- I've spent some time trying to figure out
why it's so upsetting to other people
that I made the decision that I made.
- If I was a man,
I wouldn't be sitting here having this interview.
You know, it's just the most normal thing in the world
for fathers to do that.
And yet I've never met another woman who's done this.
- What are people's reactions?
It's usually something like,"What?"
"What do you mean you don't have custody of your kids?"
I think it's one of the last taboos,
non-custodial mothers are a big taboo.
(soft pensive music)
I'm Nataly, and I'm the mother of two.
I have a four and a half year old boy,
and a six year old girl.
And their father has full legal and residential custody.
(soft lively music)
(jet engine roaring distantly)
I was born in Israel, and I came to America when I was five.
My mother was not the type of person
who should have had a child.
She didn't really know what to do with me,
so an aunt in America decided to take me.
That's the one that primarily raised me my entire life.
(soft gloomy music) (bus honking)
I always felt kind of like a burden on my aunt's family,
and it was tough for me.
I didn't have my own space,
it was like they kind of basically put me
wherever they had room for me,
so whether it was a mattress on the floor, or a couch.
I grew up in the neighborhood of Borough Park in Brooklyn,
which is one of the most Hasidic neighborhoods
in all of America.
In our community,
as women we're encouraged to have children,
it's kind of like the apex of our existence,
is to become wives and mothers.
I saw how unstable my life was growing up.
And I didn't want to bring children into this world.
I wanted to be a career woman.
I wanted to be a business woman.
I didn't want to have kids.
(gentle piano music)
- I always felt a little bit different.
I can't say that I necessarily thought
I'd go and get married and have kids.
I wasn't sort of closed to it,
but I didn't have that sort of, that drive.
But I met a very interesting Estonian man.
There was this instant connection, and attraction.
And we got together very quickly, and we sort of decided
we were going to be together forever, and so on.
He moved here, and we lived together in a squat
in Southwest London.
I became pregnant, I was 23, which is really young.
But it felt amazing, like my body was doing the thing
it was supposed to be doing.
It was a really, really exciting time.
When a women is about to give birth,
you need things to be,
you know, the nest, you need the nest.
We didn't have one.
So we knew that,
I just felt there was going to be a nest for us in Estonia.
It was my idea to move to Tallinn
where the father of my baby was from.
Even after one day I felt, "No, this isn't okay.
"I've made the wrong decision."
I can't do this, it was just alien.
I'm about to go through the most scary thing
of my life to that point.
I had left everything behind, you know, friends, family.
Suddenly there was like this, dwoosh,
this realization of a task I'd sent myself.
(soft pensive music)
So then, of course, the time came,
they just wheeled me away down into a basement theater.
And came to and heard this baby crying,
and I just thought, this is my baby.
And that this was the rest of my life,
and I was just like, "Oh my God."
- [Presenter] It is the beginning of a new era,
an era brim full of surprises and happiness.
(wind blowing distantly)
- When Claude first spoke to me,
the first thing I felt was
this is the father of my children.
(soft lively music)
We were married when I was twenty.
We got a house, and when I was twenty-five my son, Will, was born.
- [Presenter] Yes, mothers who care
know one sure way to fight decay
is to brush right, and use Gleem.
- I remember pouring over magazines I would find,
and the old advertisements, like what is a good wife mother
supposed to look like, and you'd remember those images
from the fifties, you know, where there is this kind
of beautiful sameness about everyone.
I tried very hard to fit in, and to adapt,
and to be the person
that I felt was expected to be as a mother
But I also felt at the same time, like, there was
a whole other story, another part of me
that had yet to have any expression
or any context in which to be expressed.
I felt like there was another life
beating under the surface of my skin.
(soft eerie music)
My daughter Hannah was the second of my four children,
and she was diagnosed with cancer
a month before her third birthday.
And she died a month before her fourth birthday,
almost exactly a year later.
(monotone piano music)
(waves rushing distantly)
- My family had very good intentions.
There was someone who expressed interest in marrying me,
and they married me off right away.
One day, several female family members,
they sat me down in front of a mirror.
They were standing on either side of me,
and they're like, do you think you're pretty?
There are thousands of younger prettier girls than you
that have more money than you, that have a better,
they have something to bring to the table.
What do you have to bring?
You don't have a good reputation,
you don't have good family connections,
you don't have money.
What do you bring to the table?
Here is a man that wants to marry you, go for it.
Nobody loves their husband when they get married.
On the day that I was supposed to get married,
Hurricane Sandy hit.
This is a huge hurricane, our hall was flooded.
And they offered to give us our money back without penalty.
Everybody offered to refund us.
And I look back at it, I'm like God gave me an out,
and I didn't take it (laughing).
I knew walking down the aisle
that I was making the biggest mistake.
I didn't, I didn't want him.
- When my son was sort of weeks old,
I wanted to get out, massively.
I just wanted to come home.
I felt like a caged bird.
We lived near the airport,
and I'd see these planes everyday going to,
I knew which ones were the ones going to London,
just, God (inhaling sharply).
But I knew that, even as I was finding it really hard,
I knew that I couldn't leave.
It was like a bad nightmare
just gone horribly, horribly wrong.
But my son didn't even have a passport,
just all of these things, and yeah,
and just still getting to grips with breast feeding,
and sleepless nights, and how to look after a small baby,
and to also sort of carry off this,
pull off this, like escape.
I mean, I'm sure it would have been possible,
but I just couldn't quite do it.
So I kind of just accepted that I was going to be there
for a while, and got on with it.
But I didn't tell anyone what was going on,
and how unhappy I was.
You know, it's weird for a mother with her tiny baby
to be so miserable and unhappy.
It's easier just to,
you know, be what the world wants you to be,
and try to appear as though everything's fine,
and everything's great.
And yeah, motherhood's a breeze, it's fine.
Just a bit sleepy, that's all.
- Even though I really wasn't emotionally ready
to have kids, I forced myself to,
and I had one baby,
and then 12 months later I had another baby.
I lived above a woman who also had children, but she worked.
And I was a stay-at-home wife and mother.
And I remember, it's so pathetic,
but I remember waiting by the window
for her to come home so I could talk to her.
So I could talk to somebody and say,
"How was your day, how was work, tell me all about it."
I was, I felt like my brain was melting.
That's what I felt like,
it felt like my brain was turning into goo.
And here I am stuck with a baby at home
while other women my age are going off and they're working,
and they're exploring the world, and they're traveling.
I was struggling, but I would never tell anybody
that I was struggling, I always put on a happy face.
I always wanted to be like June Cleaver.
Just perfect all the time.
You're not allowed to say
that my baby's crying is driving me crazy.
And I changed so many diapers today
that I just don't want to change another diaper.
And I just want to sleep.
You're just not allowed to express feelings
other than joy and elation at motherhood.
(soft pensive music)
(wind blowing distantly)
- Hannah's death was the moment
that my whole life pivots on.
In that deep grief, I didn't even have room
to think about another person,
or to care about how another person felt.
So, I started peeling away to this kind of raw place
where I was just walking around
and breathing in the world as myself.
And that was a completely new perspective
on everything for me.
There came a point when it was clear
that something had to change.
A marriage that had been difficult
for many years was ending,
and I was going to have to make
this very difficult decision
to be the parent that was going to move out
of our family home.
(retro rock music)
That first evening when I drove away from our family home,
it was incredibly painful.
At the same time though,
another part of me felt an incredible sense of relief
and possibility that something else now was possible.
(soft piano music)
- My brother was getting married in the May
which was going to be two years after I moved there.
And I just sort of immediately just kind of went,
"That's when I'm coming home."
I just didn't think I had the strength
to bring my son back with me
and look after him and raise him by myself,
because I felt like I was so underground,
within myself, that I'd lost touch of,
in my own confidence and ability to do things.
(soft melancholic music)
I know I haven't seen this happen before in the world,
that a mother leaves her child,
but that doesn't mean that I can't do it.
If I have to be the first woman
that I'd ever seen doing it, then so be it.
In this situation it's the right thing to do.
The agreement was that I was coming back
to London for a few months,
but I think even then I kind of knew
that I needed more than a few months.
I remember getting in the taxi,
and saying goodbye to my 23 month old baby son,
and I was okay.
And I was waving goodbye to my ex,
getting into the taxi to go to the airport.
My God, finally, I've got away from a really hard situation.
And I wasn't sure what was going to happen,
or what I was going to do,
but just that sense of, I can breathe now.
(monotonic piano music)
- Perfection isn't sustainable, it's not sustainable.
Eventually, you crack.
(soft pensive music)
I don't have to be perfect anymore
because everybody basically sees how imperfect my life is.
I'm a mother without custody of my kids,
that's already like the biggest imperfection you can have,
so there's no pressure for me to look perfect.
It's hard not to see my children all the time,
but at the same time, every single time
that I have a visitation with them,
it's like a reunion all over again.
I miss my kids, but when I'm with them, I'm 100% them.
I have to compartmentalize in my brain.
There's the mommy, and then there's the single woman.
And there's nobody to tell me that I can't do something.
(soft pensive music)
- It essentially gave me, for the first time in my life,
an opportunity to figure out who I was as a person,
just without being defined
by my marriage and being 24/7 with my children.
I really went through my adolescence in my early 40s,
'cause it was the first time I actually dated,
in my whole life (laughing).
I started smoking when I was in my 40s.
- We see each other a few times a year.
It's a very tactile, a very warm,
a very loving relationship,
and we both really love spending time together.
We just do whatever we want to do, make biscuits at home,
or go to the cinema, or just go to the park,
or we just do stuff that is very normal and fun,
and it's like getting to know each other.
It's a very different relationship I'm sure from,
compared to most mother-sons, but it's very beautiful.
There's so much love.
- Sometimes it is better for the children in the family
if the mother is the parent that moves out.
I definitely felt judged as a mother.
I was told that I should have been sterilized
and not allowed to have children.
(soft disquieting music)
While we hold this expectation
that there is this ideal mother,
none of us had one, none of us are ideal mothers.
So, you know, we need to rethink this whole idea of the ideal.