Posts tagged motherhood
Mother's Day Over Madagascar
Mother's Day Over Madagascar

Fucking first times, my therapist calls them.  First holidays, significant occasions, anniversary of the death.  The first time after you’ve lost someone, lost a child.  It caught me off guard the first year, things that I didn’t expect took me to my knees.  Easter, why did that leave me weeping, lashing out at everyone, feeling like a horrible failure?  We weren’t religious and even if we were, Nel was most certainly not.  She’d called me from prison the last Easter she was alive, Happy Easter! I tried to chirp at her.  She stopped me mid-happy.

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GriefJulia Nusbaummotherhood, Death, mother and daughter, grief Comments
Exempt Human Specimens
Exempt Human Specimens

According to the United States Postal Service website, it’s illegal to send body parts through the mail.

“Heavily restricted,” is a better way to put it. You need the necessary permits, containers, a transport license from the American Association of Mortuary Shippers. There are rules involved, special restrictions; same goes for dry ice and lithium batteries. You can mail live bees, but not medical marijuana. Those thin, translucent lines that keep us from stuffing a toe into a manila envelope on the way to work.

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GriefJulia Nusbaumdeath and dying, grief, Family, pregnancy, motherhoodComment
Milk Teeth
Milk Teeth

For years, I kept my children’s teeth in a drawer. Wrapped in a rainbow silk, I tucked them behind the protection of scarves and mismatched socks. In preparation for a move to a new life, our belongings would sit in the liminal land of a storage unit. It didn’t feel right to put the bundle of teeth in the cardboard box behind bars.

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GriefJulia Nusbaumgrief, childhood, growing up, motherhoodComment
Maiden, Mother, Crone
Maiden, Mother, Crone

My dear friend is a crone. Not an ugly, withered woman. No, she entered cronehood with ample wisdom, dignity, and poise. She entered cronehood with a croning, a sacred, near metaphysical ritual where a small group of women honor the crone and her journey. “But it’s also very much about sharing your knowledge and wisdom with other women,” the invite read. 

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MotherhoodJulia Nusbaummotherhood, creative nonfiction, CNF, Women's stories, Feminist, MotherComment
Am I Still Your Mother
Am I Still Your Mother

When my daughter was born, I was worried that I wouldn’t be the one she would call out for in the middle of the night.

Josh brings her warm, tear-soaked body into our king-sized bed – all 29 pounds of my two- and-a-half-year-old. The bed is already fully occupied. Me, Josh and my almost four-year-old son, Miles, sprawled out as if he was attempting to make snow angels in his sleep. But I still welcome Lyla with outstretched arms.

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MotherhoodJulia Nusbaummotherhood, mothers, cancer, breast cancer, creative nonfiction, women writers, Feminist, mother daughter, Personal Essay Comments
Good Enough Mother
Good Enough Mother

It’s been a long time since I have been a good mother. It is 7:25 am and my son is laying in front of the pantry, his face pressed into the crumbs, dust, and dog hair of the kitchen floor. His six-year-old body long and thin, splayed in a scissor-like pose, his hair, tangled blond snarls. He is banging one leg theatrically against the floor, telling me or the floorboards that he wants the granola with no nuts.

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MotherhoodKristina Buschmotherhood, ment, Anger Comment
A Weekend Away
A Weekend Away

He had been in Montana for seven days before she got there. He was there with a group of guys—one he had grown up with, the others he had fished with before, on the same river. The house was up on a mesa and they had rented it for ten days. It was her first time in Montana, her first trip away from her children in over a year. She didn’t do any of the planning, but rather showed up feeling as if she was joining in on someone else’s vacation.

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Abortion StoriesKristina Buschtravel, vacation, abortion, motherhoodComment
Fine
Fine

On Sunday, I'll discover the meaning of all of this. It'll turn out that it's all about hue. They say that pain, real pain, hardens around a body, ossifies, so that the sufferer can't move or even breathe. Of course, you try to prepare for the pain. It's instinctive; it's part of the process. In the end, it'll turn out that I'd prepared too well.

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Rebellious BodiesKristina Buschmotherhood, health, birth, pregnancy Comment
A Gamble
A Gamble

“Well, Ms. Song, I have to say, you’re pretty darn unlucky.” I thought about reminding her again—for maybe the 50th time—to call me Julie, but after two years of her ignoring my request, the point was moot. Besides, I couldn’t remind her, I was weeping again. Mike took two steps across the tiny doctor’s office and grabbed a tissue from the box, wiping the salty black tracks that muddied my cheeks. Dr. F pursed her lips, tightly holding back any words of wisdom or comfort she might have had. Her face said it all: pity and boredom. This was just another day as an infertility specialist.

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Before and AfterJulia Nusbaummotherhood, InfertilityComment
The Anniversary
The Anniversary

A lot can happen in ten years. You lose a baby, or choose to lose a baby, though at the time, it doesn’t feel like a choice, more like a pre-ordained outcome. You spend time blaming everything outside of you—your OB, your job, your husband. Blame comes easily; it’s a ready distraction from the blame you hold close to you, like a secret: you were not brave enough, not in love with the baby enough, not selfless enough. When your water broke months too early, you panicked, you decided against hope.

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MotherhoodJulia Nusbaummotherhood, pregnancy loss, healingComment
The Lapse
The Lapse

"You're not very gracious, are you?" he said, flashing a wry smile from his perch near the ultrasound monitor, next to the exam table on which I lay. I felt a pang; I don't like to think of myself as ungrateful. I hadn't shown much appreciation when he declared that the wound from a biopsy performed a few months earlier had healed well, that everything looked fine, and that I could now go a whole eight months, as opposed to six, or three, before my next round of precautionary imaging.

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Body ImageGuest Usermotherhood, breast cancer, identityComment