Carnal Conversations
Carnal Conversations

The pundits on NPR have been abuzz the last day or so about a new report indicating that one in five kids under the age of fifteen has had sex. So-who’s surprised? As soon as adults become parents, they get amnesia when it comes to sex. And they become hypocrites. Kids can smell hypocrisy a mile away. I did. I was a kid during the last great age of hypocrisy, the 1950’s. There was lots of teenage sex around then too, but you’d never know it based on the memories of those who were there.

Read More
SexJulia Nusbaumsex, women Comment
Amends
Amends

“The violence I had orchestrated left my insides lacking…”

The violence I had orchestrated.

I had orchestrated violence.

Had I orchestrated violence?

I was prepping for a podcast, scanning through my essay collection, Putting Out: Essays on Otherness, when I passed by this sentence. I used to love it. When I read it, I could envision myself as a conductor keeping in time the crumbling of my early womanhood. I’d visualize the rotation of shot glasses, kegs, faceless men, loose pills, and strobe lights blinking in the basement bangers all circling around me like a halo. By putting myself on the conductor’s podium I could pick and choose what parts of my experiences I illuminated to others.

Read More
SexJulia Nusbaumsex, Sexual assult Comment
WTF Is a Hoe Phase Anyway?
WTF Is a Hoe Phase Anyway?

Hi. I’m Mabs, and I am a demisexual woman trying to date after a particularly nasty divorce. I don’t know what I am doing.

Learning to live as a solitary person after twelve plus years is not fun. I go to work alone. I run errands alone. I cook dinner alone. I go to bed alone. There is no one to decompress the day with, no one to share all of the little pieces of life beside. I am learning to adjust to my independence and finding parts I enjoy in it, but I know myself. Left to my own devices, I will hunker down. I will crave companionship, but I will not actively seek it. My friends worry.

Read More
SexGuest Usersex, LGBTQ+, self love Comments
X = No Man’s Land
X = No Man’s Land

At the end of the summer of 1986, I stepped into the elevator and traveled alone from the forty-sixth floor of Chicago’s Mid-Continental Plaza to the ground for the last time. For four years, I had worked in that gray rectangular office building that spans a full city block. Its exterior resembles graph paper—gray metal and concrete run up the building vertically and around it horizontally, forming squares. In between that metal and concrete, set back ever so slightly, are windows.

Read More
SexGuest Usersex, Working women, true storiesComment
The Lost Year
The Lost Year

I played with the phone cord in my hand as I sat in a hotel room in Chiang Mai on a lumpy red bedspread. The steamy heat made my shirt stick to my back. What would it have taken to tell my father that I hated that dog? I definitely didn’t want to leave Thailand early to go home to bury him.

Read More
The Rest of the StoryJulia Nusbaum Comments
Real Ghosts Drive Black Lincolns
Real Ghosts Drive Black Lincolns

In the summer of 1990, Ghost Dad was butchered. The critics all agreed: this comedy, directed by Sidney Poitier, starring Bill Cosby, was dead in the water. The film told the story of Elliot Hopper, a workaholic widower with three children, who were forced to raise themselves in his absence. And this happened all before he became a ghost.

Read More
The Rest of the StoryJulia Nusbaum Comments
Haunted: A Study in Belief
Haunted: A Study in Belief

Margaret and I are much too sober for this place and I’m not in the mood for what’s on the menu—stale beer and dim neon lights. Eileen, a friend who used to work with me at a now-defunct magazine, wants to stay out at the Legion-style bar across the street from her studio apartment. It’s not a particularity shady late-night bar it’s just not where Margaret or I want to be.

Read More
The Rest of the StoryGuest Userwomen, fear, friendshipComment
The Throwaway Kid
The Throwaway Kid

Five years after my dad kicked me out, I was sitting in a swivel chair around a large oval table with ten other students in an Abnormal Child Development class. At twenty-one, I’d found my way into being a graduate student at Bank Street College of Education. Our teacher looked somber as she introduced the evening’s topic. “Tonight, we’ll be talking together about Adverse Childhood Experiences.

Read More
The Rest of the StoryGuest Userfamily issues, love, Forgiveness Comments
What Remains
What Remains

“Why are we here?” Karl asks and sinks back into the floral, wing-backed chair. His lower legs jut straight out of the seat.

“To dress Dad’s body for the viewing.”

I see Rob’s family arriving.

Ansel goes on a hunt for funeral home candy. Barely-a-teenager, he returns with slump posture and announces, “No candy!”

“Darn it,” Helena, my cheeky tween says, pretending to be angry. She gauges Ansel’s woeful expression and laughs.

Read More
Change of HeartJulia Nusbaumdeath, family, funeral, love, broken heart, change of heartComment
Last Call
Last Call

Tall ships lined up like regal ducks in the Delaware outside the floor to ceiling windows of the Rusty Scupper. The lights from Penns Landing illuminated their bulky masts, casting cross-shaped shadows upon the concrete. It was nearly midnight. Two parties hung on for last call: a middle-aged couple who couldn’t keep their hands off each other, and two handsome guys who’d been downing gin and tonics for nearly two hours. Exhausted after a long shift, I looked forward to washing the smoke and liquor off my body and crawling into my bed a few blocks away.

Read More
Change of HeartJulia NusbaumSexual assult, #metoo, law school, feministComment
Autumn
Autumn

My mind is fucking racing. I lay here in thick, suffocating silence, stranded in the gulf between nausea and despair. Curled in the fetal position I stare. I stare at the poster haphazardly hung on the wall outside my door. It’s unframed, the corners curling at the edges. I used to love this risograph print of Margot from The Royal Tenenbaums, sitting in her bathtub, hands draped over the edges as she stares at something I can’t see.

Read More
Change of HeartGuest Userchange of heart, depression, story Comment
The History of My Daughter
The History of My Daughter

“Shoot your vagina up to the ceiling” one male doctor helpfully suggested as your head inched forward and back into my body again. Limp I stared into the bright white hospital light above me where I saw a vision of my own blood and guts floating on the ceiling. I learned later that this particular delivery room was famous for having a tinted convex light that reflected the labor in detail if you knew to look.

Read More
Our Grandmother's StoriesJulia Nusbaumchildbirth, Motherhood, Mother daughter, birthComment
Whispers Through the Glass
Whispers Through the Glass

I inherited three things from my paternal grandmother: my middle name, an engagement ring, and the desire to be a writer. I didn’t know that Gram’s ambitions to be a writer matched mine until I was sixteen, when I read an essay she wrote titled “Why I Am What I Am.” In it, she writes, “I have a very decided ambition to become an authoress. I have always loved to write…I have a vivid imagination, which was probably kindled by the necessity of my finding something within myself to amuse myself, for I had very few friends my age.” As the youngest person in both my extended family and my neighborhood by nearly a decade, I knew what she meant.

Read More
Our Grandmother's StoriesJulia Nusbaumgrandmother, Childhood, childbirthComment
Occupation
Occupation

Rose, I saw a picture of you today. The first one, I think, I’ve ever seen. Your face was kind, like my Gran’s. For some reason this surprised me. But you must have been kind. Your daughter is kindness personified. The photo was sent by Amanda, your granddaughter, my aunt. I’d fired off an email this morning, and by lunchtime there you were, sitting in my downloads. I tried to zoom in on your face, but you pixelated on my phone screen. You were sixty-three, sitting in the garden with Great-Grandpa on Amanda’s eighth birthday. My mother, a chubby toddler, sits on Great-Grandpa’s lap. Sixty-three is the age my parents are now, but you look much older than them. Maybe it’s your clothes, your hairstyle, or the black and white camera. Maybe it’s the war, the guilt and grief that you carried away from it.

Read More
Our Grandmother's StoriesJulia Nusbaumwar, childloss Comment
The Real Erica Kane
The Real Erica Kane

Daytime soap operas held all the answers.

In fifth grade, my friend Connie introduced me to daytime soap operas so I could learn about things of which I had no firsthand knowledge, things that Connie already understood—love triangles, how to successfully ruin the social and business reputations of others, dead people coming back to life as their previously unknown evil twin.

Read More
Our Grandmother's StoriesGuest Usergrandmother, abortion, father, jewish womenComment
The Dinosaurs of Parkchester Public Library
The Dinosaurs of Parkchester Public Library

I didn’t learn to read until I was eight years old, a full month into second grade. It’s not something that entirely made sense, since I had learned how to spell simple words in the previous year, and I could speak English with the same ease as Spanish since the end of kindergarten. Reading, however, was something that had slipped past until the day my teacher took me aside, bewildered by my scattershot collection of knowledge.

Read More
Our Grandmother's StoriesGuest Usergrandmother, reading, mother, childhoodComment
Space
Space

It’s hard to disappear in this digitally-connected world. Have you ever Googled yourself? I have. It’s amazing how much someone can find out about me in just the ‘top hits’ when I put my name in. In all, close to 25 relevant entries appear, and I’m not remotely famous. I think most of my friends can say the same, yet when I tried to find Ben Krieger on the internet, I came up empty.

Read More
Missed ConnectionsJulia Nusbaumfriendship, friends, missed connections, womens storiesComment