Karen Grassle is best known as the beloved Caroline “Ma” Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie, but decades later, there’s one episode from the long-running series that she still doesn’t love.
During the December 2025 Little House on the Prairie Cast Reunion in Simi Valley, CA, Grassle, 83, recalled filming for the Season 7 episode “I Do Again.” In the episode, Ma Ingalls and her daughter, Laura (Melissa Gilbert), both experience pregnancy symptoms. Ma, desperate to bear a son after having four daughters, soon finds out that she is not pregnant but is instead beginning menopause. She sinks into a depression over the revelation that her childbearing years are over.
Grassle, who was in her late 30s when the 1981 episode was filmed, told fans at the LHOP event that the storyline was a big “no” for her.
"They wrote that Ma stopped having her period and she thought she was pregnant, and then they wrote that, no, no, she's going through menopause," Grassle recalled, per People magazine. "I was like, 'Give me a break.'"
"They wrote that my purpose in life was going away, and I was like, 'No! No!'" Grassle continued. "It's a wonderful thing to give birth, but give me a break."
Grassle revealed that she found it hard to relate to her character’s problem and worried that the storyline was "going to ruin” her career as an actress who hadn’t even turned 40 yet.
“It was very hard for me to bring myself, my whole self, to the scene," she admitted. "I never did feel I did a good job. …I had so much judgment. I had a hard time. “
This wasn’t the first time Grassle worried that the role of Caroline would hurt her career. Speaking with That’s Classicin 2023, she admitted she was initially unsure about taking the role as the Ingalls matriarch, which she ultimately played from 1974 to 1982.
“When I first read the script, I didn’t want to take the part,” Grassle revealed in the interview. “I saw that there was a leading man, handsome, positive, playing the violin, making jokes with the girls, and here was Ma, frowning, working hard, saying negative things. And I thought, ‘I don’t know about this part. I don’t think that this will lead to other parts.’”
Grassle admitted that she joined the cast because she “needed a job.”
While she didn’t love all of Ma’s often predictable scenes, Grassle told Buzzfeed that one of her favorites came earlier in the series, in the Season 2 episode “A Matter of Faith.” In the episode, Caroline cuts her leg on a wagon and battles a life-threatening bacterial infection.
“I love physical acting, so this episode felt a little like being let out of school in a way,” Grassle shared. “So much of the time I was in that straight-laced costume, straight-laced hair, tight shoulders, you know, restricted physically. In ‘A Matter of Faith,’ I could kind of break free, and that was a pleasure for me.”
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