What If Good Mothers Have Filthy Minds?
A field report from the fantasies mothers keep under lock and tongue
We like tidy stories about mothers.
Tidy mothers make tidy citizens. We keep the civic fabric from fraying by lowering our own needs to keep everyone calm.
Desire disturbs the economy of service; it is a small act of defiance, a private claim in a public role. A mother who WANTS — wants sex, wants silence, wants out — refuses to be a public good.
Half a century ago, Nancy Friday1 cracked the door and let the air in. She gathered women’s fantasies and published what culture insisted should stay unprintable. It was radical, ferociously sexual, and unfiltered.
More recently, Gillian Anderson published Want2 — an elegant collection of women’s fantasies, somehow careful in its curating, and especially alert to modern sensibility.
Between those books sits a change in mood: we have learned to speak of sex in tasteful tones while quietly scrubbing it of danger.
Yes, we have gained a more nuanced understanding of harmful power dynamics in sexual relationships, but one consequence of that progress is an impulse to prune even our most secret sexual dreams, if the sex we are dreaming of doesn’t conform to certain standards (Kitty Drake, 20243)
We tidy desire the way we tidy the house.
And so there are mothers — our fantasies living at the intersection of appetite and duty.
As Nancy Friday said way back in the ‘70’s “I couldn’t write the books I have if I were a mother,” she said. “Then ‘Good Nancy’ would have to be in charge. The one who’s less comfortable talking about sex.”
Mother’s silence has been mistaken for virtue. No one has ever really asked us what we want, because to ask is to risk hearing what the culture cannot bear: that motherhood doesn’t cauterise desire, it only conceals it.
When we admit to fantasy — sexual, emotional, existential — we disturb the self-erasure story that keeps everyone comfortable.
We are not supposed to want beyond usefulness. A mother with lust is a disruption; a mother who longs to be touched, or to be left alone, or to be taken, becomes politically volatile.
The danger is never in the fantasy itself but in its ownership.
After I published When Mothers Have Sex, the response was immediate and unrestrained. My inbox filled with messages from women who recognised themselves in its sentences and wanted to speak further - to clarify, confess, and to extend the conversation.
The volume and urgency of those replies made something clear: the subject of mothers’ desire was not exhausted by a single essay. It had merely been waiting for permission.
So I sent out a call4. I asked mothers to share their fantasies...the private imaginings that accompany the public work of care. It seemed the most natural next step, a continuation of the same act: to make visible what is habitually erased.
Women answered with eagerness, wit, hunger, intelligence, defiance. And with truths that don’t belong on school forms or Christmas shopping lists.
Each response felt revelatory and a recognition. Fantasy, it turns out, is both pressure valve and blueprint: the map a mother draws when she is not permitted to travel.
Before anything else, I want to acknowledge all the mothers who sent in their fantasies. Each voice here altered the horizon a little, making space for the rest of us to look differently at our own desires. Their courage is ongoing; it lives in the act of staying visible after speaking.
As I gathered these voices, one of mine insisted on joining them. It didn’t feel right to stay outside the frame, collecting other women’s truths as if I were exempt. Desire doesn’t permit that kind of distance; it folds everyone who touches it into its heat.
How these fantasies appear
Settle in. Each section gathers voices around a theme: appetite, escape, rest, refusal, touch. Every numbered entry belongs to a mother, printed exactly as she sent it. They are unedited, unembellished, and collectively, a record of what usually goes unsaid.
THE WING I DIDN’T KNOW WAS THERE
Discovery, multiplicity, the self with a key in her hand.
One of my recurring dreams is that I’m living in a house and realise there’s a whole wing I’ve never known about. A door I thought was a closet opens, almost by accident, onto a staircase. Each room in this wing houses a different man for me to do what I will with.
I fantasise about a double life: one free of responsibilities where I do whatever my heart and libido want even fly across the globe on a whim. The other life is anchor and family and steadiness, which I adore… just not all the time.
Imagine if there was a world where dualities and complexities could be lived unshamed instead of being pushed into a dark corner of the psyche as a mere fantasy. Uttering these things, no matter the depth of their truth, triggers conditioning from generations of how one must settle and not want more (especially something wild… very wild…)
How the confines of marriage makes a fantasy like a double life an impossible aspiration (though, would an open marriage be a mid-way solution? only if the other partner was open to open, which is probably the greatest limitation of most women in longing).
The complexity of wanting to stay and wanting to leave at the same time… I can hear the elders whisper “oh but little girl, you can’t both have the cake and eat it”. But what if I want to?
THE HOLY FUCKING SILENCE
Sanctuary as lust. The erotic life of quiet.
Simply to have a holiday alone. Time and space for my own thoughts, preferences, and desires to be the most important thing I think about.
Quiet, peace, space. Being in the tropics by myself and swimming in crystal-clear water… warm and expansive. Living at my own rhythm, deep in my own thoughts and being.
My fantasy is a hotel alone. Sometimes I fantasise about disappearing. Not dying. Just logging off. Getting a job no one gives a shit about. Growing cucumbers. Writing poetry in the margins of a notebook no one reads.
I fantasised about being in a hotel room with room service a phone call away. A place where no one touched me, called my name, or needed anything. After a couple of days of that, my husband comes to ravage me and sleep in with me.
TO BE LOVED WITHOUT LIFTING A FINGER
The refusal of labour as a theology.
Men in nappies do nothing for me. But the recognition in me of what it could mean - being babied, being cooed at, adored - to be a baby and not have to do anything to be loved.
As a mother who raised her child alone, I fantasised that I’d meet a wonderful man who could enjoy my child as much as I did — not care for them — just truly enjoy them. It never happened. I stopped looking.
I fantasise about being saved by a big loving man, a carpenter who helps me build my dream life, accepts my son as his own, loves us both. A man with a van who takes me away on weekend adventures and loves me hard and forever.
THE KITCHEN. THE WINDOW. THE ORGASM.
Domestic altar; holy, slightly sticky.
A quick, caressing fuck while my hands are still dirty making family dinner, watching a gaudy sunset from the kitchen window, climaxing the way we love.
Abandon my kids, move back to Costa Rica, make sweet love all day to my lover sixteen years younger. I fantasise romantic things: a lot of kissing and stroking. And sometimes him bending me over in the kitchen, or anywhere, really.
I get off on one loop: my much-loved husband comes home and his white shirt is not grubby. That’s the whole thing. Clean shirt, clean mouth, clean attention. I finish every time.
COME TO THE POOL, SHE SAID
Women as current, women as congregation.
I arrive in my swimsuit at a pool. I’m intrigued because what I’m about to enter might change who I am. Candlelight along the water, soft jazz, women’s voices. To my right, a woman licking her lips slowly; to my left, two women bringing another to orgasm.
UNDOING THE GOOD MOTHER
Shadow talk. The wish that cannot be said at pick-up.
I have fantasised about getting in my car and fucking off forever. Packing a bag and waving cheerio to my insanely ungrateful kids.
A wardrobe to lock my children in. That’s my honest fantasy.
I fantasise about a mute button. Like the TV controller. I want that, for my children.
I really don’t know how much more I can handle. Everything feels (or is) out of control. I don’t want to parent anymore.
RETURN ME TO TOUCH
Weight, pressure, animal calm.
I used to fantasize about being caught. I loved a steamy quickie in a dangerous context. But now, as a mother, getting caught has lost its sex appeal. I don’t want to traumatize my kids. In fact, even though I rarely long for solitude (because I really fucking love my kids), when I fantasize, I dream of the opposite - space and slowness. The idea of simply laying beneath my husband - clothed or not - and feeling squished by his entire body, not doing anything other than just feeling his pressure, turns me on immensely. I think I could cum from just his thigh between my upper thighs, uninterrupted for thirty minutes.
After I began post-menopausal BHRT, I was as horny as a seventeen-year-old boy. I fantasised about my husband becoming my older lover and I was the innocent Lolita-esque younger woman, his student to the pleasures my body contained. LOver lessons?
I fantasize how I get to spend Mother’s Day alone with my house all to myself. The sun is shining outside, birds are chirping, and no one needs anything from me because I’m alone. I recharge however I choose all day long.
As a mom of five stair-steppers, I’ve been gloriously in love with my body. I’m a healthy, postmenopausal woman, in my 50s. I never thought I’d appreciate and honor my body this much. One of my joys is having a partner whom I adore and who is just as appreciative for my goddess-like appearance as I am, all while maintaining strength and sensuality.
PRAY FOR US
Disobedience in drag.
I become Sister Fanny one day a month, doing good works in full wimple and red lipstick. I drink pints in a pub and drive my Fannymobile. I want to escape into something subversive and freeing, disruptive yet meaningful. (Under the habit: filthy desires.)
THE VAN. THE CARPENTER. THE SEA.
Life-fantasy as love-fantasy: a geography.
I fantasise about being well—energised and pain-free. I want to be loved. I want to be safe. I want support. I want to be free.
I fantasise about a deep circle of women friends who share everything and swim daily in the cold sea. Sisterhood.
I fantasise about a partner, a family, our own home, our own business, my son happy, nature on our doorstep, the sea at the end of the road, living close to others.
THE WRECKING BALL
Permission as demolition.
I spent two decades pleasing an abuser, until three years ago when I wrote a script at 5 a.m. every day about a woman who starts an affair as a fuck-you to her asshole husband. It was a purge. I sleep alone now, star-shaped and defiant.
I have a lover nearly three decades younger than me. My fantasy has come true.
I heard about being whisked off, blindfolded, to a sexual experience. Safe, thrilling, wild, with no control. I’m sick to death of designing and holding responsibility for every fucking thing.
What would it be like to get in my car and drive and never look back? I’d pick up my ID and never look back.
Desire begins where language thins.
It traces the edges of what we can’t say yet still feel — a map drawn in the dark to find our way back to ourselves. These fantasies are testimonies of being: records of what is missing, what is too much, and, of course, what might finally be enough.
Motherhood never empties the interior world, though the culture would prefer it did. We are expected to become public property —efficient, transparent, endlessly available — yet an interior life endures: clever, filthy, gentle, furious, holy. It belongs to us alone.
This work is a defence of that hidden life, of privacy as a form of freedom. The freedom to want without audience or apology, without turning every ache into translation.
If this made something in you sit up a little straighter, don’t let it roll back into silence. Tell me what you think — about desire, motherhood, plus the myth of the good woman.
Hit reply or write your own piece. Let’s make this conversation impossible to tidy away.
Some fantasies are best lived, not written.
Have you ever fantasised about running away and coming home in the same breath?
To disappear just long enough to recover your pulse - to rest, to think, to create — and in doing so, to find the way back to yourself?
I’ve been building a place for that kind of fantasy. Reset Residencies will open soon: creative retreats for people who need to vanish before they begin again, cocooned in the bucolic green of Exmoor, between the Brendon Hills and the Quantocks. A few days of silence, clarity, and restoration for people ready to re-enter their lives on their own terms.
Watch this space. The fantasy is about to get real.
More From Parents Who Think
Thank You for Your Service (Now Please Be Quiet)
Prefer to listen? Press play below for the audio version:
Friday, N. (1973) My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies, Quartet Books
Anderson, G (2025) Want, Bloomsbury Publishing
Darke, K (2024), Review of Want, Guardian
CALL for FANTASIES - What Do Mothers Fantasise About? I’m collecting anonymous fantasies from mothers, the kind we don’t say out loud. Not just sex (though yes, that too).
Just brilliant. I had a feeling this was going to be good, and it was. Thank you, Danusia. The timing is perfect too.
I'm writing a novel, about a woman who walks away and fulfills a fantasy, and to do some research I have booked a ticket and am heading off on a train this Wednesday, by myself, to Venice - the first time in 40 years of marriage I've done this, and without asking g his permission. It feels so rebellious.
Love, love, loved this! Imagine how much more we could teach our children if we allowed ourselves to openly want. They might see that we are whole humans, that openness is healthy, that they - yes even our daughters - have the right to want too. I’ve often found that naming a complex emotion tempers its destructive power. I wonder… maybe daring to speak aloud the feelings that clearly run deep within many (if not all) of us might just do the same. Thank you for collating and sharing this incredible piece of writing, I’ll be thinking hard about this for a long time, I think!