Opinion | Why Mothers Feel Touched Out

My husband became an outcast in our own home, second fiddle to me, the primary source of nourishment and comfort, but also to the institution of motherhood, to which my body also now belonged. I sensed his disappointment because a mother, too, is meant to belong to her husband. But I frequently found myself “touched out,” a phrase I absorbed from other parents of my generation, which named well those frantic flashes when all the requirements of good motherhood overwhelmed me and I wanted to be alone to sort things out.

My single mother experienced her own moments of overwhelm when I was young, triggered by losses of control she felt in her own life. Wanting to feel the power I had over her when it seemed I’d lost it, when I was a teenager, I dumped her liquor down the kitchen drain. I wanted to belong to her, but now that I am a mother, I understand that she was often looking to belong, if only for an instant, to herself.

Today, when women speak of feeling touched out in motherhood, they cite this phenomenon — a sense that their body no longer belongs to them. Mothers belong to husbands and children, and when they seek their own respite or pleasure it’s understood as narcissistic, selfish or immoral. We have come to accept that parents will experience an extreme lack of autonomy for many years. This is a trick, though, of patriarchal power, which has convinced many Americans that women parenting all alone without support or community is just the way things must be, and that a loss of ownership over one’s body is a biological inevitability rather than a political, economic and social problem.

On social media, the hashtag #touchedout creates recognition for parents, primarily straight married women, to commune around the sensory overwhelm of parenthood, but also around losses of identity, questions about marital sex and the confusion that arises when old traumas resurface in parenthood. Often in online spaces, the lethal cocktail of intensive, individualistic parenting and America’s failing social services and lack of affordable child care appears disconnected from a misogynistic culture that objectifies women’s bodies, as well as a political climate that is robbing people of reproductive freedom. But there is a certain continuity between the rape culture in which my generation grew up, which normalized sexual violence and left many girls and women feeling reduced to nothing but a body, and the loneliness and isolation so many women feel when they become parents.

I don’t mean to imply that women pushing their children away are inherently political rebels. But the psychic and physical overwhelms mothers experience at home in America are evidence of broader issues with the conditions in which we parent and illustrate how our daily lives both echo and resist a culture of male control. These are not just messy moms who can’t get themselves together. The act of clarifying a limit around touch and access to one’s body can be a form of domestic resistance for women.