Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control

by Amanda Montei

But when schools and daycares closed in March of 2020 in response to the pandemic, there I was again, stuck at home, my children scaling my chest and back, no escape in sight. While many in lockdown longed to hold and hug loved ones, my resistance to my kids’ constant daily touch worsened. By then I saw the structural conditions—the lack of paid leave, the childcare crisis, mothers as America’s only social safety net—that were depriving me of my autonomy, but without any outlet for rebellion, my body rejected intimacy with my children and husband almost involuntarily, just as it had in early motherhood. I was full of rage, but also desire.

What I wanted, more than anything, was to know and be myself, to feel as though I fully inhabited and had my body. But all the ideas about how I should act as a mother—how I should respond to my children’s near-constant requests for snacks, their demands for attention, their volatile emotions, their hands down my shirt or smushing my face—felt like insects crawling on me.

Other times I burst into anger, yelling at my children or my husband, demanding space or help, simply because I felt so small, like a little creature myself, shouting in the wide expanse of darkness and nothingness that had become my i...

I learned the phrase “touched out” when my first child was an infant, when I was hunting in online motherhood forums for some recognition of the constant disorientation I felt. Two years later I would struggle with overpowering flashes of not wanting to be touched by my children and my husband, and of feeling like I had no escape, just as many around the world were waking up to the omnipresent nature of sexual violence.

My aversion to my children’s soft hands felt like an indication of a deep unresolvedness in my body. I wanted to rid myself of everything that had been piled on me—to peel my skin off and scrub it clean.

When my children hit me in frustration, or when they studied me as I dressed or peed, or when they played with my body like a toy—then when I turned away from them, only to see the hungry eyes of my husband or the news of men ascending to positions of power despite having assaulted women—I had the desperate urge to finally say no, though I didn’t know how, nor to whom I might say it.

But the basic tenets of rape culture also run through our cultural expectations of mothers, something I began to see more clearly just after #MeToo. Middle-class, bourgeois standards of parenting have created exponential anxieties for mothers. Today, women who become parents are expected to study and perform ideal motherhood at the cost of all else by consuming online parenting content to meet their children’s needs with monkish detachment, and though they are often encouraged to take baths or hide in the shower if they need a break, the message is well received that women should expect to sacrifice their autonomy for motherhood, in addition to their physical and emotional well-being. The expectations of American parenthood are an assault all their own.

In the years after I had my first child, as the wounds my body had suffered at the hands of boys and men reopened, I replayed memories of my early sexual life, saw them anew. But I also acquired new abrasions from the institution of American motherhood: fresh ideas about what I lacked and new reasons for self-denial, shame, and self-effacement, along with real financial and social losses.

This book roots out how those of us who ended up on the other side of that baby boycott—specifically millennial mothers—found ourselves at sea in the brand of parenthood into which we stumbled, and what this confusion has to do with what we demand of women in America throughout their lives. Many parents have begun reevaluating their roles in the American family after feeling abandoned by policymakers during the pandemic, but the stories we tell about parenting and women’s bodies that led to that shameless abandonment remain.

While my experiences are common, in writing this book I have come to see that like many women I had been conditioned to view the pain in my life as something I deserved, had coming, or for which I was destined.

In the early years of motherhood I worked at a daycare, and I witnessed on my shifts the skill and imagination inherent to care work. I also observed the patience of those who—it must be said—did it so much better than I did, many of whom continue to help raise my children and give me space to work and rest. As my children have returned to school and daycare in the wake of the pandemic, I have glimpsed, thanks to my network of care, what I longed for in lockdown: space to think, to write, to breathe, to sit in my body without interruption. Space to feel the way I never quite felt as a girl—like my body is my own.

As a woman in America, however, my access to physical and mental health, and to bodily autonomy, also remains—to some degree, as I have always known it—conditional and tenuous. Since the pandemic, I have become financially reliant on my husband, despite having more education than he has. When the children fall ill, because I am the parent with part-time, contingent work, I am the one who sets aside my day’s plans.

Maybe I should have known better than to have a child in America, given what I learned young about being a woman in America. But I didn’t ask for this. How could I, when it’s all been hidden away? I didn’t ask to raise my children in an era in which so many policymakers are determined to force people into this thing we call motherhood. I didn’t ask for high childcare costs, failing care and education systems, or for the fear I feel as my children enter the world of binary gender roles at the potential cost to their own happiness and liberation.

I did not ask for the kind of motherhood I was handed. None of us did. And I certainly never asked for parenting in America to feel so nonconsensual. I

I have certainly encouraged this interpretation of events, trying to explain to them, exhaustively, that women can do more than mother, that their bodies are their own, that my body is my own, that every person needs time to themselves, that I am a person, that all parents are people, that it’s complicated, that history lives in us, that history is happening right now, that it’s hard, that it’s hopeful, and that their world, when they are older, can be different. I am hesitant to place the burden of a better future in the hands of young people, who will inherit so many systemic failures, but the tender moments I share with my children are, for better or for worse, what keep me going when the world feels, as the poet Alice Notley put it in her essay “Women and Poetry,” “late and ugly.”

But in the bedroom that night, he didn’t kiss me. He just hovered over me and thrusted, and I focused on the feeling of the rough mattress underneath my back. After he came, I smiled demurely as I dressed, but he never spoke to me again, not even later at the party. It was a plan, I later realized, that had been concocted by his friends, other boys who knew how much I liked him. American motherhood felt like that: like a plan devised by men. Something I wanted, then got, only to find I had been lured in by a group of boys who didn’t care at all how I ended up and who were nowhere on the scene. Sure, I had consented to motherhood. I had asked for it. I had even desperately wanted it—in the same way I had craved the touch of that boy. There was even pleasure involved in putzing around the house with Hannah, and in the laughs I shared with her as we splashed around the water table on our patio—a purchase I had made hoping to keep her busy when it was just the two of us, at home alone. But my housewifery also felt forced, compulsory, staged. And the experience of getting what I wanted was immediately tainted by what I hadn’t known before consenting.

Capitalism thrives on women’s unpaid labor in the home because women’s care work supports lower taxes,” Kristen Ghodsee writes in Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. Offloading the cost of childcare and the social safety net on to families has historically hurt women most. But for men, the economic advantages abound.

As a mother I felt the way I had felt as a young woman: if I just made myself into an object that was accommodating and agreeable, perhaps I could fill my role. In

When I was trying to find my footing as a new parent in a sea of recommendations, American parenthood also became inseparable from a wider culture of burnout. There was no amount of boundary setting parents could do verbally, with their children or partners, to create space for themselves in our increasingly siloed, isolated home lives, especially while still living under the cultural expectation that boundary setting, big or small, made us a little worse at raising our kids.

There is an incredible lack of nuance in both naming and treating the traumatic experience of becoming a parent in a misogynistic culture, even though there is plenty of evidence to suggest that when mothers are not cared for, it hampers their ability to be present with their children.

What Adrienne Rich had written in Of Woman Born was true: if sexual violence felt like a form of patriarchal “terrorism,” motherhood felt like “penal servitude.” But her statement following this analogy was also true: “It need not be.”

I had for years accommodated men and tried to quench what I had been told was their insatiable hunger for sex, but in marriage, I wanted to hand my body over only when I felt full of desire. Jon never demanded anything, but he didn’t have to say it, or even think it, for it to be there: wives were supposed to please their husbands, even when they would rather not. And as this thing called a wife, I felt duty bound to please him, which only made me reject him more forcefully.

I couldn’t yet see that my sexual refusal was a way of taking my body back in a time when I had so little control over it. Instead, I googled marital sex statistics, trying to locate some criterion by which I could judge my marriage and my sexual health.

After we moved back to California, arguments came up around the shape of Jon’s desire—the way he talked about my body or looked me up and down. These were advances I had welcomed when we first met. They made me feel desired. But I was beginning to reevaluate my past, and I couldn’t comfortably welcome this plain objectification anymore. I told him this talk felt boyish, adolescent, which hurt him. But the stakes felt high for me now: in bed, Jon’s touch also sometimes triggered memories of being coerced or forced into sexual acts. “When you touch the back of my head when I’m going down on you,” Angela Garbes writes in Essential Labor—quoting a friend who also fell with her husband into a routine of her turning his sexual advances down—“what I feel isn’t you—it’s every person who’s ever pushed me to do it when I really didn’t want to.”

I had no words to name forms of sexual assault that didn’t fit inadequate definitions of the term “rape” or even “assault”—such as the times when I gave up or gave in, because it was easier than fighting, or when I hated what I was doing, but had no tools to reverse course. Instead, I carried with me a feeling that had I been more forceful—the way I intuited I should have been—the story might only have turned out worse.

Parenthood, in other words, isn’t just a tool for passing on our beliefs about bodies, but for learning about them. The ever-shifting nuances I had to embrace as I taught my children about needs and wants, and as they challenged me, made me realize how little I had been taught young about how to give and receive, how to account for power imbalances between friends and loved ones. It all demonstrated so clearly that care requires consent, and consent requires great care.

But this demand still follows me. In America, mothers are also supposed to know themselves—to be intentional about falling in love, getting married, and having children. Women are told to wait until they’re “ready” for all the work and disempowerment having children will entail, as though one could ever prepare.

Most parents are not prepared for the psychical and psychological changes that come with parenthood. “The touched body, the degree and frequency it is touched—how much and how often—is not even imagined as a potential stressor until it happens or reaches a crisis,” Athan says. “Nor is the physical labor of bending and lifting, the wear and tear on the body.”

And everyone needs access to employment policies that offer time for care work and reproductive labor, as well as to continuous social services, so citizens without kids or “kin-based responsibilities” can also join in on communal care work.

As Federici points out, we need childcare not just so we can do more work outside the home, but “to be able to take a walk, talk to our friends, or go to a women’s meeting.”

Contrary to the myth that social services breed entitlement and dependency, a bit of economic autonomy allowed me to do more meaningful work.

I also know the sorrow of feeling as though I have wronged my children too much—feeling that I have failed them with what I cannot undo, cannot take back, never should have said. With the inadequate story I have offered them. But the world comes inside our homes, our bodies, our minds, makes a mess, makes us a mess. We are left to sort it all out, clean it up. As a result, we often turn on those closest to us. How could we not? They’re right there.

But policymakers and political leaders continually failed to show up for parents, including the 3.5 million mothers who had been pushed out of the workforce. We kept telling our stories. No one seemed to be listening. The collective distribution and consumption of women’s suffering, all to no avail, felt recognizable. The burden appeared again to fall on women’s speech. Were we not telling our stories loudly enough, or in the right way?