Watch: Inside Jenny Mollen’s Post-Breakup Drama Involving 12-Year-Old Son Sid
Jenny Mollen is well aware she’s not like a regular mom. But she likes herself just the way she is.
So, no, she doesn’t really care what people think about her sharing a photo embracing her oldest son.
Though the newly single star—she and Jason Biggs announced the end of their 18-year marriage in May—did change the caption of her and 12-year-old Sid‘s May 25 Instagram post, presumably realizing her “Your eldest son will be the most toxic guy you ever date” joke didn’t quite land.
As for the rest of it—while some agreed with the commenter who insisted, “Your child is not your boyfriend. A boyfriend is a romantic partner” others saw no issue with the snap—Mollen was admittedly “shocked” people took issue with their closeness.
“It’s like because I’m getting separated, because I’m not protected by the institution of marriage, I’m suddenly like a different kind of target in what I’m posting,” the Crazy, Stupid, Love actress detailed on her Instagram Stories, per Entertainment Weekly. “Like this is absolutely jaw-dropping. A photo of me hugging my 12-year-old child is getting ridiculed.”
Though the snap did garner some double-taps as well.
Among them, Mollen’s sister-in-law, who shared her thoughts on Instagram Stories, writing, “As a teacher I can tell you this, it’s totally normal. And if your child isn’t doing that then I’m sorry they’re not able to show affection. And any parent knows that what you see in that photo is not going to last long because my nephew is not going to be doing that that much longer.”
Plus, as Mollen—also mom to 8-year-old Lazlo with Biggs—noted, she’d been away from her kids for three days, “Why would I not milk it?” (E! News reached out to Mollen’s rep for comment but has not heard back.)
Because there’s no shame in Mollen’s boy mom game.
Before she was wrapped up in this current controversy, the 47-year-old fully leaned into the mama’s boy stereotype. And the Internet had thoughts.
“Call me old-fashioned,” she kicked off a May 10 entry on her Substack, The Best Friend Experience with Jenny Mollen, “but I only want my sons to marry women with dead mothers. It’s my only shot at staying relevant, of seeming useful, and of winning by comparison.”
The way she saw it, continued the star, “Having boys is a mind f–k. It builds you up, only to tear you apart.”
When she and Biggs first welcomed their boys, “I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without my kids following,” Mollen wrote, detailing all the ways her kids were “the most emotionally high-maintenance men I’ve ever dated.”
But now that they’re not so needy, she’s had to grapple with the understanding that, “eventually, I will lose them.”
And she understands implicitly what she is up against.
Before her 2008 wedding to Biggs, “I was every mother’s nightmare,” Mollen acknowledged of her haphazard dating style. “I dismantled boys by accident, I destroyed their loves, wrote about it extensively, then got personally offended when they no longer wanted to be my friend.”
So when she caught wind of Sid texting a fellow tween with “my brand of toxic,” Mollen wrote, she became concerned.
“She was bossing him around and using big words, and he was utterly spun,” Mollen detailed. “I complained to Jason that I wanted to intervene before he got hurt and that she wasn’t even hotter than me. But 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.”
Instead, she’s trying to accept her role on the sidelines.
“There is so much anticipatory grief wrapped into motherhood,” noted Mollen. “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.”
And at the moment, she continues to wow them.
“They still crawl into my sweaters and into my sheets,” Mollen detailed. “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.”
At least she can hold tight to the memories. Check out her sweetest moments with Biggs and their boys.
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