We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jennifer Case teaches creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas. She also serves as an assistant nonfiction editor at Terrain.org and is the supervising editor of Arkana. She is the author of The Carework Project: Reckoning with Love, Labor, and the Living World, We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood and Sawbill: A Search for Place, and her work has appeared in Orion, the Sycamore Review, and Fourth River. She lives in central Arkansas.

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Four days before my daughter is born, I am at the OBGYN clinic for a usual, now weekly exam.

The nurse straps the blood pressure cuff around my forearm. I breathe slowly, in and out,

breathing in calmness, even though I can already see the nurse’s frown out of the corner of my

eyes. “Hmm,” she says, like she has at each appointment for the last month. “It’s high. Have you

been feeling okay?”

I nod, as I always have. Though my blood pressure has been rising, I drink plenty of

water and do not cross my legs. I assume it is just tension: white coat syndrome. When my

midwife takes my blood pressure, it is always lower. I ignore the nurse’s comment and focus

instead on the flickering lights, on the posters of fetuses gestating, bigger and bigger each month.

I allow myself to now, finally, look at the last image: the infant almost fully formed.

I am waiting there, for my midwife’s quiet knock, when the exam room door bursts open

and my midwife snaps, “We’re done.” Tall and thin, about the same age as me, her head nearly

touches the doorway. Her eyes are focused and fierce, her voice tight.

My first thought is that she is firing us. She doesn’t want to work with us anymore. My

husband and I have to get out.

“We can’t have you walking around with a blood pressure of 150/100,” she says. It takes

a few moments for me to realize that she means the baby. She means it is time for the baby to

come out. As in now. As in today.

In the exam room I’ve sat in again and again and again, the exam room that has become

familiar to me these past eight months, where Katie has praised us for being calm and for taking

everything as it comes, an anxiety that I’ve spent nine months repressing swells into my throat.

Katie talks about induction. About wheeling us to labor and delivery.

I do not hear because I am crying. I do not want to be induced. I know inductions often

lead to epidurals, and epidurals to C-Sections, and I want neither of those things. Instead, I want

to trust my body and let my body do its work. Yet here the nurses are with the wheelchair, ready

to wheel me to labor and delivery.

“No, no, no,” my body says, my face says, though the only words that come out are tears.

I am crying in the exam room while my husband stares, surprised, openmouthed.

I am crying in the exam room, wondering what my midwife thinks of me now.