to be a mom anymore.” The lingering pain from their strained relationship led Mollen to believe “that I could avoid the mistakes that shaped my childhood by building a life around choosing carefully enough, by loving carefully enough that I’d always be protected from loss. But life unfolds in ways we can’t control.” And further, “When I became a mom, I wasn’t prepared for how thoroughly a love like this would break me. How it would turn me inside out and make knots of my viscera.”
For all those reasons, Mollen has come to understand that “children can feel like our one opportunity at redemption in this lifetime. They offer us the chance to become the very thing we need to save ourselves, instead of spending our lives waiting to be saved. But redemption is not the same as relief.”
Raising Sid and Lazlo, 8, with Biggs, from whom she separated last month, has taught her that “loving a child is a vomit-inducing free fall, and I’ve spent the last twelve years writing about it. Not the highlight reel. Not the version that comes on Christmas cards or frames before you own them. The version where I’m trapped in my son’s bunk bed for ten consecutive years… The version where I’m on my hands and knees, covered in somebody else’s blood and vomit, promising them that everything is going to be okay.”
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Jenny Mollen with her two sons
Credit: Jenny Mollen/Instagram
Returning to the subject of the photo and its caption, Mollen said she’s made a similar joke to friends since Sid’s birth in 2014. “When I look at that picture, I see a 12-year-old boy who still wants his mother, and a woman trying to hold on to closeness and connection at a time in her life when everything else is changing… I spent the last decade begging for five minutes alone, only to get exactly what I asked for. And it has broken my heart. It will break your heart, too,” she said, urging her readers to not “let anyone shame you for holding on while you still can.”
Mollen met Biggs on the set of the 2008 romantic comedy My Best Friend’s Girl. They were engaged and married that same year. In May, the pair announced their separation after 16 years. A representative for the couple told EW at the time that they are still on “great terms” and “remain focused” on coparenting their sons.
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