In high school, my philosophy teacher assigned each student a different question and corresponding primary sources for our term paper. He assigned me the question, “Are women free?” and handed me a Sandra Bartky article that outlined the fragmentation, domination, and objectification the female body endures. I wrote twenty pages answering the assigned question in the negative while living my arguments. I already knew that I was supposed to forgo myself to become desirable to boys who already felt entitled to my body. I looked around for a communal outcry but found none. The insidious male gaze patterned itself on me, restricting my freedom while being deemed acceptable, inevitable, or even nonexistent.

I saddled up to guys who, I calculated, might not make the first move. I was afraid of being alone in a room with a boy, not wanting a tongue forced into my mouth or a penis rammed into my vagina. I withstood awkward invitations for connection from guys I had no interest in. Avoiding sexual confrontation eclipsed acknowledging that I had my own desire. When a guy did kiss me or more, I let myself be kissed, or more. Not wanting to be mean or make him mad, sensing embarrassment or anger looming if I rebuffed him, being conditioned to care for his feelings first, I didn’t say no. I also never said yes. I got practiced at what Melissa Febos terms empty consent. I took part in the mistreatment of my body, confused as to whom it belonged. A voice whispered repeatedly, “You asked for this.”

Thus, I learned some bodies have unfettered, state-supported access to choice, and others do not. In my sexual encounters through much of my twenties, I didn’t believe I had full autonomy over what happened to my body. As I entered my thirties, I realized that empty consent does not just apply to sexuality, but motherhood as well.

I chose to be a mother. I consented enthusiastically. Then, after making that choice, I immediately experienced the inequities of motherhood. I lived the two-week cycles of hope and disappointment, hypervigilant to the rhythm of and shifts in my body. I cut things out of my diet. I had the miscarriages. I had the nausea. I gained weight fast and was expected to lose it faster. I had the grueling labor and abdominal surgeries. I breastfed. Does gender inequality in parenting come down to the difference between my body and the body of my spouse?

After birthing my first child, I stood in my bedroom, crying, with staples holding my belly skin together and milk dripping from my engorged breasts onto the floor. I was sleep deprived and overwhelmed. I looked at my spouse, imploring, whimpering, “Help me.” He had no idea what to do. I never felt so alone.

I know from her own writing that my mother wanted nothing more than to be a mother. She joyfully quit her job and raised me and my four siblings. She told me if she could instill one thing in me it would be the importance of staying at home with my kids. I did not comply, yet when my kids arrived, unpaid emotional and domestic labor seemed to slow-clap me into oblivion anyway. I felt isolated under what Audre Lorde calls the travesty of necessities. The patriarchy folded itself into the mundane routine of motherhood, making me believe I am to blame for my own mistreatment. Like the male gaze, the inequity in motherhood is so acceptable and normalized it is assumed inevitable. Stating it feels like naming the air.

I was not prepared for the banality of the oppression that I would endure as the parent with the uterus, all while being asked to love it and publicly proclaim my love for it, as if it were synonymous with the love I have for my children. I found life with little children adorable, precious, and tragic. Time is fleeting and loving my children feels like holding water. It feels sacred, which makes the misogyny propping up the institution of motherhood a little slippery. The old and ordinary pain ached dully in my bones, but I was too tired, sad, and depleted to complain or talk back to the voice whispering on loop, “You asked for this.” I faded into the wallpaper.

A few years ago, I wrote a short essay about a half hour of my life as a mother that attempted to capture the feeling of compression and complexity undergirding the empty consent of motherhood. The narrator is trapped in a system that severs her choice. Notice her crafting a story to cling to, striving to create meaning and assign value to defend her existence.

Sitting on the floor of the nursery with my second born on my lap, my phone buzzes against my hip. I ignore it and finish reading Frog and Toad aloud: 

 Frog and Toad stayed on the island all afternoon.

They ate wet sandwiches without iced tea.

They were two close friends sitting alone together.

 Boosting him up to his feet by his armpits I say, “Okay, Bubba, Momma has to go potty.”

“Potty,” he replies. 

“Well, let’s have a potty party! You go on your potty and…” 

“Momma?” calls my first born from the bottom of the stairs. 

“We’re upstairs, honey. How’s my sweet boy?” 

“I have to go poop.” 

“Okay babe. Go ahead. We’ll be right down if you need help wiping.” 

 While getting my youngest situated on his toddler toilet, my phone, now resting on the corner of the sink, buzzes again. I open the text I missed first, from my nanny:

 “Woke up with a cold. Going to stay home today. I’d hate to get the kids sick.”

 I clench my teeth, calling up my mental calendar, searching for a new chunk of time to finish my edits. Before the rearranging clicks into place, I open the more recent text from a friend:

 “Miscarried last night. Very strange experience. Pain intensified while we were at Adam’s graduation reception. Came back to our hotel to manage and rest. Feeling much better today, though sadness is palpable, as you can imagine.”

 My heart sinks. My friend is a pediatric palliative care doctor. She helps children die. On her days off, she knits clothes for the healthy kids in her life to remind herself that some children thrive. Both of my boys received adorable old-man cardigans with elbow pads from her. She is torn about having children, but her spouse is desperate for a baby. There is no halfway. She is struggling to conceive and feels layers of relief and sadness, then guilt, confusion, and grief. 

 “All do-ne!” my youngest announces.  

“Okay, Bub. Let’s wipe the tushies.”  

While getting us assembled again, my mind wonders after the two babies who died inside of me before my two boys were born. I remember how this same doctor friend was very scientific about it all, offering me stats about how common miscarriages are and stating, “It was just not viable,” so simply it took my breath away.  

“Down. Stairs.”

“Yep, let’s go downstairs. Hold my hand please.”

 “Down. Down. Down,” he narrates, concentrating, and regrouping after each step. 

 Hearing us draw near, my older child calls from the downstairs toilet, “Momma, do you know how waxy monkey tree frogs have their babies?”

“No, how?” 

I quickly craft a text reply that feels woefully inadequate:  

 “Oh, my goodness. I’m so sorry. Oh, this is so much. I’m here with you. Call me anytime. I’ll check in later. The best advice I got was to feel what you feel without judgment. Love you so much.”

 “They have tadpoles in their tummies and then they spit them up and the tadpoles come out of their mouths and are babies.”

“Wow,” I try to sound more amazed than distracted. But I’m tugged.

Before I can elaborate, my phone buzzes again. This text is from my spouse:

 “The gift we got your dad for Christmas isn’t coming until January.”

 I sigh and start to come up with a new gift idea before interrupting myself, triaging. Later. 

 “Phone. Phone. Phone,” from the floor.

 From the bathroom, “Momma, I am nervous about having the dream where I get sad that Dada is going to die.”  

 “Read. Read,” my youngest toddles toward me with a book held high. 

 “Ok baby, I’ll read. Simon, honey…”

 Before I can address his comment, he adds, “Momma, did you know that the Northern leopard frog eats bats?”

I try to compute this new obscure animal fact, but there is no place to put it. I’m full. I am not keeping up. It’s too much too fast. I can feel myself retreating, deflating, hunkering, surviving. My youngest climbs up on the couch, snuggles in close, pushing his elbow into my belly to lean forward and look at the pictures. He absentmindedly places his soft, pudgy hand on my thigh. I notice. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. Then begin again:

 “Mr. Watson and Mrs. Watson have a pig named Mercy…”

 My phone buzzes against my hip. 

 “Momma?” 

*

The moment in the essay when my child put his hand on my thigh is working for resolution. The narrator is straining to show that moment makes it all worth it. In many ways, it does. I know that in twenty years I will give anything to have that pudgy hand on my thigh one more time. Yet in the moment, it was too much. There must be another way. In motherhood, I rearranged my personal and professional life, self-deprecating as much and for as long as necessary. I longed for more time and space to think, read, and write, to remember who I was apart from being a mother. There were moments when I was crawling out of my skin while feeling guilty for crawling out of my skin.

Perpetually touched out, as Amanda Montei describes it, I experienced physical and emotional burnout. As much as I asked for help from my spouse, nanny, and extended family, no one was coming to save me. Motherhood patterned itself on me. I disappeared, hoping to find myself later.

I did choose to become a mother, but the severed choice inside motherhood feels like empty consent. I did not choose for my maternity leave to last only eight weeks. I did not ask for quality childcare to cost as much as my salary, which was lower than my spouse’s despite having more degrees than him. When I quit my job during COVID and joined the millions of women pushed out of the workforce in 2020 in response to my youngest’s childcare center closing and my oldest being sent home to do kindergarten on an iPad, it did not feel like a choice. Motherhood is an exploitative and accepted form of unpaid labor, and I refuse to believe the suffering I endure as a mother is inevitable.

It was easy to blame my spouse. He represented the heteropatriarchal structure that entitles men to use my body. I begged him to consider me, to fight for me as his equal. He sees the inequity and says he’ll try. And then the centripetal force of society sweeps us back into the normalcy of sexism and the sanctioned inequities of motherhood.  

Like so many institutions in society, motherhood is shaped by policy and restricted by the confines of ability, class, race, gender, and sexuality. I win in all categories except gender. I have a uterus, and I am a woman. Motherhood acted on my body in ways that fatherhood did not act on the body of my spouse. I failed privately at a rigged game, thinking it was my fault. No matter what my mother friends choose among our limited options, they feel like they are failing privately, too. Motherhood is a broken agreement that benefits our patriarchal capitalist society while wounding women. And I fell for it.

My sons are growing up in a society that wrongly believes male bodies are superior to mine. How do we live in the world while resisting it? How do I extract myself from the institution of motherhood while loving my children beyond measure? I feel guilty for relaxing into the hum of a society that allows violence against and exploitation of women in all forms to go unchecked. Although not my fault, it is my responsibility to fight like hell to build a place where more bodies can feel the freedom and agency of real choice and true consent, mothers included.

Now that my children are six and eight, I feel a bit more rested. I can exhale. I am straightening my spine, looking around, and assessing the damage. My sense of agency is re-emerging, and I am livid. Becoming invisible under the blanket of age and domesticity has garnered my courage to be disobedient. I opt out of the assumed agreement whereby men extract emotional, reproductive, and domestic labor from women in exchange for the promise of economic and physical protection. I want more than empty consent. I want real choice for my body, which should belong to me. I am desperate for a reckoning.

The essay I wrote as a snapshot of motherhood is a reminder that the love I have for my children is seeping with preciousness, the isolation and unequal unpaid labor of motherhood is real suffering, and that I do not need to be complicit in the mistreatment of my body. As a mother raising boys, I am reflecting on Sandra Bartky and what I learned about sensuality, consent, desire, and pleasure as a girl. We need new stories, messier scripts, and new translations of old motherhood myths that include autonomy, equality, and real choice. Although I have been conditioned to distrust it, I do have a yes inside my body that includes loving my children well without losing myself. Inside my body, I also find sustained outrage to talk back to the normalization of women’s suffering.

No, thank you. I did not ask for this.

-Ellie Roscher

Ellie Roscher is the author of Remarkable Rose, The Embodied Path, 12 Tiny Things, Play Like a Girl and How Coffee Saved My Life. Her writing appears in the Baltimore Review, Eunoia Review, Inscape Magazine, Half and One, Mothering Spirit, Bearings and elsewhere. Ellie founded and facilitates Plum, a supportive online community for folks journeying toward deeper embodiment together. She teaches writing and yoga in Minneapolis and holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA in Theology from Luther Seminary. Follow Ellie at @ellieroscher and find out more at plumwellness.us and ellieroscher.com.