Mommy Is Going Away for Awhile

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.

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.