“Parenthood has demanded a level of commitment and self-sacrifice from me that, in any other context, would be considered pathological. I’d never accept this kind of relationship under any other circumstances. And yet here I am, jumping through fire, constantly striving for affection and approval, waiting by the phone for a guy who can’t even drive.”

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Jenny and Jason — who split last month after almost two decades of marriage — are parents to 12-year-old Sid and 8-year-old Lazlo.

Going on to claim that Jason’s mom “fell apart” when they announced their engagement, Jenny writes, “I used to find it insane… Now, I understand it had nothing to do with my cat allergy or whether or not I touched her lasagna. I was eating her son, straight out of the fridge, without even asking for a plate.”

“Jason insisted I let him make his own mistakes. And objectively, he’s right. But as a mother, you want to shield and protect and fiercely defend the thing you’ve devoted your life to shaping,” she continues. “There is so much anticipatory grief wrapped into motherhood. It will trigger even the most well-adjusted of women. But the abandonment we eventually endure as boy moms is uniquely cruel because it begins as worship. They arrive obsessed. Dependent. Adoring. They think we’re magic. We think we are magic.”

Jenny’s essay concludes: “Today, they’re still little. They still crawl into my sweaters and into my sheets. They still need me to open milk cartons and operate on invisible injuries. I’m still in it, but also somehow outside of it, fully aware I am living through the longest goodbye of my life. I pray that at least one of them is gay.”

“For anyone defending this. Would you be okay with it if it was a “comedian” dad and his 12 year old daughter??” someone else questioned.

Jenny goes on to recall her strained relationship with her own mother, whom she says told her that she “didn’t know how to be a mom anymore” when she was just 12. Noting that she’d fly between Phoenix and San Diego as “an unaccompanied minor” every month or two to visit her, Jenny says, “I never understood how she could tolerate it. How she could sleep through the night knowing I was in another state, in another house, with another woman who wasn’t her. I don’t think I’ve ever fully healed that wound. And I don’t know that I ever will.”

“When I became a mom, I wasn’t prepared for how thoroughly a love like this would break me. How it would turn me inside out and make knots of my viscera,” she says, describing motherhood as “vulnerability in a form so all-encompassing that it borders on masochism.”