By Shanon Cook of CNN
(CNN) — In a shocking article on TheAwl.com, author and mother Amy Sohn writes that moms in her affluent Brooklyn neighborhood are going through something called “the 40-year-old reversion.” The tedium of raising children, she says, is driving moms in her circle out at night to party to the extreme as if they were 25 again.
Sohn likens the scene to the HBO show “Girls,” which depicts life in New York for the post-college crowd: “…We’re masturbating excessively, cheating on good people, doing coke in newly price-inflated townhouses, and sexting compulsively—though rarely with our partners. Our children now school-aged, our marriages entering their second decade, we are avoiding the big questions—Should I quit my job? Have another child? Divorce?—by behaving like a bunch of crazy twentysomething hipsters. Call us the Regressives.”
It’s a grim portrait of parenthood and marriage. And cringe-worthy tales of a drunk mom falling down the stairs while leaving a party and a mom who went to third base in the back of a minivan with a man who wasn’t her husband could make a person who’s thinking about getting pregnant hit the pause button. Sohn’s salacious revelations have some people suggesting she made it all up: Her new novel comes out in August, after all. (When I contacted Sohn directly and asked if everything she wrote was true, she referred me to her publicist, who said the author wasn’t doing interviews until the book releases.)
But when I think about it, I’ve encountered plenty of this mischief myself, particularly the cheating. A former co-worker once described how a mom of three threw herself at him on a business trip, claiming she was having a hard time at home and really needed to have sex with him or she’d die. Sort of like he was a missing vitamin.
If there’s an uptick in Moms Gone Wild behavior among the Brooklyn co-op set, it wouldn’t be anything new. Heck, if “Mad Men” is any measure, this generation’s mommies were regularly tucked into bed by parents already three sheets to the wind before heading out to the neighborhood key party.
Cultural depictions of modern motherhood tend to be much tamer, however. When I became a mom, I never expected I’d go out nearly as much as I do. I thought I’d always be home knitting mittens, singing lullabies and falling into exhausted sleeps on top of my husband.
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