The truth is: when the news about Roe came out, I could feel it in my body. Not like a gut punch, but something worse, and something deeper.
A few days after Roe is overturned, my husband’s uncle posts a meme that says:
Pro-choicer: “Well, what do you do to help these children?”
Pro-lifer: “We don’t kill them for starters.”
I have always respected my husband’s uncle. He was a psychotherapist for years, and we once sat quietly on the outskirts of my husband’s family gathering and had a long conversation about mindfulness and writing. So his meme surprises me. Although I have long known of his deep Catholicism, I did not expect that someone like him—a retired psychotherapist, who practices mindfulness, has surely worked with many female clients, and understands the complexities of people’s lives—would fall into that kind of polarization. I understand that his faith is sacred to him, and that people tend to dig in their heels as they age, but still. It saddens me deeply, partly because it illustrates how quickly so many can overlook women’s real, embodied lives, and partly because it reveals exactly how intractable this conversation has become.
The truth is: when the news about Roe came out, I could feel it in my body. Not like a gut punch, but something worse, and something deeper. I felt a violation in the deep, recessed, thrumming part of myself that knows what it is like to feel forced to give birth. I have had a planned pregnancy, and I have had an unintended pregnancy, and I know what it is like to pee on a stick and come up against a husband, a mother, a family, a society, a political system, and a religion that will not allow me an option. That tell me I will get over my despair, and that my life doesn’t matter, and that I have no choice because there is only one choice. I know what it is like to collapse under those pressures and to lose my voice. To stare at myself in the mirror and not recognize the sallow tightness in my face or the growing belly. To think my life is over. To want to die. I know what it is like to be a parent in that state. To not be fully present for my children.
There’s a photograph I keep on my phone, taken when my son was just shy of two months old. He sits in my lap in a green onesie, flopped against my left arm. Light from the window has solarized one of my shoulders and half of my face, but I grin into the camera, a playful crinkle in my nose. My son, gaze not fully focused, looks upward toward my voice and smiles, cheeks so full they sag from the fatty milk of my breasts.
I keep the photo because it is precious. Because I would like to believe that moment was real: the joy it looks like I got from him. The comfort and security he seemed to have in my lap.
Everything they say about unintended/unwanted pregnancies is true: that the mother is at a high risk of postpartum depression. That mother-infant attachment can be compromised. That there are economic and professional losses the mother will not be able to recoup. That the physical, mental, and emotional tolls can last long after the birth. That socially marginalized women, Black women, and other women of color face even higher risks.
I have spent the last six years untangling my experience, placing it in context, and what I know now, with certainty, is this: we are interconnected. A mother’s health reveals the health of the society around her.
I struggle with my husband’s uncle’s meme. Maybe because I had respected him. Maybe because he was partly family. Maybe because it represents for me, in this moment, all the emptiness I kept coming up against in my upbringing and youth. I had expected him to have more compassion, but when I confront him, he is unapologetic. He simply says, “When it comes to the life of a child versus a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body, I will choose the child.”
My anger is an energy field. Like starting a fire with just a magnifying glass and the sun.
I am starting to feel my own power, I suppose. Or a certain kind of groundedness. In my meditation group, we discuss how to transform fear and anger into love, and I do that now, my anger and fear becoming a fierce love for all the people I know who will be hurt by this. For all of the harmful messages about their bodies these laws will perpetuate and create.
A mentor suggests that some of my anger is residual—the anger I was unable to express when pregnant. I close my eyes to ponder the thought. I try to imagine what decisions I would have made, then, if I’d allowed myself this feeling.
What does it mean if the greatest lesson my son’s pregnancy has taught me is that sometimes I need to choose myself?
I will have no more children. I will not sit silently when someone implies I am less. I will know in my bones what the right and necessary and moral decision is. And I will hold and embody that knowledge and power even when it causes discomfort to those around me.
That weekend, I take the kayak and paddle the water trail of a nearby slough. It is perfect as always: the deep hush and throbbing as I maneuver between tupelo and cypress. A snake wraps itself around a dead tree trunk. A few fish lick insects from the lip of the lake. Everywhere: energy fields and life forces so much larger than my own.
How much we have misunderstood motherhood, I realize. How narrow and incomplete all of our conceptions are. Here, even gender has nothing to do with it.
Where the trees open up into still water, the kayak holds me. I can be part of it all.
Jennifer Case is the author of Sawbill: A Search for Place (University of New Mexico Press, 2018). Her essays have appeared in journals such as the Rumpus, Orion, Ecotone, Literary Mama, and North American Review. She teaches at the University of Central Arkansas and serves as the assistant nonfiction editor of Terrain.org. You can find her at www.jenniferlcase.com.
Read Jennifer Case’s first Letter to America, published on November 28, 2016, as well as “Building Sawbill,” an excerpt from her book Sawbill: A Search for Place.
All postcard collage artwork by Jennifer Case.
