A Need for Hibernation
A Need for Hibernation

I hear scratching coming from behind me on the couch. I live on the third floor of an apartment complex, with nothing above me. Woods surround my tiny balcony and cover my living room and bedroom. The noise, it sounds like scurrying, and I think maybe it’s just a squirrel or a raccoon crawling on top of the roof. Whatever it is sounds like it’s running off the roof, leaving me wondering why it would be doing such a thing this late at night. I don’t know much about nature. I don’t know much about what happens in the dark.

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True StoriesJulia Nusbaumtrue stories, anxiety, fear, Grad school, coffee, panic attackComment
Soul Mate: A Definition
Soul Mate: A Definition

The day after my twin sister's wedding I curled up in the corner of my parent's kitchen and fell asleep. At the time I said I was sitting there because the rest of the house was already overtaken by relatives. I said I was sick because my adrenaline had finally run out. As maid of honor, adrenaline was all I had been running on for a long time. But I've had a long time to think about it now.

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True StoriesJulia Nusbaumsuicide, Marriage, Sisters, Familiy Comments
From Nashville to Maine With Love
From Nashville to Maine With Love

Everything in Maine was blissfully damp, from the sheets to the mornings to the paperbacks. Blueberries, by the time they made it into our pancakes, were still wet. Ponytails remained lake-stained all the livelong day. It was only when we laid our heads on the moist flannel pillowcases that we felt something akin to dry. Even then, one good squeeze and we could have wrung juice from the blankets.

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True StoriesJulia Nusbaumfamily history, family, Familiy Comment
Fingernails
Fingernails

In the high dependency room, the room before graduating to the special care baby unit, I would cut your fingernails for the first time.

My mom took a bus to Hackney Central in East London, to buy the tiny, baby-doll sized fingernail clippers.

Grandma had traveled from Michigan, where I grew up, and was not used to big city living. For her, a bus ride to a very busy place, by herself, was a brave step for her. She then walked from the bus to the Woolworths on the corner.

She did it for me, because I couldn’t leave you.

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True StoriesKristina Buschfamily, motherhood, reflectionComment
Pressing Play
Pressing Play

It’s my first Christmas Day with my family in two years and Scott’s first Christmas with us ever. After packing up our lives in Austin and moving to Brooklyn to fulfill a mid-twenties obligation to ourselves, we spend our vacation time not on vacation and instead doing the work of family visits. Now that I’ve dragged him for the four hour flight and the five hour car ride to the southernmost tip in Texas, he can enjoy December in shorts and a tee in what locals call the Valley.

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True StoriesKristina Buschfamily, divorce, relationshipsComment
I Earned My Stripes
I Earned My Stripes

I grew up listening to my mom criticize her stomach. Having children had done this, she would say as she ran her hand over her loose stomach. Being pregnant and giving birth had changed her body forever, leaving behind stretch marks and large breasts and a stomach that jiggled and bulged. She didn’t like how her stomach looked, but she didn’t starve herself or excessively exercise. In every fitting room we shared, she commented. If only I could get rid of this, she’d say as she patted her stomach. Look at this, she said, as she shook her head and looked at her side profile in the dressing room mirror. If I didn’t have all this, these would fit better, she would say, while pulling down the pair of pants that didn’t fit. She saw, and continues to see, her stomach as a negative, a defect.

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True StoriesJulia Nusbaumself love, family, body imageComment
Waterstones
Waterstones

A couple of months ago you were going to several Overeaters Anonymous meetings a week, sometimes every day. But when Elaine told you she couldn’t sponsor you anymore after your suicide attempt, and when she and a friend whom she also sponsored asked you not to attend a couple of their regular meetings, and after your therapist came to the facility you were hospitalized in to tell you she couldn’t work with you anymore, you stopped going to meetings altogether.

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True StoriesJulia Nusbaummental health, self love, books, friendshipComment
Polar Solstice
Polar Solstice

The evening before you came into this world we endured the longest blackest night.

Winter. The hibernal solstice. Our slice of Earth turning her back to the sun, head bowed, submitting to the dark.

That night imprinted its suffocating length onto my birthing body. Within the week, wrapped in tendrils of dread

postnatally deeply depressed.

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True StoriesJulia Nusbaummotherhood, family, reflectionComment
Tears for Vivian
Tears for Vivian

You stand with your husband on the balcony of a hotel room in Ao Nang, Thailand. Together, you watch the sky turn from pre-dawn pink to blue. It rained during the night and the air smells like damp teakwood and salt. Your hotel sits at the edge of town on top of a steep hill. As the sun rises, you contemplate the serenity of the Indian Ocean—a sea without waves.

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True StoriesJulia Nusbaumgrief, traveling, trauma Comments
Wedding Song
Wedding Song

It was time for our one rehearsal, the day of my daughter’s wedding. A group of family and friends who had been practicing alone now gathered, anticipating the thrill of voices blending and harmonizing, woven together by the glistening thread that is my daughter’s life force. In the run-up to this event, all said, “Yes, we will sing…We are honored to sing…We are thrilled to be part of this special surprise,” a touching tribute to a father long dead. All coming together from different places, different times, different experiences, to fuse in song.

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True StoriesJulia Nusbaumgrief, love, family Comments
(W)hole
(W)hole

I used to place Ken’s hand right on the mound of Barbie’s breast. It fit, almost precisely, as if the rounded palm was created for this small act of intimacy. Of course, further south it was merely a place where two legs connected, a smooth sweep of plastic that neither confirmed nor betrayed pleasure. But that didn’t stop me from imagining. I used to sit on the floor between the two twin beds in the upstairs bedroom at my grandmother’s house.

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True StoriesJulia Nusbaumsex, sexuality, bodies, body image Comment
The Cost of Leaving
The Cost of Leaving

I stare out at the sky. The man next to me is snoring, mouth wide open. His head drops forward, jolting back upright. It’s February. If the year had gone as planned, I would not have been on this airplane. I would have been finishing breakfast with my roommates and walking to class. Tonight, they will make dinner without me. We won’t dress up together this weekend, sifting through each other’s closets, to attend a party where we drink too much and laugh too hard. I am leaving home.

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True StoriesJulia NusbaumReligion, father daughter, Change, Change of life, family, teacherComment
The Memorial
The Memorial

In the early morning hours after John Lennon was shot and killed, people began gathering in front of the Upper West Side apartment building that he shared with his wife and their young son. For more than a week, from everywhere and of all ages, they came to keep a vigil. Watching the local news channel, I hear them referred to as Beatle fans. But what I see are mourners. Crowded together, hemmed in by police barricades, they weep and hold candles and signs, cleaving to the spot where Lennon left this earth.

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True StoriesJulia NusbaumChild Loss, miscarriage, still born, stillborn, New York, Beetles, John Lennon, Grief, Loss Comments
Seeking, Listening, Echoing
Seeking, Listening, Echoing

I grew up in the north of México in a city called Tecate, B.C. I used to think that I could, just as well, have grown anywhere else. I used to ignore, as I grew up, the situations of Mexican migrants. My family was not and that is why they always made sure that I didn’t know what, thanks to them, “I didn’t need to know.” My father and my uncles crossed the border as if getting into the neighbor’s yard to retrieve something they had lost. Only they hadn’t lost anything and were looking for what they never had, and without permission but with confidence. The confidence of someone who has crossed a territory that is not theirs many times knowing they shouldn’t.

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True StoriesKristina Buschfamily, immigration, relationships, languageComment
Illumination
Illumination

In the minutes after she was born, all of the lights came on. We watched her climb the wall of my body and land, exhausted, at the shore of my breast. Under the sharp white of hospital light, they did the weighing and measuring, and she screamed so that every number and value only reached my ears as alive, alive, more evidence of her realness, her presence. She sent howls up into a brightness that must have been like looking at the sun.

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True StoriesDiya MehtaStorytelling, Motherhood, mother daughter, life and death, dearComment