Fresh Take: Amanda Montei on "Touched Out"

Margaret: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Margaret.

Amy: And this is Amy. And today we're talking to Amanda Montei, author of the new book, Touched Out, which we'll be discussing today. Amanda has a PhD in literature and teaches writing at Stanford, plus a number of literary organizations.

You can find her every week at her popular Substack Mad Woman, where Amanda writes about books and culture with a feminist lens. Amanda is also the mother of two children. Welcome, Amanda.

Amanda Montei: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Amy: So touched out, it's one of those terms that like, we all know what it means you know what it means when you see it, when you feel it, but let's really define it.

What does it tend to mean in our society?

Amanda Montei: It's great. Actually writing this book too, I thought that sort of everybody knew this term, but I've found that some, especially non-parents are not as familiar with this term.

Margaret: I think all moms know the term in their bones, even if they don't know that they know it.

They're like touched out. I know exactly what you mean. Oh, I know what that is.

Amanda Montei: Yes. And then you describe it. Oh yeah. [00:01:00] Okay. Now I know what this is. Yes. Yeah, it really became this commonly used term, I think, over the past decade. So I became a parent in 2015, and I started hearing this term.

But yes, it is this term that provides a lot of recognition, I think, for a lot of moms who feel sensory overwhelmed, who feel like their body has reached a limit. There's often descriptions of the kids tugging on them, feeling like you want to jump out of your skin, crawling out of your skin, all the bad feelings about the skin, but I think that when I learned this term, I felt like there was a lot missing there because in the mid-2010s, a lot of the discourse around this term was like, this is totally normal. It's totally just a part of becoming a mom. And that really did not sit well with [00:02:00] me.

Amy: And, and it's like an end, it's like a thought-terminating thing, right?

Yep, that's a thing.

Amanda Montei: Totally. Yeah. And go deal with it. And I think, part of that was that there was this urge to destigmatize feeling this way, right? Because as moms, like any negative feeling that we might have in parenting is something that we're taught to secret away, right?

And so it makes sense that we were trying to normalize this thing. Okay, yes, sometimes you are going to feel like you don't want to be touched by your children or your partner, which maybe we can get into as well, which is another layer to this term, but, ultimately, yeah, we need to move past that thought of why are mothers feeling this way?

And why have we come to accept it as just this sort of normal part of parenting?

Margaret: It's interesting. Cause even in picking up this book, I read the title and I was like, Oh, it's [00:03:00] Touched Out, like I'm picturing a harried mom on the cover and it's like, when I just can't stand it anymore.

And it's really not that kind of book at all. It's a deep work look at our relationship with our own bodies, the world's relationship with our bodies, our parents, our partners, other people's relationship with our bodies, that this is really much deeper than: I just can't take it anymore. And that's like what Amy said, it's not enough to just dismiss this term as I'm a hot mess mom and I'm touched out.

It's not quite at that level.

Amanda Montei: Totally. Yes. Yes. Thank you for saying that. Yeah. And I think there's that assumption whenever you write like a quote unquote mom book, which is to say just like a book about motherhood, that it's going to be like, as I always think of it, like jazz hands, right? Okay, moms, let's talk about how we feel touched out and it's really trivializing.

And I think for me, I felt like this was a cultural [00:04:00] phenomenon that we needed to take a little bit more seriously.

Amy: Because after the touched out thing it is the guilt that comes, the sort of second arrow of it all is: and I'm not supposed to feel this way, especially with our partners, that there's this shame that we're not going to be able to give 100 percent of ourselves and maybe the way we used to before we were breastfeeding six hours a day. But then we also feel bad about that, right? We're at the end of our rope and then we also like, ugh, but I really got to get it together. That's, I feel like that's the hardest part of what's hard about this.

Amanda Montei: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I think there's a trivializing discourse that sort of hovers around this, but there's also a lot of what I found online, these really painful stories, and usually there was like always a common narrative of a mom staying home, staying home [00:05:00] alone, taking care of her kids.

And then at the end of the day, her partner comes home and she really wants to have nothing to do with him. Usually it was like hetero, cis-hetero partnership. And that was also very troubling for me, right? What is this sort of element of sexual duty that's factoring in? And as you said, Amy, like this feeling of shame around a pretty normal response to being touched all day by a child.

So yeah, a lot of the book is also digging into how can we look at this cultural phenomenon and connected to a lot of what we've been talking about in feminist politics over the past decade or so, as far as male entitlement to women's bodies.

Margaret: And it is, it's deep in the medical jargon or the medical starting point that like, [00:06:00] okay, six weeks is when you can resume sexual activity because a doctor has looked at parts and pieces and said okay, everything's just about healed enough that it's a green light.

And that's not the starting point for a lot of women. And it's just like this inherent thing of okay, you're good to go. So now you should be breastfeeding and not sleeping and also getting back to intimacy with your partner. And that is your baseline expectation when you wake up in the morning.

Amanda Montei: And also like the burning question that you have at six weeks, like when realistically, we want to know how we're doing psychologically, emotionally, physically, in other ways, like the centrality of, the sexual green light at six weeks is something that tells us a lot about our culture.

Margaret: Worth investigating. Yeah.

Amanda Montei: Worth investigating, for sure.

Amy: And then there's [00:07:00] like another part of this, about being touched out, that we actually just need physical space, a room of our own, right? And we all felt this much more I think during the pandemic, but it was an intensification of something that was always there, right? Like we don't, the space that we exist in is not our own.

Amanda Montei: Yeah. Part of this sort of touched out phenomenon is that women are describing their body like a toy, a snot rag, it's just this thing to be used and trampled on and I write in the book about working at an in-home daycare. And what I learned there is that there's definitely a degree of filth and fluid and fury, like just constant...

Margaret: Filth, fluid, and fury. The story of American daycares.

Amanda Montei: Alliteration. Yeah. [00:08:00] Should have been the subtitle. Yeah, caregiving is, it's a very sensory, physical experience, right? But when we're doing it all alone with no support, which of course is what was happening during the pandemic and which triggered a lot of memories of early parenthood for parents who had older kids at the time.

When we're doing it all alone, of course our body becomes this kind of tool. There's no, there's nothing else around for kids to use.

Margaret: And it's a play jungle gym, right? Like it's just a constant physical touch. The book is very personal and full of personal stories. And I think one of the things that, you know, as I came in expecting kind of a different book, the idea that motherhood is a reckoning with our own bodies and our own history within our [00:09:00] bodies is something that was, we read a lot of books and talk to a lot of people for this podcast and it's been a while since I had a like falling from the horse kind of moment. And I think we talk a lot about the reckoning with how we were parented, the reckoning with maybe our own experience as children or watching our own parents in terms of parenting, but this reckoning with the physical experiences of our body.

Can you talk a little bit about how you talk about that in the book? Because for me it was very eyeopening.

Amanda Montei: Yeah, definitely. Like I said, parenting is inherently physical, but the sort of knock about nature of American intensive parenting is keyed up so much.

So it is really confronting to have your body, tugged at constantly, to have your naked body [00:10:00] stared at by your children especially if those things have happened before, with experiences with men or other sexual partners in ways that left a mark, or caused you to feel like your sense of autonomy or consent were violated.

And I think that experience is, it's pretty common for women, we have this very limited set of terms for talking about sexual violence, like rape, assault, harassment, there's just like three levels, right? But in reality, we're catcalled, from a young age, if we're socialized as girls, we are taught that our bodies are objects for other people's pleasure. And so to get into a situation where [00:11:00] then you're performing that as a parent, all that unresolved stuff tends to, or can, really bubble up. So for me, that's, yeah, that's what that touched out feeling is.

It's all that stuff riling up and wait, am I allowed to say no? Have I ever been allowed to say no?

Margaret: It goes deep.

Amy: We're talking to Amanda Montei. Her new book is called Touched Out and we'll be right back. So Amanda, there's a quote in the book that I saved to talk to you about because I thought, we never want to say as we often do, if you feel touched out, that's something for you to fix and deal with and change, right?

That's not something for the world to, that's for you to figure out, but there are ways in which we contribute to this. And I'm quoting something from the book. You said, "I still believed that laying myself down on the train tracks to be [00:12:00] railroaded by my child or on the floor as train tracks so her daughter could run her caboose over my back was the best way to parent.

It hadn't occurred to me to consider what other lessons I was teaching my daughter in the process." So let's talk about how we think that we are not only supposed to put up with this, but we're better if we are putting up with it.

Amanda Montei: Yeah, absolutely. So I do talk a little bit about this sort of era of intensive parenting that we're living in, which, again, is another way in which we're ramping up the pressure on mothers psychologically, emotionally in terms of labor, and I write about really buying into that, and feeling like I did have to make my body available to my child 24/7 for them to not be, I know I'm not supposed to curse, messed up, to [00:13:00] not like, irreparably damage them.

I also write about being like really invested in attachment parenting, which is very like late 2010s. And now of course we have the sort of gentle parenting backlash that's happening. And I think that's not because we don't want to be gentle with our children or we don't want to give them everything that we have to give, right? But that it's all a little too much, right? And it's all putting pressure on mothers and not a community or another adult. And yeah, and I think that we can explore how we are invested in those ideologies that say mothers are going to suffer for a couple of years. They're going to give up their identity and everything that they believe in. [00:14:00] And we can push back against that.

Margaret: Yeah, it's we sometimes say it's like these simple ideas can be extremely radical. Like the idea that, I feel like the imagery around this that we all see that I've never even really thought to question, which is the mom with, I've taken this picture for promos for the podcast, for my old blog, like I got the baby on the hip and another one crawling into my face and the house is a mess. And you've never seen that image of a male ever. Try to think of an image of a man who's like: I had kids and now like my whole life is over and everything's falling apart and it's okay to have people crawling all over me all the time. And this is the new reality. This it's so standard to what we believe about motherhood.

Amanda Montei: It is. It is. It's so central to the image of the American [00:15:00] mom that it's hard to imagine something else. But if we just think about it for a minute, like where is everybody else in this picture? It's just the mom. And literally as you described it, right? Like the kids descending on her, and where is anyone else helping her?

Margaret: And it does seem, it's, as I think back, like it does seem historically that this is played out through history, right? That I picture, like an Irish mom in the 1800s, it's like, she's like feeding the cow and has the 10 kids all around. So it's not something that's, like, where is it coming from? Is it layered on by society or is it just we think it's fundamental to the experience?

Amanda Montei: Yeah. I think both, and at least like the Irish mom with the cow is like outside, right? It's usually when we get the American mom, she's like sitting [00:16:00] on the couch, right?

She's at home. Why is she trapped? Why is she always trapped at home? And I think that, yeah, it's a cultural image that just is like self perpetuating. It's definitely coming from our belief in parenting expert advice, which is so all consuming now that especially with the internet, the amount of that advice that we're getting and the very American tendency to look to experts rather than to look to our family systems or our communities or ourselves to explore how we might want to parent.

Yeah. And I think, as I explore in the book, I think we also need to situate the question of this sort of entitlement to women's work in the home next to this sort of broader exploration of male entitlement to women's bodies [00:17:00] because it says a lot, right? That image of the mom being descended upon, right?

About who we think women's bodies are for and what we think they're for.

Amy: Yeah. And then, and you're young, I'm thinking about being a young woman not having had kids yet and you're getting catcalled every time you walked on the street. And now I'm a different-aged woman having had a couple of kids, having a body that looks like I've had a couple of kids and not getting catcalled.

And then you feel bad about that, right? Like that, like your body is for other people to use and judge. And you are measuring yourself up to how well you're performing whatever part of that job you're supposed to be performing at that moment.

Amanda Montei: And usually the job is to, yeah, make yourself into an object for male consumption or to serve the nuclear family, which historically, serves [00:18:00] men and male power in the form of being a mom.

And that's supposed to be the sort of like ultimate self-actualization for women is to be moms serving the nuclear family.

Amy: And if you ever questioned any of this, I think it's put back on you if you didn't want to put up with this, what'd you have kids for?

Amanda Montei: Totally.

Amy: Yeah. And you get to do both. You get to be a good parent and say some of this seems a little unfair.

Amanda Montei: Totally. Absolutely. Yeah. I completely reject the idea that like critiquing the institution of the family or critiquing our cultural expectations of mothers or our political abandonment of mothers in terms of policy, like paid leave and affordable childcare, has really anything to do with our love for our children. I think becoming more aware of the limits of my body and, or just what I [00:19:00] want, my own desire and my own sense of self has made me such a better parent and it shouldn't all be about that. It should also be about us as people, women as people. But yeah, it only strengthens our relationships when they feel more consensual and caring.

Margaret: Yeah. And it's not like a zero-sum game at some point, it's like in the old days, it's if you don't throw yourself on the funeral pyre, you don't love your husband enough. You don't throw yourself on this burning pile of debris, it doesn't mean you don't love your kids. It means that you have an autonomy, an autonomous place from which to love your kids, which I think that permission to find that space for yourself, and we did talk a lot about this in the pandemic in terms of so many of our listeners were writing in and being like, I had one little sewing [00:20:00] station, that was my little special place.

And it was like, throw that off the table. Now that's going to be the kids' desk for home learning or whatever, that it's not really a question of how much we want to give and we want to give in love to kids. It's that we don't want to just take chunks of ourselves and offer that to the world because that's the default.

Amanda Montei: Totally. Yeah, totally. And sometimes that's survival mode, right? Like you got to make space in the house where you can get it. Another thing here too that I explore in the book is this question of choice, right? And I think people get really prickly when talking about choice.

They really want to believe that either you have a choice or you don't have a choice, right? Are you saying that women don't have a choice? And so that, to Amy's point, is where this sort of weaponization of choice against women comes up, right? Oh you chose to be a parent. You should have known this, right?

If you're poor, that must've been a choice that you made, right? [00:21:00] If you don't have the resources to give yourself a sense of freedom and be a parent, you made that choice, right? It's on you. But that's just not how it works. That's not how choice works. This is just coming from this very American sense of free will, right?

That we just completely create our own destiny. Exactly. Yeah. And we know that's not true. Like agency, choice, these things have always been conditioned along the lines of class and race and gender. And so there's ways that I've been able to create agency in my life that other people might not.

And even people with an immense amount of privilege, they're still living under the influence of culture and politics and history, so I think it's worth us just exploring choice as this more complex concept and agency as this [00:22:00] more complex concept so that we can create spaces that do feel more consensual, to a range of people and families.

Margaret: In part three, we always turn to solutions. So that's what we're going to talk about next. The solutions are not necessarily easy, but we will be back to discuss them. We're talking to Amanda Montei, the author of Touched Out. Okay. So we've had the scales fall from our eyes. We see that oh, this default of this is just our destiny as moms is maybe something worth questioning and finding some more autonomy for ourselves and changing our stories around this.

How do you start to find, as Amy likes to say, some of this stuff feels so deeply baked in the cake. Like how are we disentangling ourselves personally from this and then maybe how connected to that [00:23:00] is untangling it on a societal level?

Amanda Montei: Yeah. I think it is deeply baked into the cake that we're all eating every day. So it is tricky. And my background is in narrative and literature. So this book is, yeah, it's not that here's the problem and here's my solution.

Margaret: Here's your eight-point plan.

Amanda Montei: Yeah. You got it for 27 bucks.

Amy: You said that in one of your interviews.

Amanda Montei: Yeah, exactly.

Amy: Amanda, you actually said in one of your interviews, I thought it was with Anne Helen Petersen. You said that at the end of the book and you're like hmmm, a really good ending would be if I sailed away on a boat, but I'm not going to do that. So what's the ending here?

Amanda Montei: Totally. And that's I think that's a trend now in the genre too, of like women blowing up their lives, which is great. I'm all for it. But also that's not necessary for some people, for some people it is. Yeah. So I was like really resistant [00:24:00] to providing any sort of like false solutions here, but I do talk in the book about bringing men into childcare.

And this is something that historically has not happened globally. And so I think it's interesting, curious that we're not talking more about this. Yes, there is a great conversation happening now around bringing men into the work that happens inside the home. But over 90 percent of childcare providers are women. Half of them are women of color. I think we really need, that's like the next frontier is really digging into why are men not in professional childcare. But I think on the more individual level, acknowledging that, yes, we're always told to fix it ourselves, that we're going to fix living under the thumb of patriarchy in our homes [00:25:00] for me as a parent, passing on a language of consent and autonomy to my kids is crucially important.

It's the path from which all others diverge, if I can teach them to respect other people's bodies, that's great. I won parenting.

Amy: How do you go about modeling that? How do, give us an example of how you might talk about that with your kids and how old are your

children too?

Amanda Montei: My kids are five, almost six, and eight.

Yeah, we talk about bodies all the time. We talk about not commenting on other people's bodies. We talk about asking before, the basic stuff, asking before hugs and touch and as they get older, these these conversations get increasingly complicated, but, as I write in the book, like I started with the [00:26:00] wry parenting stuff of: I'm going to pick you up now. Here is what we're doing. And then as they get bigger, it gets more complicated. But I also model that I have a sense of autonomy, right? I need space, mommy's body needs a little break right now. And I don't really carry guilt around that anymore because I know that it's teaching them a really valuable lesson about their own bodies. I think another sort of main question in this book is how do we separate ourselves from the institution of motherhood, using Adrienne Rich's terms, which is like all this stuff that we've been talking about, all these expectations and assumptions all this sort of history that we're mired in.

And I think we can't we can't completely remove [00:27:00] ourselves from this world, but we can continue to ask, why am I doing this? Why do I feel like I need to let my kid jump on my face right now, or why am I feeling like really frustrated and itchy? What is it that maybe I need?

And just to get curious about why we're doing the things that we're doing. Is it a cultural compulsion? Is it that image of the mom that we think we need to play out or is it something we really want?

Amy: You point out in the book that maternal touch aversion has been studied a little but not that much.

There hasn't been that much on it. Do you think that's a shortcoming of the scientific community or do you think because in the end it is more metaphorical than this amount of touch is acceptable and then this is too much?[00:28:00]

Amanda Montei: Oh, for sure. I think it's a deficit in the research. Yeah. There's very minimal research on postpartum mental health in general, and so we definitely need more of that. There's, the resources allocated for women's mental health in general, or even physical health, is disappointing to say the least. But that doesn't mean that women aren't having these experiences and that they're not worth digging into both how we talk about them, but also the metaphor of feeling touched out can also be like a lived experience. Wow, I really feel like my body's being used as an object. That can be really triggering, because we felt that before. [00:29:00]

Margaret: So yeah, it seems to me like the naming of it just for people and for moms in our audience is the most useful part of the exercise.

This is not just like you're touched out, go get a manicure. You need self care. Like we're not having the discussion on the level of here's your eight-point plan. It's really a deeper dive into the way we have lived in our bodies is coming into a reckoning in this motherhood and trying to be a spouse and a partner and a sexual partner and a mother all at the same time.

And that feeling is very deeply valid. It's not just valid in terms of and here's the four-point plan to fix it. That this is something that's real. I feel like it's 90 percent of the battle.

Amanda Montei: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think, yes, it is like a [00:30:00] normal reaction. But it's not a feeling that we have to allow ourselves to have all the time.

And, for me, the better question is: what has been my relationship in my body with consent? What's been my relationship with desire and my own wants and needs and what is my relationship right now, and do I maybe need to sit with those questions and see why motherhood is bringing all this stuff up? I love the term reckoning. Yeah, because it is this sort of: wait a minute.

Margaret: And what's been my relationship with sublimating my own needs for the needs of other people who want access to my body. That is a question that I think in all the questions we have talked about in the many years of doing this, that like we have [00:31:00] not really had a discussion around that and it's very eyeopening, I think.

Amanda Montei: Totally. Yeah. And I feel mothers should belong to themselves. And there's this interesting, I wrote a piece for The New York Times about who does the, who does a mother's body belong to, and being pregnant and realizing it felt like it belonged to strangers who were like telling me how to eat and what I shouldn't be buying at the grocery store, and then having kids, you have people commenting on what you're doing or wearing or whatever, I think mother's bodies should belong to themselves.

And that doesn't mean that we can't also feel a sense of that sort of loving belonging with our children and our families and our communities. But I think that those experiences are richer when we also feel like our bodies belong to us.

Amy: You made a beautiful point in the book and [00:32:00] I'm going to paraphrase and I can't remember the exact phrasing, but it was about how love is truly love when it's consensual. That's when it's truly felt, when it's freely given. I thought, yeah, that's it.

Amanda Montei: Yeah, totally. And I think this book is a lot about love. It's about looking at our children and realizing there's like a barrier coming up here within me, but it doesn't feel like it has anything to do with them, with the kids, and so allowing us ourselves to explore what are those barriers that are coming up and purge them to an extent, allows us to, yeah, create this more consensual form of love, and not trying to romanticize it too much. Of course, like I said, not all of us have the choice to slow down, take a beat, do all this like hard internal work, right?

Some folks are just working and trying to put dinner on the table, but [00:33:00] we would hope that everyone could have access to this kind of important reflection on their bodies and being validated, right?

Amy: This is, it's such a beautiful book because it's such a skillful combination of really personal memoir and really hard hitting research. And it's such an eye opening read, as you said, Margaret, and I really enjoyed this book. Amanda Montei's book is called Touched Out. Amanda, tell us where our listeners can find more about you and what you're working on.

Amanda Montei: Yeah, you can find the book everywhere. I just finished my book tour. So I am like totally burnt out, going to reconnect with my body now. Talked out. Yeah. And talked out. Actually really excited to snuggle with my kids cause I've been spending so much time away from them. But you can find me, yeah, at my newsletter, Mad Woman on [00:34:00] Substack. I've been actually really enjoying digging in there

since the book tour and yeah, I'm always teaching. You can find me on Instagram, not on Twitter. I am over Twitter now. Yeah, but you can find me at Instagram @amontei.

Margaret: Thanks so much for talking to us today.

Amanda Montei: Thanks for having me.

Amy: Thanks, Amanda.