There's no point to this ask other than to say: Wild!

Feeling touched out is one way women’s bodies sound the alarm bells on those broken structures that have betrayed them, and on a misogynistic culture that has told them how to comport their bodies, moderate their tone, and carry themselves in public and private spaces all their lives. It’s also a feeling that indicates the body has reached its limit and doesn’t quite know how to cope—understandably, because in such a culture, women are discouraged from articulating any feelings about what’s not working for us. The pressure we place on mothers to perform constantly at the expense of their own physical and emotional health is to some degree a generational demand, but holding women responsible for everything that goes wrong in a child’s life—or that might go wrong—is an American pastime, one that creates a lot of anxiety for mothers, keeping them busy worrying about what they have done wrong, rather than organizing against the betrayals.

Mothers have been blamed for everything from serial killings to combat PTSD. By the end of World War II, Freudian fears surrounding incest had spread to popular culture. Films began to depict women with a perverse closeness to their children—especially frightening when the mothers focused too much attention on their sons. These mothers apparently posed a danger to the purity of motherly love.”]

In other words, at first I saw my second baby not as a victim of power, but more as an inevitable foe. As if here, in front of me, was someone who would benefit from all the power structures I hated, from everything that had troubled me and the women in my life. At the very least, I saw my new baby as someone who did not need my emotional protection in the same way my daughter would, and my rage took a different form with him in the first two years of his life, as it always had with rowdy little boys who seemed to take up all the space. As he brought his baby wrath to bear on my body every night at the witching hour, mouthing my breasts and tearing into me with his impossible-to-trim nails, I projected masculine violence onto his healthy infantile aggression. When he began to walk, I was harder on him when he bumped into other kids carelessly, just as I had always been with the boys at the daycare. I knew his right to take up space would always be greater than my daughter’s, and when he acted out in frustration, threw his body into it, I scolded him harder, trying to block off some path on which I felt he was already walking a little too firmly.

Parenting a son with patriarchy in mind meant I had to be extra attentive to the ways in which my best efforts at making him a good person would be thwarted by a culture of masculinity that would teach him to take take take. But by the time he turned two, I felt like I had been conned into reproducing the exact gender roles I was trying to avoid. I had positioned my daughter as a victim of the patriarchy, my son as an aggressor. I had left no room for anything in between. I had, despite my best efforts, developed a pattern of reinforcing the gender binary, even if the way I was doing it wasn’t quite in line with how I saw others projecting gender on to my children.

Trying to keep up with his big busy sister, Elliott became quite the bruiser. Whatever I did, however I hovered, I could not keep him from injuring himself. Those around us often linked his gaucheness with his perceived gender identity, which frustrated me, because I saw in him the confusion I felt as the younger sibling, carrying around a body so full of energy, without any clear understanding of where to direct that vitality, or how to get anyone in the family to pay attention to me. But Elliott also grew to be so tender, thoughtful in a way I never expected. Like all children, he became a multifaceted little creature.”]

Women who are full of rage—or just sad and falling apart—are rarely seen as responding with reason to America’s uniquely isolating, intensive parenthood models, or to the historical depreciation of their round-the-clock work in the home, much less to the misogynistic culture in which they grew up, only to find their bodies used and abused further in work that goes unrecognized as work, with little free time to agitate for better working conditions without risking being called unfit or in need of psychotropic drugs. “We are seen as nagging bitches,” Federici writes, “not workers in a struggle.” Bad mothers, frigid wives, hysterics—all are more cultural images that police women’s latent rebellions and their burgeoning desires for rejecting what’s piled on them all their lives. Rarely are such women understood to be intelligently tapping into a wise internal voice, an intuition, and a clamoring inside their bodies for change.

I grew up with hardly any language with which to assert my own autonomy, only to find myself absorbing the widespread cultural belief that women should martyr themselves for motherhood. But I knew somewhere inside, even in the early years, that it didn’t have to be this way—that it wasn’t supposed to be this way. That there was some other set of terms—beyond dominance versus “gentleness,” powerlessness versus power, passivity versus anger, self-erasure versus running, normalcy versus madness—another, altogether different approach to the way we were doing this work of raising children, which in its current state felt like such a ruse.”]

There was not, to my knowledge, any alternative. But I knew that some women in our family had resisted motherhood, for reasons I didn’t quite understand. They did away with unwanted pregnancies in clinics, or in bedrooms, or tried. My great-grandmother, Jean, gave herself multiple abortions at home. My mother told me Jean used hangers repeatedly, disfiguring her reproductive system over time, but it’s possible Jean used other abortive methods, and that these were simply cultural images of abortion my mother patterned on to what she knew. Jean was white and came from money, and although her father forbade her from going to the women’s college she wanted, she was educated at a finishing school meant to prepare her for marriage. Safe abortion may have been possible for Jean, living just outside of Chicago at the turn of the century, because of her race, class, and marital status. It’s also possible that Jean was raped in her marriage and then suffered through abortions alone, though it’s hard to say how Jean herself would have categorized the way her body fit into her marriage—whether she endorsed a kind of marital duty. But given how many times my great-grandmother had to do away with unwanted pregnancies, I have always assumed she simply couldn’t say no to the man she lived with, who was known to be an angry alcoholic who drove a Duesenberg and threw big parties.

Jean died before menopause due to complications caused by a final at-home abortion, never getting the chance to know her body as something other than a maker of children. The details of those complications are lost to time and the haziness of generational memory. But I know Jean’s life was altered by legal and medical institutions that endorsed a husband’s ownership over his wife, and that didn’t see women as capable of making choices about their bodies. Even so, whenever my mother spoke of Jean, she spoke only of my great-grandmother’s sadness. My mother was ashamed of Jean’s depressive tendencies, as though they issued from some flaw within—something perhaps we carried in ourselves, too. Jean’s feminine melancholy was, for my mother, just another thing Jean could not rid herself of, however she tried—and it was, perhaps, the thing my mother, too, was always trying to overcome. Ultimately, my mother came to see her own dark periods the ways she saw Jean’s. My mother’s alcoholism, her trouble with men, her imperfect motherhood—these she would come to see as indications that there was something broken in her, rather than in the world.”]

I was spellbound by my child’s presence, totally addicted to mulling over every part of her body as she lay in my arms—her fat legs and arms, which fit right in my closed palm; her pursed lips, always a little blistered from where she suckled me; her skin, which felt like silk. But the amount of time I spent caring for others now outnumbered the amount of time I spent caring for myself, and when it all felt like too much—too much touch, too much posturing, too much meeting demands, too much trying to say the right thing and be nice nice nice—I tried to gently push Hannah off, to distract her, to get her interested in something around the apartment other than me, so I could have a moment alone. She, however, had a willful spirit and never liked being told what to do. And I was noncommittal, because I still believed that I should put all her needs and desires before mine.

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 my twenties, I had found methods for dissociating during sex: I studied corners of the room while men got themselves off inside me; I listened to their heavy breathing, calculating how much longer, moaning here and there to help them along, moving my hips methodically or going limp. “Most of our sexual encounters are spent in calculations,” Silvia Federici writes. “We sigh, sob, gasp, pant, jump up and down in bed, but in the meantime our mind keeps calculating ‘how much’: how much of ourselves can we give before we lose or undersell ourselves, how much will we get in return.” How much longer.

Motherhood too was filled with an unbearable sense of calculation—of waiting, of pushing my body to the brink of what it could take, of counting down the minutes, of doing what I did not want to do, trying to get to the end of the day, just to do it all over again. It all stirred memories of sidelining my own desires, and of waiting for others to finish taking what they wanted from me. The first year we spent in California I gave my body over at the daycare, and when I went home, sitting to nurse or play or talk with Hannah, I let her too have her way with me, wondering whether life, for some women, was just a series of moments in which we grit our teeth and watch the clock.

Back then, my body was a curio, claimed and set aside by my child’s request. I was utterly confused about how to set limits with my child in a way that wouldn’t forever damage the unseeable outer reaches of her psyche. The parenting advice I located online, which confirmed that I was solely responsible for everything that might someday go wrong in my child’s adult life, didn’t help. But I tried to take a more active role in moderating the use of my body. Finding the language, however, proved difficult. During the day, I abided by other, more palatable advice found on the internet: I set boundaries, and I took up pointed refrains, ones I heard spoken by mothers at the daycare as they wrestled children off their backs at drop-off and pick-up. When I sat on the couch at home after a long day, and Hannah scaled me, I said, “Mommy is not a jungle gym.” I was a mother, not a plaything.

But growing up in the ’90s and early 2000s, I had received the message that my body was a plaything. And now, when I told Hannah I needed a break, it was hard to locate what exactly I needed a break from.”]

In an essay for Gawker on how Americans grew so attached to attachment theory, Danielle Carr, a scholar who studies capitalism and neuroscience, writes that “attachment theory offers the consolations of the heuristic, a kind of rough-draft outline for a larger essay on our internal life. This is true of almost any Grand Theory of Everything that explains the unknowable—in this case, the interiority of the other—using a few rough-hewn concepts.” Attachment theory is nevertheless used to explain both parenting (usually relying on the mother-child dyad) and romance (usually relying on the man-woman dyad), which furthers the theory’s hetero-patriarchal feel and allows us to blame even our sexual and romantic relationship problems on our mothers.

At best, however, attachment theory is merely a tool for explaining how growing up in a hetero-patriarchal culture tends to create certain personality types, outcomes that are loosely linked to how our caregivers behaved when we were kids, or how we perceive them to have behaved years later, when we grow into adults and consult the attachment playbooks. At worst, attachment theory can be used to reify bad behavior that emerges from living in a sexist society, tracing it all back to Mom and Dad—but usually Mom. “What are the odds that the vast majority of heterosexuals would sort so neatly into what look like gender-coded slots—the women frantic for explanations for their romantic woes self-identifying as ‘anxious’ and slapping the ‘avoidant’ label on guys who seem to be just not that into them? Does this remind you of anything?” Carr asks. “The whole thing smacks of gender.”

Not surprising, given that the theories we have available on how human development, psychology, and relationships both form and function are all inherited from white men. “I think a lot of that science is bad science,” Kate Manne has said about the sexism that continues to plague contemporary studies on how men and women supposedly perceive the world differently because of biological difference. “There’s no control group in a patriarchal culture,” Manne points out. “There’s no group of women raised such as not to have sexist theories and misogynistic enforcement mechanisms operating on them. Of course some differences will show up. But it doesn’t lead to an enhanced kind of epistemic state, where we know something interesting and new about two different groups.” The same is true for how we interpret the science that says secure attachments with our mothers makes us well-adjusted later in life. Who is to say this is not the result of growing up living in a family that felt “normal,” judged by standards that relegate women to positions of inferiority in motherhood?”]

Arendt saw this hierarchy of work as a fundamental misunderstanding of what happens in the home—a misunderstanding that arose from the unique temporal features of care work and housework: the labor performed in the home moves so quickly, and produces so rapidly, Arendt wrote, that “its effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent.” Ancient political philosophers, Arendt writes, at least recognized the vital productivity of their servants, who, they believed, left behind “nothing more or less than their masters’ freedom or, in modern language, their masters’ potential productivity.” In antiquity, the work performed in the home was understood as constant, life-sustaining work that always produced: indeed, it produced the very possibility of public productivity; it created the possibility of shared communal life outside the home.”]