The Bar Only Exists for Mothers
A father who leaves is brave. A mother who leaves is gone.
I've been interviewing people who moved abroad for months now and some of my usual questions are: "Were you pushed?" Or "Were you pulled?"
I noticed the answer changed everything. It completely rewired how I understood their whole story.
When someone is pushed, we have words for it: refugee, displaced, exile and we have sympathy for it, because the push lets us keep our morality: "she had no choice."
Which means we don't have to sit with anything uncomfortable. We don't have to ask harder questions.
The pull is a different thing entirely.
The pull is quieter. It doesn't come with an emergency. It's the dream that's been sitting in your chest since you were little, the feeling that there's a life out there that fits you better than the one you're actually living. It doesn't care that you have a career, a marriage, kids. It just stays. It stays and stays until one day you can no longer ignore it.
When a woman follows that pull, we don't reach for a sympathetic word. We reach for the harshest one we have.
Let me tell you about Roamer six
She left Russia with one suitcase and one backpack. She left when the war started and her translation business collapsed overnight. She left knowing her husband wouldn't come. She left knowing her son — not yet eighteen, not yet legally his own person — couldn't follow.
She packed her things, got on a plane, and went to Cancun. She had never been there. She knew almost no one. But as fate or luck would have it, within weeks she had a job, an apartment, a best friend whose grandmother now screens all her boyfriends and eventually a fiancé — a Mexican man, just like the one she'd imagined marrying since she was four years old watching telenovelas with her grandmother.
Her son is still in Russia. His father won't let him visit. He's afraid the boy will want to stay.
When I finished that interview, I couldn't stop thinking about something. What do we call a woman who leaves not because she doesn't love her child, but because something in her knows she'll disappear if she doesn't go?
The word we reach for is "abandon."
Before you know the circumstances, before you know why she was leaving or what she was leaving toward, you already decided on that word.
”She walked away. She chose herself over her kid. She left her child behind.”
Every single phrase is pre-loaded with the same charge: selfish, unnatural, monstrous even. And underneath all of it is this myth — that women are inherently nurturing, that mothering is pure instinct, that a good mother would never. So when a woman's behavior doesn't fit it, we don't question the myth. We just reach for the harshest word available and call it honesty.
Research shows that children raised by single fathers do just as well as children raised by single mothers.
I want you to think about this for a sec. If the harm to the child were really what this was about, then a father leaving and a mother leaving would carry the same weight. But they don't, do they? A father who moves abroad for work is providing. A father who builds a new life somewhere else is brave, starting over. We don't even have a story where a father leaves because something in him knows he'll disappear if he stays because we've never made fathers justify that feeling. We've never set a bar that high for them.
The bar only exists for mothers and it's set so high that the word “abandon” becomes inevitable no matter what she does or why she does it. Whatever she felt wasn't real enough. Whatever was pulling her should have been resisted. She should have stayed.
You see, the judgment isn't really about the child. It's about the audacity of a woman who wanted something badly enough to go get it. That's what we're actually punishing.
No one ever asks what happens to the child of a mother who stays past the point of her own survival.
That mother is still at school pickup. She's still making dinner. She's still physically there, doing all the things. But she's not there there. She's hollowed out. She's a woman going through the motions while something in her checked out a long time ago. We all know what that looks like. Some of us grew up next to it.
We never call that abandonment. We never talk about her staying the way we talk about her leaving. We never ask what it actually costs a child to grow up beside a mother who wasn't emotionally and mentally present.
The harm to a child when their mother leaves isn't only from the leaving itself.
A huge part of it comes from the story the culture immediately starts telling about it.
It's every person who says “abandoned” when they mean “left”. It's the shame that gets stitched into the child's origin story before they're old enough to question any of it. It's the verdict delivered in a single word before the child has any tools to form their own understanding.
We wound the child with our language and then we point to the wound as proof the mother was wrong to go.
Roamer six spoke Spanish to her son from the day he was born. It wasn't her native language. It was the language she grew up listening to in those telenovelas and the hacienda she'd been dreaming about since she was tiny. She planted it in him before she knew she was going to need it. Before the war. Before the business collapsed. Before she knew any distance was coming.
She was preparing him for a life she hadn't decided to build yet.
That is not abandonment. That is a woman who loved her child enough to give him a way to find her. Who knew, on some level she couldn't have even articulated yet, that the pull was real and the distance was coming and her son would need a bridge across it.
We don't question the father who is actively keeping a son from his mother. Instead, we focus on the mother who left.
If you've felt the pull—if you've always felt it, if you're feeling it right now reading this, you've probably spent a long time telling yourself it isn't a good enough reason. That you should stay. That the word for what you want is “selfish”.
But it isn't. It might just be the most human thing there is which is wanting the life that was always meant to be yours.
We should probably find a better word for it. Before we lose any more women to the silence of staying somewhere they were never meant to be.
Another cracker, Sydney!