This memory surfaced the other day when I saw the flurry of Instagram chatter about Jenny Mollen, who recently posted photos of herself wrapped around her 12-year-old son, faces obscured, a tangle of limbs and hair on top of a bed. After reading the caption — “Your eldest son will be the most toxic man you ever date” — I understood why the post was going viral. It was a portrait of suffocation: a warning from a mother already desperate to make sure that no woman on Earth will ever love her son as much as she does, regardless of what that means for him. (Did I mention that the soundtrack for the post was Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s “’03 Bonnie & Clyde”?)
As unnerving as this post was, it’s probably not the most questionable thing Mollen has put on her social-media feeds. A proudly attention-seeking, self-obsessed writer, actor and Hollywood wife (until recently, she was married to “American Pie” star Jason Biggs), Mollen specializes in oversharing and blithe chaos: posting boobs on main, filming herself at cosmetic-surgery appointments, and regularly spewing the kind of private details that would have to be waterboarded out of most people. On an internet full of #boymoms who address their newborn sons as “sexy daddy” and admit to making their daughters do all the household chores, Mollen hasn’t stood out as particularly unhinged in expressions of maternal devotion. But even Boy Moms have a line in the sand, and many of them made it clear in the post’s comments that Mollen had crossed it: “This is why people say boy moms are weird.”
