Who else is your mother?
Lecture notes from my Write or Die class on writing motherhood and sexuality
Today I’m sharing an essay that is will also appear this week at
— a newsletter hosted by Chill Subs and Write or Die. Write or Die is a great organization that runs a bunch of innovative classes and mentorships taught by esteemed writers, and they’ve recently partnered with ChillSubs, which has tons of resources and support for writers looking to send their work out in into the world.The essay below explores just some of the ideas we’ll discuss this weekend in my one-day seminar on exploring sexuality and motherhood in your writing, hosted by Write or Die Sunday 10/29 10am-1pm PT—you can still sign up.
I’m also offering a couple one-on-one “care for writers” mentorships next month through Write or Die, and I did an interview for them recently with a wonderful former student of mine.
Today’s essay is housed under a new section I’ve created for Mad Woman, titled “Craft & Creativity.” I’ve been sharing essays on creativity, craft, and the work of writing since this newsletter’s inception, but I’m going to start aggregating these all in one place. Under this new heading, I’ll also be reviving my lecture notes series— essays, like this one, that draw on topics that come up in classes and workshops I teach.
I’ll still be publishing regular essays on books and culture under the “Essays” section, as well as weekly recs and personal essays and other features for paid subscribers, but the plan is to slowly (I just launched a book!) build up this new section for writers and other creatives by offering more prompts and community events and AMAs. Expanding this community will only be possible, though, with the ongoing support of paying subscribers, who make the work I do here paid work.
You can opt out of receiving essays like these if it’s just not your thing by going into your subscription settings and unchecking “Craft & Creativity.”
One might think that at this point in history the proximity of sex and motherhood would no longer feel dangerous. Surely people understand that mothers have sex and have had sex previously or that having children might change one’s relationship to sex, or at the very least the relationship to one’s body? Surely people know that sexuality and intimacy are shaped by cultural and political ideas about gender, and that the way we think about parenting and family are as well?
Not so, I’ve found, after writing two books that explore, among other things, not just mothers, but the sexual lives of mothers. In my first book, I wrote about my mother from the perspective of myself, as a child, watching her try to navigate what it meant to be a woman in both personal relationships and professional settings. As a girl, I watched as my mother’s experience of sexuality limited her ability to love and be loved, to find a pleasure all her own, and to fulfill the role of the good mother. I wrote, too, about the discomfort I felt in the presence of my mother’s sexuality.
In my second book, Touched Out, just released, I explore how I learned who and what my body was for through my early sexual experiences. I also write about how, years later, when I became a mother, I had to teach myself to navigate the residue of pain and confusion those experiences left in my body. I illustrate theoretically how the architecture of rape culture is reflected in the institution of motherhood because both are misogynist paradigms that seek to control and exploit women. And I write personally about how this comes up in the body in moments of disorientation and frustration as we parent.
On the one hand, mothers are considered, by default, to be nonsexual creatures. Motherhood is supposed to be the opposite of sex, even though many women have sex to become mothers. But a mother, the patriarchal logic goes, has already achieved the only reason for sex—she has had children! What use do mothers even have for sex?
On the other hand, mothers are supposed to quickly “get their bodies back” to save their marriages, while at the same time nodding along to the cultural norm that says a mother’s body belongs to her children. As I write in Touched Out, this reveals that a woman’s body is supposed to be reserved for marriage and motherhood—that is, for men and children, not for herself.
We have a cultural fear of maternal sexuality and maternal intensity more generally. Mothers who love too much or not enough are considered dangerous because they threaten the line between sex and motherhood, another reason we fear mothers who have sex. We can see how this shows up in our cultural narratives—the popularity of true crime or films that feature mothers whose excessive devotion leads them to violence, for instance.
But how do these cultural beliefs show up in our writing?