Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control

by Amanda Montei

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.”