Sordid truth about Jason Biggs' ex-wife and that bizarre post with her teen son. Believe me, I've read her work for a decade: BETHANY MANDEL

Most people reacted with shock – even revulsion – after actress and writer Jenny Mollen, estranged wife to actor Jason Biggs, posted pictures of herself lying on top of her 12-year-old son Sid, her body between his legs.

The photographs were paired with the caption, 'Your eldest son will be the most toxic guy you ever date.'

I suspect most mothers of sons understand what she really meant.

I've followed Mollen's work for nearly a decade. She's a 47-year-old mom of two and a uniquely talented voice of a generation of mothers. She weaves humor and heartbreak together in a way that feels both deeply personal and instantly recognizable. But many only know her as the soon-to-be ex of that American Pie actor.

On Instagram, the comments section of her post exploded with thousands weighing in on the image. Mollen's fans and hate-followers alike saw in her the modern equivalent of the Oedipus myth, later transformed by Sigmund Freud into a psychological theory centered on a postulated sexual attraction between opposite-sex parents and children.

Mollen removed the caption. A community note remains attached to the post: 'Jenny removed the caption for this post. It originally had a pedophilic statement about her son.'

I cannot deny that those provocative photos and the caption could rightfully be interpreted through an unmistakably sexual lens.

But that's not how I saw it.

A few days after the controversy erupted, loyal readers of Mollen pointed to a recent Substack essay titled after the chorus of a Benson Boone song: 'Please. Stay. I want you. I need you. Oh, God.'

She opens the essay with a joke that only a mother could make: 'Call me old-fashioned, 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.'

I know what she's talking about. The essay is not about romance or sexuality. It is about the uniquely painful reality that motherhood is a long exercise in preparing yourself to be needed less.

Mollen goes on to describe the love that only mothers of sons can understand and the heartbreak of knowing that, eventually, 'I will lose them.'

Not lose them in any literal sense. Not lose them to tragedy, but in the way every healthy parent eventually loses a child: to adulthood, independence, marriage, careers, friendships and lives of their own.

She is describing the beautiful tension at the center of motherhood. From the moment our children are born, we are engaged in two contradictory tasks at once. We are expected to create a world in which they feel completely safe and completely loved while simultaneously preparing them to leave that safety. We spend years at the center of their universe, knowing full well that success means one day we won't be.

Every milestone carries with it a small grief. The first day they no longer want to hold your hand. The last bedtime story. The moment they stop climbing into your lap. The realization that the child who once needed you for everything increasingly needs you for less.

That is the feeling Mollen was describing.

Yet what many people saw was something sexual. That response says less about Mollen and more about our culture's inability to recognize ordinary familial love without filtering it through the language of pathology. Freud may have popularized those ideas more than a century ago, but their influence remains remarkably durable.

A mother expresses sadness about her son growing up and strangers begin discussing emotional incest. A parent jokes about eventually being replaced by a future spouse and amateur psychologists rush to diagnose dysfunction.

There was nothing sexual in Mollen's essay about motherhood. The sexual element entered the conversation because critics brought it there.

It's worth noting that Mollen's reflections are unfolding during a period of major personal change for her. She recently announced her separation and pending divorce, a development that would naturally cause anyone to think more deeply about family, attachment, loss and the passage of time.

Read in that context, her writing feels less like a confession and more like an acknowledgment that every stage of life eventually comes to an end.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether the photograph was wise to post. They can disagree about whether the caption was funny. They can disagree about whether either was likely to be misunderstood. But the leap from maternal longing to accusations of pedophilia reveals something far stranger than anything Mollen actually said.

What Jenny Mollen appears to be describing is one of the oldest emotions in the world: a mother looking at her child and wishing, if only for a moment, that time would slow down.

Love, attachment and the inevitable heartbreak of letting go.