I was no virgin when I met my husband, and he knew it. We have been monogamous, but I wouldn’t call myself chaste. (I can hear my friends guffaw.) Pleasure brings me no shame. Books gave me strength to be my own woman.
Regarding what I do with my womb, I’ve stood my ground against curious strangers and relatives who worried I’d end up without a partner. In college, to lower the numbers, Abuela urged that I marry the very next man I met. If that’s what God thinks is best. Even prayers need clauses. As my primary caretaker, Abuela doubted I’d find a man who could love me, given my prickly temperament. Throughout my childhood and into adulthood, even after years of marriage, she told me hundreds of times that I should change to keep a husband. A false prophecy.
When are women worshipped like goddesses? Wedding day only. (2007-me in a white dress and red pashmina, Brian with my kiss marks on his face.) Marriage carries the promise of children. Have one? Don’t fret—you’ll be nudged toward another before too long. Have two? Better prepare your remarks, because one and done is the assumption. Two and through should suffice. The social pressure to stay fertile does not vanish until it becomes obvious to onlookers that this woman could not bear another child. Imagine dying with nipples sore and slack.
Two sons and a decade into our marriage, I’ve pressed my husband to get a vasectomy, modernity’s fastest and most reliable form of birth control, with little ceremony beyond a few laughs and winces. I love him and our boys. They are enough for me, but I am not yet enough for me. I want to be kept safe from worship. I intend to rule my own body. By which I mean I do not want more children.
Dame Mary Beard is a feminist scholar of the classics. Intrigued by her study of womanhood, power and speech, I have followed her thoughts from antiquity to the present and back again. In “The Roman and the Foreign: The Cult of the ‘Great Mother’ in Imperial Rome,” Beard tells us the Great Mother Goddess was formally introduced to Rome in 204 BCE. Not merely an idea, Cybele began as a blazing space rock from Asia Minor, now known as Türkiye. I repeat: Cybele was a meteorite.
Worshippers gilded Cybele’s fissures with silver and installed her in a temple completed in 191 BCE on Palatine Hill, widely regarded as Rome’s cradle. Centuries passed before a shared sense of Cybele’s significance yielded archival notes about her arrival. Beard turns to Livy, who describes a string of meteor showers in the closing days of the war against Hannibal. Eager to read the gods’ will—stones that had burned with light surely carried sacred meaning—the Romans consulted the Sibylline Books.
I want to be kept safe from worship. I intend to rule my own body. By which I mean I do not want more children.
Translated from Greek, these oracular pronouncements declared: When a foreign foe had brought war to Italy, that foe could be driven from the land and defeated if the Idaean Mother were brought to Rome from Pessinus. Legend held that the Roman race sprang from Mount Ida in Troy, and Cybele bore that name—Magna Mater Idaea.
To verify this divine directive, the Romans sent ambassadors to King Attalus of Pergamum by way of Delphi, where the foggy oracle decreed that the Goddess ought to be received by he who was the best man in Rome.
Delphi sits above a geological vent, a crack from which noxious gases escaped the earth, believed to cloud the minds of women who inhaled them and spoke their prophecies. In July 2013, a year before I learned Cybele’s name and more than 2,200 years after she had been brought to Rome, I climbed that sun-baked mountainside, once stained by animal blood offered to divinity, display, and the longing to know the future. There I encountered a stone shaped like a womb, revered as the center of the universe. Not anymore. Most people count the year by the birth of Jesus. And July’s name recalls Julius Caesar. Men cast long shadows.
In Delphi, I was already pregnant, though I hadn’t realized it yet. Among the toppled columns, cells were dividing in a wild, tumbling rush, as if eagles were dropping from a cliff. The embryo would implant in my body after I returned from Greece and headed to a writing conference. A twinge ran through my uterine lining, and I clutched my coffee in the ferry line. “I think I just felt implantation,” I told my friend. “I’d better not drink while I’m here.” To mother in contemporary culture is to become a temple under public scrutiny.
History is hazy, and Beard remains doubtful. Livy, too. He wrote that Attalus gave the Roman envoys a sacred stone locals claimed was the Mother of the Gods. What had the ambassadors offered in return? The chance to go on living? Attalus could have unearthed another meteorite and called it Cybele. The human mind sanctions sacredness in objects. Could a fraudulent rock, a stand-in, acquire legitimacy through the devotion of many? Perhaps pregnancy could make me a mother.
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From Desire Lines by Kristen Millares Young. © 2026. Published by Red Hen Press.
