Jennifer Case

Nov 14, 2024 | muthamagazine.com | Jennifer Case

My birth begins at 3 a.m. when I wake with a rock-hard uterus that softens and then hardens again. I have been waking with such Braxton-Hicks contractions for days, at exactly this time, so at first I do not think anything about them. I drink a glass of milk, get back into bed, and then, when they continue, decide to take a bath, which has stopped stubborn Braxton-Hicks contractions in the past. I fill the tub with warm water and keep the light off. My daughter sleeps across the house.

Nov 1, 2024 | terrain.org | Jennifer Case |Jarrett Ziemer

Four days before my daughter is born, I am at the ob-gyn 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 past month. “It’s high. Have you been feeling okay?”Excerpted from We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood, by Jennifer Case.

Sep 14, 2024 | msmagazine.com | Jennifer Case

The day after Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was supposed to attend the quarterly meeting of an environmental civic organization in my adopted state of Arkansas. I had joined the organization a few years before, and although most of the participants out-aged me by decades, I enjoyed collecting wildflower seeds, planting trees, and cleaning up hiking trails with the chapter’s two dozen retirees.

Jul 29, 2024 | yahoo.com | Jennifer Case

Jennifer CaseJuly 29, 2024 at 2:14 PM·4 min readFor the first 18 months of my son’s life, I took an online, anonymous postpartum depression (PPD) screening every two weeks. I remember clicking through the ten questions surreptitiously from bed, my body frozen yet thrumming while my son slept in the bassinet beside me.

Jul 15, 2024 | terrain.org | Melissa Sevigny |Jennifer Case

Introduction“When the universe gives us a bird,” writes Priyanka Kumar, “we should accept it without too many questions.” This acceptance of the miraculous, mysterious, and inexplicable sings throughout her book Conversations with Birds (Milkweed Editions, 2023), a collection of spiritually rich essays about the natural world (read an excerpt, “A Flicker of Light,” in Terrain.org). Kumar’s approach to the topic is unique.