Kristen Millares Young has a simple request: stop treating her body like a shrine. In her essay “To Become a Goddess: Kristen Millares Young on Motherhood and Marriage,” she draws a straight line from ancient Rome’s worship of Cybele to the modern pressure on women to reproduce. The piece argues that marriage brings the promise of children, but that promise comes with a price.
Young opens with a blunt assessment of her own life. “To mother in modern culture is to become a temple subjected to public scrutiny,” she writes. She is not a virgin when she meets her husband, Brian. She has had sex outside marriage, and she has never regretted it. Books gave her strength to be her own woman. But when it comes to her womb, she has spent years defending herself to strangers who fear she will not marry.
Abuela’s Prayers and the False Prophecy
Her grandmother, Abuela, did not believe Young would find a man who would love her. As the primary caretaker, Abuela told Young hundreds of times over decades that she needed to change to keep a husband. Young calls this a false prophecy.
In college, Abuela prayed that Young would wed the next man she met. The prayer came with a clause: “If that’s what God thinks is best.” Even then, Young says, prayers need conditions. Abuela did not believe Young would attract a partner given her “prickly ways.”
The Wedding Day and the Hustle Afterward
Young got married in 2007, wearing a white dress and a red pashmina. Brian had her kiss marks on his face. The ceremony promised children, but the social pressure did not stop there. Have one child? You’ll be pushed toward another soon enough. Have two? Better start practicing your jokes, because one and done is assumed. Two and through should suffice.
The pressure to stay fertile ends only when everyone around her can see clearly that she cannot produce another baby. Young puts it bluntly: “Imagine dying with nipples sore and slack.”
Vasectomy as Birth Control
Two sons and a decade into the marriage, Young asks Brian to get a vasectomy. She calls it modernity’s quickest and most effective birth control, with a few laughs and winces instead of ceremony. She loves her husband and her boys. They are enough for her, but she is not yet enough for herself.
“I want to be kept safe from worship,” she writes. “I intend to rule my own body. By which I mean I do not want more children.”
Cybele’s Meteorite and the Oracle at Delphi
Young turns to Dame Mary Beard, a feminist scholar of the classics, for historical context. In her study of “The Roman and the Foreign: The Cult of the ‘Great Mother’ in Imperial Rome,” Beard tells us that Cybele was formally introduced to Rome in 204 BCE. The goddess was not an idea; she was a burnt space rock from Asia Minor, now known as the Republic of Türkiye.
Cybele was a meteorite. Worshippers lined her cracks with silver and installed her in a temple dedicated in 191 BCE on Palatine Hill, considered the birthplace of Rome. Centuries passed before anyone bothered to record the details of her arrival.
Beard cites Livy, who describes a series of meteor showers in the waning days of the war against Hannibal. The Romans consulted the Sibylline Books, a collection of oracular utterances. Translated from Greek, those prophecies stated that when a foreign enemy brought war to Italy, he could be driven out if the Idaean Mother were brought to Rome from Pessinus.
Legend held that the Roman race had sprung from Mount Ida in Troy, whose name Cybele bore — Magna Mater Idaea. The Romans sent ambassadors to King Attalus of Pergamum via Delphi, where the oracle decreed that the Goddess be received by he who was the best man in Rome.
The Stone Shaped Like a Womb
Delphi sits above a geologic vent, a place where noxious gases escaped the earth and corrupted the minds of women who inhaled and pronounced prophecies. In July 2013, one year before Young learned Cybele’s name and more than 2,200 years after she arrived in Rome, Young walked up that parched mountainside.
She was already pregnant but did not yet know it. Among the toppled columns, cells divided in a freefalling swarm, grappling like eagles tumbling from a cliff. The writhing ball would implant in her body when she returned from Greece and traveled to a writing conference. Her uterine lining twinged, and she clutched her coffee in the ferry line.
“I think I just felt my baby implant,” she told her friend. “I better not drink while I’m here.”
Reading Between the Lines
Young’s essay is not just a memoir. It is a literary argument about how women are reduced to their reproductive capacity. The comparison between ancient goddess worship and modern motherhood is exact: both involve a woman’s body being treated as something external, something to be inspected and judged.
She also raises questions about authenticity. Could a fraudulent rock, a substitute, become real through the worship of multitudes? Perhaps pregnancy could make her a mother.
The essay closes with a note on perspective. Most people measure the year by its distance from the birth of Jesus. And let’s not forget that July was named for the Roman dictator Julius Caesar. Men cast long shadows.
Young wants to rule her own body, and she wants to be kept safe from worship. Those desires define her position.
Key figures in the essay:
– Kristen Millares Young: author of Subduction, essay collection Desire Lines
– Brian: her husband
– Abuela: her grandmother
– Dame Mary Beard: feminist scholar of classics
– Cybele: Great Mother Goddess, brought to Rome in 204 BCE
– Livy: Roman historian who described the meteor showers and prophecies
– Attalus of Pergamum: king consulted about bringing Cybele to Rome
– Delphi: site of the oracle’s vent and the stone shaped like a womb
Young’s essay is a powerful statement about autonomy.
Source material: “To Become a Goddess: Kristen Millares Young on Motherhood and Marriage,” Literary Hub.
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