Culture

Modern novels, films, and television shows are a sobering reflection of society's vastly different expectations for moms and dads.

The female protagonists in Catherine Texier’s “Breakup: The End of a Love Story” (1998) and Elena Ferrante’s “The Days of Abandonment” (2002) both respond to the discovery of a husband’s affair with a state of near paralysis followed by fits of intense rage directed at everyone and everything in their vicinity. “I get that people don’t want to read about the adult diapers you wear after you have a baby,” she said in How much of this is cultural, and how much of this is biological? In Leila Slimani’s “The Perfect Nanny,” the children are literally sacrificed to the alter of trying to be a perfect mom. As the poet Sarah Vap writes in “Winter: Effulgences and Devotions,” her 2019 book-length exploration of how the demands of motherhood have drained her creative output, “I am losing language as my children are gaining theirs. In direct contrast to social media’s (particularly Facebook and Instagram, which have been infiltrated by “ [momfluencer” content](https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/a35266612/motherhood-instagram-influencers/)) portrayal of “an idealized fantasy of motherhood at odds with the lived experience of motherhood,” to quote Petersen again, many of today’s female artists are creating works that pull back the curtain to lay bare the sometimes excruciatingly painful experience of being a mom. In the beginning, everything is “melted.” Louise adores the children, and Miriam, relieved of the burdens of stay-at-home motherhood, gets to adore them too. “The baby is dead,” the book begins, and the next line describes the near-death state of the baby’s older sister. In “Tully,” a film written by Diablo Cody, Marlo is a suburban mother of three whose frantic household is rescued by the arrival of Tully, a night nurse intended to help with Marlo’s newborn daughter. The fathers in these popular entertainments are living in the chaotic world of parenthood (a noun, a state of being) but are not drowning in the tsunami of parenting (a verb, an effort). The Knausgaard on the page and the Louie on the screen do, of course, participate, but the stakes don’t seem that high for these fathers, either. To be fair, the mothers are not usually depicted doing these things either, but there is a tacit understanding in these shows that Mom has the minutiae under control, and hence the house maintains its overall peace.