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Struggling Mother

I can't say I enjoyed The Lost Daughter but there were many quality moments throughout the movie. One of my favorites came towards the end of the movie where Leda describes herself as an unnatural mother. We see her trying to overachieve as a mother of two young girls. Her influence on their little lives is oversize and matches their level of clinginess to her. Leda is the sun and they can only reflect her light or be in her shadow. In the phase of life the girls are shown in the movie, it seems like they cannot discover the world and need mother to show the way and shine the light. This gets Leda beyond the point of exhaustion and she abandons them. Some element of post-partum depression is alluded to and then there is the extra marital affair that presumably helps her cope with it all.

This is something many an overzealous mother is not told when she has just given birth - there is a fine line between being supportive to children and being the tree that does not allow young plants to grow in its shade, fight on their own terms without turning parasitic. Perhaps some of that zeal is driven by motherhood feeling unnatural yet having a high bar for what a good mother looks like. So the woman pulls all the stops to deliver on good motherhood and like Leda comes a point where she explodes. She is fully depleted and has nothing left to give.

Explosion manifests its self in a myriad of ways - the one depicted in the movie is possibly the more mundane way to burst for such a woman. Of all the mothers I have known in my life including myself as mother to J, I have only seen a couple that found their natural stride in the state of motherhood - they struck the perfect balance. I was and am so far from that -  I should consider myself lucky to have made it thus far without implosion.

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