When Mothers Have Sex

On appetite, aliveness, and the machinery of maternal silence

Prefer to listen? Press play below for the audio version:

Let’s begin with what I’m not supposed to say.

I was mid-fuck. Legs locked around a man I adore. Slick, shaking, swearing. The kind of sex that fogs mirrors, ruins sheets, and rewires the week. The neighbour clapped through the wall. The one on the other side got pregnant not long after. Coincidence? Or maybe the kind of orgasm that sends aftershocks. Maybe the sex was so frisky even the neighbours needed a cigarette.

But if they heard me, so did someone else. My children. Not probably. Absolutely.

And that’s where the real trouble starts. Because a woman coming is one thing. But a mother—coming loud, soaked in pleasure, untethered, unreachable in her own body’s rapture? That’s unacceptable.

Once, we were free. Before children.

Before duty-bound rituals, domestic responsibilities, and dedicated reliability. Before desire got scheduled, softened, shaved down into something safe.

Before we replaced raw sex with emotionally tidy, scheduled “relational” intimacy—something meant to perform closeness, but lacking the wildness, the chaos, the appetite.

Before we swallowed our moans so the children wouldn’t know. Wouldn’t hear. Wouldn’t see who we still are. As if their innocence depended on our disappearance. As if the sound of a mother in rapture is more dangerous than a mother erased.

For the record: this is not about decibels. It’s not about the sound of sex.

It’s about what happens to a woman’s libido, her longing, her life force—once she becomes a mother. It’s about appetite: not just for sex, but for abandon, for release, for being entirely inside her own body with no duty tethering her to the needs of others.

It’s not parenting we’re interrogating. It’s permission. Who grants it, who withholds it, and why a mother’s pleasure is still seen as a risk to her child’s wellbeing.

This isn’t about moaning too loud. It’s about whether a mother is ever allowed to be a human being—hungry, whole, and unapologetically alive.

When Desire Becomes Dangerous

Which raises the deeper truth: we do not mother in a vacuum. We mother inside an invisible architecture—an unspoken design—that demands we be reachable, reliable, responsive. Always on call. Even in bed. Especially in bed.

That’s why the real taboo isn’t noise—it’s what the noise signals. A mother untethered. Not tending to someone else’s needs. Not listening for footsteps. Not rehearsing the day ahead in her head while someone moves inside her. Not mentally adjusting the family calendar while breathless beneath another body. Not performing availability for an audience that isn’t even in the room.

Just gone. Taken. Claimed by sensation, surrender, need.

And that’s what makes the world flinch—for a breathless, god-bent, spine-arching moment, she was fucking free.

This Is for the Mothers Who Were Told to Be Quiet

So what do we do? We muzzle. We contort. We have “quiet” sex, “quick” sex, “scheduled” sex—rushed between bedtime stories and breakfast prep.

We apologise with our hips. We ration sound like it’s a sin. We become experts in maternal ventriloquism—where even our moans are made to tiptoe, where desire must emerge in disguise.

We move pillows, press hands over mouths, fuck under covers like fugitives. We shrink our pleasure down to polite sizes.

We protect our children from the knowledge that we still want. That we still ache. That our bodies are not just soft landing places but sites of wildfire.

And then we’re told—by culture, by silence, by the knowing looks of others—that this suppression is good mothering. That the quieter we fuck, the better we mother.

The Architecture of Disappearance

But what is the cost of this silence? Where does our swallowed hunger go? When we press the pillow against our mouths and mute the moan, where does that unmet voltage reroute?

• Into micro-managing the children’s every move—tracking screen time, correcting tone, anticipating moods before they surface?

• Into obsessing over snacks, lunchboxes, and the optimal number of extracurricular clubs?

• Into list-making, calendar-juggling, the compulsive orchestration of everyone else’s lives—because we’ve been told that our fulfilment must come from theirs?

We believe we’re being good. Careful. Considerate. But let’s be honest: this isn’t protection. This is erasure. Of our hungers. Our heat. Our selfhood.

The mother is the only adult in the household expected to abandon her own sensory experience in service of others. Not just in the bedroom—but in the every-hour of every-day.

That’s not love. That’s sanctioned disappearance.

And some mothers don’t just silence the sound. They silence the sex. No touch, no hunger, no heat. Not even solo. Not for lack of wanting. But because a mother with no appetite for herself is easier to admire.

Which is why we must ask—what are we so afraid of?

What do we think will happen if they hear us—really hear us? If they catch wind of our hunger, our heat, our bodies in motion for reasons that have nothing to do with them?

What are we afraid our children will know? That women want? That we aren’t just their providers, their protectors, their soft-lipped bedtime kissers?

That we ache. That we climax. That we are still in possession of our own desire—that we do not vanish once we’ve given birth. That we are not relics of a past self, but living, pulsing evidence that aliveness does not end with motherhood.

You want a moral panic?

Try this: a child hears a mother moan in pleasure—and doesn’t collapse. Doesn’t implode. Doesn’t grow up damaged or ashamed or wrecked by the knowing¹.

They just keep eating their cereal. Or fall back asleep. Or maybe, one day, they wonder what it means for a woman to be that alive. To be unapologetically in her body.

Not filtered through someone else’s need, but lit from within by her own. That’s the real danger, isn’t it? That they might grow up expecting women to stay whole.

We’ve been told (the sound of) our pleasure is dangerous.

That our bodies must perform, but never erupt. That if we want to be “good mothers,” we must cut away the parts of ourselves that pulse, ache, want.

We’re permitted to be sexual only when it’s tidy, tamed, and in service to someone else’s gaze—but never our own sensation. Never for joy. Never for the goddamned rapture of it.

We’ve been convinced that if our children know we still want—still are—then we’ve failed them.

But what kind of failure is it to show a life fully lived? What kind of love is it to shrink in the name of protection?

I will not muzzle my appetite. I will not dim my voltage to keep a myth intact. I refuse to be a half-person, a hollowed-out mother playing at goodness while disappearing on herself. Not for me. Not for my children.

I am not alone in this. Every day, women vanish a little to protect a fiction. But that fiction is cracking—and we are the ones with the hammer in hand.

To all the mothers who swallow hunger. To all the mothers who contort bodies and boundaries to stay acceptable. To all the mothers who fuck in silence, gag pleasure, silent-scream orgasms, perform good mother mid-thrust:

Unmuzzle.

Clutch your pearls—or rip them off and let them scatter like beads on tile.

This is the opening. To say what’s never been said. To voice what was forbidden. To join the conversation most mothers were never allowed to have.

We’re having it. Now. Right here. Meet me in the comments?

Danusia

1. For info: I’m mum of ten wonderful children. Some still at home. Some grown, flown, and unscathed by knowing their mother has a libido and a life force. They are sane, brilliant, loving, self-aware humans who talk to me about sex—including mine. They are not damaged. They are discerning. And they’ve never had to wonder whether their mother was her own person. That’s not the same as flaunting sex. It’s not exhibition. It’s presence. It’s embodiment. And it matters.

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