a few semi-personal thoughts on mariska hargitay's 'my mom jayne'

Image via: HBO Max

When I got home from work on June 27, there was one thing on my mind after scrubbing off my makeup, taking my dog outside, and getting into pajamas. I would tuck into bed, underneath my forest green comforter, pull up HBO Max and watch Mariska Hargitay's documentary My Mom Jayne. The film reclaims both the story of her mother, actress Jayne Mansfield, and Hargitay's own story. After watching it, in short: Mariska Hargitay has crafted a truly special piece of cinema.

As I began to watch, I was overwhelmed with emotion (not surprising given the bleeding heart personality I am) but there was something deeper there that continued to reach in and touch a place in my heart over the course of the documentary's 1 hour and 45 minute runtime. It left me, truly, at a loss for words, that I am only now able to really compile. My Mom Jayne deals with complicated feelings related to grief whether that be grieving the idea of a person you thought you knew or wishing you'd had the time to be able to understand the person they truly were.

That feeling of grief, of loss, when you're too young to understand what you lost kept hitting me again and again. For some brief context, the most significant loss I went through was losing my maternal grandmother at 18 (so roughly ten years ago). My grandmother was 81. About two years ago, we finally cleaned out the house that she and my grandfather shared for many years. So when Hargitay went through her family's storage unit, it unexpectedly knocked the wind out of my chest.

As I watched her being surrounded by everything, it wrecked me. That was the first part of the documentary that caused me to burst into uncontrollable tears. I deeply empathized with combing through all of these things about a person you knew but didn't. In the documentary, she's is surrounded by all of this stuff that people just don't deal with for decades. It just accumulates and then you're faced with the fact that after they die, that's the only parts of them you have left.

The look on Hargitay's face, I so deeply understood. And I'm not here to speak for her, but instead to share from a place of empathy. To understand that feeling when you're so overwhelmed, because oftentimes, it's all stuff that's a part of them that you never knew. So, you're sitting there, reconciling all these things, all these parts of them you can't ask them about because they're gone. Taylor Swift once said, "one of the hardest forms of regret to work through, is the regret of being so young when you lost someone, that you didn't have the perspective to learn and appreciate who they were fully." And isn't that so much of what this documentary is?

There's the undercurrent of this aching desire to peel back the curtain on her mother, reconcile all the things Hargitay heard about her, with what little memories she had of her, and piece together not an idea of Jayne Mansfield, but a person, Jayne. Her mother, in all the ways she was, as a beautiful, multi-faceted talented human being with depth. Not a singular person, certainly not strangers on the Internet, will ever understand the ins and outs of another regardless if they're here to tell us but that's okay. We don't ever owe 100% of ourselves to 100% of people. Instead, Hargitay aims to deepen our understanding and hers of her mother beyond public persona, to reconcile things in a beautiful, healing, and freeing documentary.

So as I sit here, wrapping this up, remembering how I finished the documentary. It was at roughly two in the morning, tear-striken with this hug of a film wrapped around my heart. I also think about the pictures of me scattered across my apartment, my parents' house, and likely a storage unit or two. Sometimes when I find one, I stare at her, the little girl with the bright smile, the dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin, and wonder if that little girl knew just how much she'd carry one day. That she'd one day move through her own devastating losses, through the fact that she can't leave well enough alone and have to always be working towards something: healing, understanding, empathy. If there's one thing to take away from this documentary, it's empathy. Something the world desperately needs, for people to just sit and feel in order to become our best selves.

My Mom Jayne is available to stream on HBO Max now.