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.

When it comes to what I do with my womb, I’ve defended myself to random interrogators and family who feared I would not marry. In college, to keep my numbers down, Abuela prayed I would wed the next man I met. If that’s what God thinks is best. Even prayers need clauses. As my primary caretaker, Abuela did not believe I’d find a man to love me, given my prickly ways. Throughout my childhood and into my adulthood, even after I’d been married for years, she told me hundreds of times that I needed to 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 brings the promise of children. Have one? Don’t fret—you’ll be hustled into another soon enough. Have two? Better get your quips out since one and done is a foregone conclusion. Two and through should suffice. Social pressure to stay fertile does not end until it’s obvious to onlookers that this woman could not produce another baby. Imagine dying with nipples sore and slack.

Two sons and one decade into our marriage, I’ve asked my husband to get a vasectomy, modernity’s quickest and most effective birth control, no ceremony but 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 mind to antiquity and back. 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 just an idea, Cybele was a burnt space rock from Asia Minor, now known as the Republic of Türkiye. I repeat: Cybele was a meteorite.

Worshippers lined Cybele’s cracks with silver and installed her in a temple dedicated in 191 BCE on Palatine Hill, considered to be the birthplace of Rome. Centuries passed before a collective sense of Cybele’s importance yielded archival details of her arrival. Beard turns to Livy, who describes a series of meteor showers in the waning days of the war against Hannibal. Eager to interpret the gods’ will—surely, stones that trailed light must hold sacred portent—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 utterances proclaimed: When a foreign enemy had brought war to the land of Italy, he could be driven out of Italy and defeated, 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.