The most-read Rumpus essay of 2020 is now part of an essay collection by Jennifer Case. Deeply researched and deeply personal, We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood (Trinity University Press, 2024) intrepidly examines how mothers fear losing, lose, and try to retrieve ourselves both within our most intimate circles and within the twenty-first century American political regime bent on control.
On the eve of a crucial election, Case’s collection should be required reading—especially for those of us with highly complicated fertility, pregnancy, infant loss, and birth stories. Seeing ourselves reflected and refracted in other mothers’ narratives becomes reassuring, normalizing, humanizing, emboldening, and, in many cases, essential for survival.
As a whole, the essays point to how very gray and case-by-case women’s decisions are around reproductive healthcare, pregnancy, and motherhood. They yield a clearer understanding of the danger in legislating the complex, delicately nuanced decisions around family.
Because Case ventures far beyond the more typically exchanged blissful or darkly humorous aspects of motherhood and into the striking examination of some of motherhood’s most isolating shadows—including finding herself with a second, unwanted pregnancy and trying to make decisions about her second child within the conflicted context of her marriage—her meditations offer the opportunity for women to feel less alone in the tangled choices we face. Because these essays delve into the unique duality and conflicting feelings of motherhood, they offer a lifeline.
I was heartened to converse with Case by email to learn more about her approaches to the complex truths of motherhood. This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.
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The Rumpus: “A Political Pregnancy” was first published at The Rumpus and became its most-read essay of 2020. Why do you think it struck such a cord with readers?
Jennifer Case: The essay came out in January 2020, so we were all gearing up for the 2020 election, looking over our shoulders at 2016 and feeling frayed. There was also a lot of anxiety about reproductive rights. Although Dobbs hadn’t happened yet, access to reproductive healthcare was being curtailed, and many readers were feeling that unease. Also, the essay is as much about restrictive pressures from within the home as from the government. I think the essay captured that painful truth.
I was humbled and surprised by how well received the essay was. After it came out, a number of readers reached out to share their own complicated stories of unintended pregnancies, abortions, or coerced adoptions. The essay spoke into shame and secrecy and the ways difficult reproductive experiences are often held in silence. I think a lot of readers found that the essay freed something in them or helped them look at something painful in their own lives. The essay’s reception gave me a lot of motivation to continue seeking publication for the collection as a whole.
Rumpus: In “A Political Pregnancy,” you make the point related to motherhood that “death isn’t the only way to lose a life.” Throughout the collection, you show us the ways that a mother’s life can be lost through the questions you ask yourself: “Will I run away? How long can things continue before I lose grip of who I am? Will I lose my sanity? Will I destroy myself or the walls that surround me? Is my body capable of this?” How do you witness mothers being particularly vulnerable to losing their lives in a way that fathers are not?
Case: There’s this cultural message that once someone becomes a mother, their life becomes entirely about their children. The most obvious example is abortion access. In many states right now, the moment a woman becomes pregnant, the fetus’s life suddenly trumps her own. But even more subtly, the pregnant woman needs to avoid certain foods, medications, and activities. The new mother needs to ensure the safety of the infant, and if she protects some space for herself or pushes against some of those all-consuming expectations, she is being selfish and irresponsible. When we study evolutionary biology, we learn that parenting was never supposed to take place in just a nuclear family. Yet that’s what has happened in our culture—with the majority of the expectations placed on mothers’ shoulders.
The surgeon general just released a report identifying parental mental health and parental stress and isolation as a public health crisis. This affects fathers as well, and I know that fathers also can struggle with depression during the transition into parenthood. Yet men aren’t expected to change their lives to the same degree that women are when pregnant or after a child’s birth, and there is far less public shaming of men in their role as fathers. And men, of course, aren’t showing up at ERs with miscarriages and being turned away from lifesaving medical procedures, like we’ve seen documented in Georgia.
Rumpus: One of the most challenging moments of the collection is during your second—unwanted—pregnancy with your son, when you contemplated having an abortion, which your husband did not want you to have. You found that he couldn’t let go of the fact that “Some of that decision should have been his too. . . . The fact that it was my body—and that I would bear most of the burdens in those first two years—didn’t make it more of my own choice.” Now, your son is seven years old. Have your thoughts on this changed or have you gained any insights that were not part of this essay?
Case: Over the years, I’ve certainly gained more clarity. My son is a marvelous creature, and like I predicted in “To Hatch Intimacy from Despair,” I now can’t imagine life without him. But that doesn’t diminish the difficulty of those moments for me.
Looking back, I honestly don’t know what choice I would have made if my husband and I had been able to have that conversation. But I do know it was our inability to have that conversation that caused the most damage and made me feel so stuck. And our nation’s inability to support women’s choices that will continue to cause damage.
There’s a moment at the end of “A Political Pregnancy” where I narrate the apology I wanted my husband to be able to give me. Part of the apology I wanted was a recognition that my body was important, and I wasn’t beholden to anyone else when making decisions about it. The realization I’ve come to, now, is that I needed to be the one to give myself permission to make decisions about my body. However, I also recognize that I hadn’t been raised in a family or culture that taught me to claim that agency, and so I never was going to be able to do so in that high-stakes moment—much like so many women still aren’t.
Rumpus: Do you think your son will read the collection someday? How do you hope to talk about it with him? Even knowing that someday you might face difficult moments around this with him, what made you write and publish it anyway?
Case: If he does, I hope it isn’t until he is an adult himself, in his early twenties—and I will do what I can to keep it from him until then. I don’t want him to read about some of those moments until he is old enough to understand the complexity.
When I was writing the pieces, I told myself two things. One: this was the truth of his early childhood and it would be better to face the truth than to hide it, where it could do more harm to him and me. Two: mothers facing unintended pregnancies were never going to feel less isolated if no one spoke up about the experience. I figured if I spoke up for other women like me, it would be a service to the whole since the health of a mother has a direct impact on the health of the children.
Today, I’m actually much less concerned. When talking about the book with my kids, I’ve told them that it’s about motherhood and the ways that mothers don’t always get the support they need from society—that the book is trying to change this. My husband and I have been working on normalizing this so that hopefully if [and] when they read the book it feels much more like something about “mothers” than a reflection of them.
Rumpus: One of the things I admire most about this collection is that rather than attempting to demonstrate that for you there was a right and a wrong choice, you show us with brave and searching detail the complexity and nuance of decisions around pregnancy, childbearing, fertility, termination of pregnancy, and mothering. As we quickly approach the next election, what are your goals for these essays?
Case: To break through the binary: right versus wrong, progressive versus conservative. The complexities of women’s lived experiences simply can’t fit within that—as anyone knows, once they’ve faced these difficult moments—and we are doing ourselves a disservice as humans by pretending there is a right or wrong decision rather than offering support for the decisions women and families make.
My hope is that the book offers space for readers to acknowledge and feel the complexity of their own stories and to hopefully offer others space, compassion, and respect for their complex stories as well.
I also hope the book motivates readers to vote for candidates who understand those nuances rather than candidates or policies that forward black-and-white restrictions without room for actual lived experience. Most women—including conservative women—want more flexibility regarding reproductive healthcare.
In many ways, reproductive justice is worse now than it was in 2016 or when I drafted these essays. I’ve actually been amazed at how closely We Are Animals speaks to issues coming up in this election: Vance’s pronatalist comments about childless cat ladies, Arkansas’s decision to throw out a petition for an abortion amendment on a technicality, critiques of Kamala Harris because she hasn’t experienced childbirth, messages coming from the “trad wife” movement, etcetera. I keep seeing the news cycle and thinking, “We Are Animals addresses that!”
Rumpus: In Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair argues that men should take more responsibility in preventing unwanted pregnancies—men are fifty times more fertile than women, and there is an unfair burden placed on women to prevent pregnancy, with ninety percent of the birth control market being for women. What do you think about the weight our country places on women to prevent pregnancy, and what would it mean if this shifted?
Case: It is an incredible weight physically but also mentally and emotionally. I don’t know of a single woman who hasn’t at some point felt a surge of fear and anxiety over a potential unintended pregnancy. Women have also long been shamed for unintended pregnancies. I’m not aware of men feeling or being shamed in the same way.
So much of We Are Animals, for me, was learning to unearth myself from generations of shame and unfair burdens, the kind that stopped me from feeling embodied or like I had a choice. Lifting those pressures would change so much. In fact, just imagining it makes my shoulders feel lighter—giving me space to be human and for my husband and me to have more equal footing.
Rumpus: In “On Contemplating a Second Child,” a female writer in a panel on motherhood and writing tells a room full of young mothers and aspiring mothers that each child you have is the equivalent of a book. This comment is part of your consideration of what you might be giving up by having a child. As a writer, how did this make you feel? Do you think it’s true?
Case: When I first heard it in my mid-twenties, the comment felt sobering. It made me pause and really consider what I wanted from life and what I might “give up” by making particular choices. In certain occupations, there is and can be a very real professional cost to having children—called “the motherhood penalty.” There often isn’t a “fatherhood penalty.” As a result, I agree with the premise of the comment. Raising children takes an incredible amount of time and energy, especially when they are young. Pregnancy itself requires a lot of energy, which means your body has less for other endeavors. Some of the work We Are Animals is doing is looking very, very closely at those biological “costs.” That said, is it actually a one-to-one equivalent . . . ? I don’t know. We only get one life, so it all gets pretty hypothetical. Ironically, I doubled down on my artistic life after having my son, and the experience of having him, of course led to this book. I have no regrets as a mother or writer now. But those choices can weigh heavily when you are making them.
Rumpus: In “On Breast Pumps and Bovines,” you note the parallels between bovine milking machines and breast pumps. You draw attention to the fact that all those who have been involved in developing the breast pump have been men. What do you think it means that men have been exclusively in control of this act of motherhood?
Case: I think it says a lot. I read part of that essay at a reading recently, and afterward a man came up to me to say how much his wife appreciated the piece. He also added that he didn’t think any technological solution would make pumping “better.”
To a degree, I agree. I’m not sure technology will ever be able to replicate the hormonal things that happen during breastfeeding to encourage the mother–infant bond. However, how would mothers have solved the original problem I used a pump for, to provide breastmilk for my child while I was away at work? In my ideal world, I could have simply walked to a daycare nearby and breastfed there. If women had had more control of lactation practices and policies from the start, I expect the foundation of society would look very different.
Rumpus: One theme that runs throughout the collection is control, attempts at control, and illusions of control—both internal—your attempts to control your own mind and body—and external—your attempt to control external forces and actors and their attempts to control or influence you. You seem to try to maintain control, as many of us do in unknown territory, through information gathering. Again and again, through these essays, we see you reading, researching, questioning, discussing, and, perhaps most obviously, writing. How have these approaches added to your sense of control? Where have they fallen short?
Case: This is such a good question. “Trying to make meaning through knowledge” is definitely one of my ways of maintaining control, and I can vividly recall using the writing process to try to reconstruct myself. The truth of life, however, is that we never really have control, and it all falls apart eventually. That’s what the last essay in the book is trying to get at: that kind of letting go and acquiescing, so that the clinging to control—including through our conceptual ideas—doesn’t cause more suffering.
As for what surprised me most about the writing process. . . . Once I finished the book, I thought I had “solved” motherhood for myself. In reality, although I’d certainly gained more insight and understanding, my emotional processing took a few extra years to really catch up. It is only now that the book is coming out that I’ve been able to speak openly about some of these experiences without that inner twinge of shame.
Rumpus: Craft question. I love using word and phrase repetition in my own work, and it features strongly in yours too, seeming to reflect the steady, repetitive, sometimes relentless, and often mundane nature of mothering. How does that choice to repeat or not repeat enable you to draw attention to the emotions and experiences of the moments in which you employ it?
Case: I view it as almost propulsive. We get into these repetitive moments, maybe especially as parents, but in other areas of life too, where we are caught up in those routines, and yet a pressure builds beneath them. Eventually, the building pressure of those routines, and the tension in needing to continue them even when they cause stress, is going to erupt and spit us out somewhere else. I think I try to create that energy a lot by using repetition—the repetitive motions and tasks of motherhood, as well as the unrelenting pressure of it all, especially with very young children. It all creates a tightness that has something crisp and clear and cutting to it.
Rumpus: In “On Race and Motherhood in America,” you experienced a moment of crisis when your doula, Nicolle, a Black woman, literally knelt beneath you on the floor while you, a white woman, were perched on a bed above her, looking on while she cleaned your afterbirth. You would later attend a session at which Nicolle was a panelist, discussing the state of Black maternal health in Arkansas, where you both live. What work do you see this essay doing in the manuscript? What can Americans learn from better understanding Black maternal health in Arkansas and across the South?
Case: If my goal in writing the book was to tackle complex truths about motherhood in the United States today, one of the most difficult truths has to do with Black maternal health and the huge disparities there. “On Race and Motherhood in America” feels important to me but also imperfect—in the ways that I am imperfect—and unfinished in the ways that my voice and experience as a white woman isn’t the voice that should be centered. As I was writing it, I spent a lot of time working out how much to integrate my own experience, how much to highlight my doula and others’ experiences, and how to make sure I wasn’t taking over someone else’s story for my own purposes. My solution was to watch that balance carefully and make the complexities of a white woman writing about Black maternal health one of the tensions of the narrative. As a result, the perspective the essay takes is messy and uncomfortable in the way that any conversation about race is going to be messy and uncomfortable. And yet, I hope it raises awareness and shows how much it is up to us all—not just women of color—to work to improve Black maternal health in the United States.
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Author photograph courtesy of Jennifer Case
