“We Are Animals” Is Candid and Complex https://ift.tt/gDcrbGF
In “A Cost Accounting of Birth,” one of the 15 refreshingly honest and deeply considered essays in We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood, the author Jennifer Case asks, “What does it mean to be a childbearing woman?” This question, I think, undergirds the entire collection.
I wanted to review Case’s collection because I am a mother, yes, and I am drawn to mothers’ stories, but also because I have felt a mother’s ambivalence. And ambivalence is ubiquitous here. “As much as I loved being there, participating in what I believed was my evolutionary, animal self,” Case writes about breastfeeding her son, “I also wanted to be somewhere else.”
I was gratified to see these mixed feelings and contradictory ideas — this complexity — admitted to and written about. I was especially gratified to see it foregrounded in light of the rampant pronatalism I see everywhere these days on traditional and social media.
Pronatalism is a policy paradigm that encourages reproduction and exalts motherhood; examples of it include GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s comment about “childless cat ladies,” the political right’s constant references to falling birth rates, a recent article in Newsweek claiming that Taylor Swift isn’t a good role model for girls in part because she is “unmarried and childless,” and the whole “trad wife” movement.
It’s difficult to avoid politics when considering a book like We Are Animals, whose subtitle includes the phrase “politics of motherhood.” I don’t believe that phrase is an accident. The personal is indeed political, as second-wave feminist activist Carol Hanisch wrote in her now-famous 1969 essay. Childbearing is a personal experience, but it is undertaken within a larger social and political context, a context in which maternal and infant mortality are unacceptably high, and pro-family policies, at least in America, are scarce.
But We Are Animals is not an op-ed. It’s one Arkansas-based woman’s candid account of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, touching in frank terms on her feelings about her pregnant body, the pain of childbirth, antenatal and postnatal depression, the psychological effects of an unintended pregnancy, and the opportunity costs of breastfeeding. She reaches outside of her own experience, too, to explore alternate birthing philosophies, midwife- and doula-aided deliveries versus hospital deliveries, abortion, feminism, faith, and gender inequity.
Case admits to feelings of inconsequentiality: “It dawns on you: how small you are. How inconsequential. You are a body reproducing your kind. That is all.” She writes about giving birth and becoming a mother as being eclipsed, disappeared, broken and reassembled, used, swallowed whole. She admits to a revulsion at pumping her breast milk, to feeling like livestock. She admits to wanting to “dash” and “bail out.” She admits to not wanting to be with her children all day. She admits to feeling resentful of her husband.
The importance of mothers’ stories cannot be overstated. We need more of them. In the essay “On the Silence of Regret,” Case asks, “Why are we so afraid to know what mothers think of their children? Is it because such stories would remove a veil about motherhood that we as a culture are not ready to confront”? The author excerpts a passage from Rebecca Solnit’s The Mother of All Questions and concludes: “Regret needs to become part of the story.”
In “To Hatch Intimacy from Despair” Case asks, “How do you love a child you did not want?” And in “A Political Pregnancy” she braids her experience of an unintended pregnancy with Donald Trump’s misogyny during his 2016 presidential campaign. In that essay she relates an interaction with her husband that epitomizes much of her intellectual searching throughout the book:
“When I say, ‘I’m not excited for this child,’ he says, ‘I’ll be excited for both of us,’ and something inside of me shrivels and cracks, because what does that mean for him to be excited enough for both of us? For me to become the body carrying a child others want?
I do not want to be pregnant, but I don’t want to hurt my husband, and since I can’t not have the child without hurting my husband, the pregnancy continues.”
The United States ranks worst among developed nations for maternal mortality. The rate for Black women is more than twice that of White women. And from 2021 to 2022, the infant mortality rate went up. Up! Despite this appalling record, women continue to be inundated with patriarchal pro-birth propaganda.
It’s fortifying to read the truth about Case’s experience — and to recognize so much of my own experience in hers. If sharing one’s regret openly and without judgment alleviates it, as Case asserts, then to her, I say, Yes. I regret. I’ve felt all of these things, too.
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