So Close, But Not Quite

On bravery, the blue of longing, and the stories our bodies remember

This piece came out of one of my Write the Hard Thing 10-minute writing and grounding sessions. Not the whole thing, but the center of it, the emotional heat. That’s the power of these weekly sessions where we’re teaching our body to feel safe enough to write the hard stories. You don’t always know what’s going to surface, but when it does, it’s usually exactly what needs to be written. My body knew, and it carried me there, gave me the map.

That’s why I keep showing up for this practice, and why I invite you to join me. Each week is a chance to write from a place of safety and to see what story is ready to be told. You don’t have to come with a plan, just your breath, your body, and your willingness to see what speaks. The next one is next Friday, September 5th, at noon ET. You can add to your calendar here. We’d love to have you!

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“Are you scared?” my husband asked, lying beside me on the bed, his head in my lap, his dark curls spilling like satin.
“No,” I said. “If anything, I’m annoyed. I don’t really have time for this.”
“You’re so brave,” he said.
I laughed. “I don’t think brave is the right word. Smart, maybe.”

The next day I would be under anesthesia for abdominal surgery, a breathing tube down my throat, my body stitched again to fix a hernia from pregnancy. Nothing dramatic, I thought. At least not compared to the emergency C-section four years earlier. What’s another slice across the stomach? Surely this wouldn’t be as bad. If I could survive that, then this would be nothing. A cakewalk.

That’s what I told my husband. It wasn’t about bravery. Something was wrong, and I was fixing it. Bravery never entered the equation. If you have to do something, you just do it, don’t you? What it was, what it always felt like, was simply the smarter choice. Better to get it over with now than wait until it got worse.

“No, you’re brave,” he said again. “And you’re smart.”

I smiled and drank my last gulps of water before the pre-surgery fast. That part felt like the hardest of all—no tea, no sip of water to start the morning. When I woke, I couldn’t help myself. I took the tiniest sip, just enough to wet my mouth.

I woke my son and lay beside him for as long as he was still, but soon he was wiggling his way out of my arms, off to one of his imaginary games that make no sense to anyone but him. I was craving my morning cup of tea. If I have a vice, this is it. A warm cup first thing is like God to me. That, and fantasizing about Timothée Chalamet (c’mon, tell me I’m not the only one).

My husband loaded our son into the car. I felt a pang. I wanted to carry him down the path myself, between the black-eyed Susans spilling into the walkway, to feel his weight in my arms one last time before a month of not lifting him. I was already grieving that weight. His warmth and aliveness pressed against me, the way he wraps his arms around my neck and collapses fully, as if he knows I can hold him, his needs, his big, endless love.

We drove the fifteen minutes to the same hospital where I had delivered him. A dreary morning, mist falling, trees a deep green against the gray. “It feels like England,” my husband said, and he was right. “I hate it,” I said. “It makes me tired.” We circled to the outpatient center. I unbuckled my son and held him tight in the parking lot, memorizing his weight against me until he wiggled and whined about the rain on his head. I buckled him back in, kissed his face, and said, “Have fun with Daddy.”

My husband was waiting for his hug.
“Do you want us to go in with you?” he asked.
“No way,” I said, hugging him. “He needs to get back for his oatmeal.”
“If it were me, I’d want you to stay with me.”

I laughed a little. “Aww,” I said. I wanted to tell him, You need more than I do, but I’m pretty sure I only thought it. Out loud it might’ve come out wrong. But it was true.

I grew up with needs but nowhere to take them. No one to meet them, no one to fill them. So I ignored them, buried them, denied them. Even now, almost forty years later, my needs stay quiet, a slow, silent simmer beneath the hum of everyone else’s.

I’m better than I used to be (thanks, therapy), but you don’t live your whole damn life one way and then suddenly feel safe to need, just because someone says you should. It doesn’t work like that. Learning to have needs after decades of pretending you don’t is like learning a new language late in life—you can understand the words, but your tongue still stumbles. The truth is, I didn’t need my husband to come in. I was fine. More than fine, even. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts, with the current of my own energy. I love being alone. I crave it. Aloneness has never scared me. It’s the place I first learned to survive. So even a doctor’s waiting room, with its stale magazines and humming machines, felt like luxury.

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The front desk clerk asked me everything about my health history, emergency contact, religion. Why did they need to know my religion? I said, “Other.” When they asked me to specify what that meant, I said, “Other” again. You don’t need my religion to cut my belly open. Then I paid them $4,000 I didn’t really have and muttered some woo-woo mantra to myself. Abundance flows to me easily and freely. As the clerk ran my card, I made the mistake of checking my email. An emergency from one of my jewelry clients. Oh shit. I waited until the clerk was finished and then called my husband immediately. Code red. Fix this. Do this. Hurry. Call me back as soon as you can.

The nurse called my full name, which always makes me cringe—Jessica Easton. I had to get naked, pee in a cup, and tie myself into a thin gown that opened in the back. My husband called just as I was climbing into the hospital bed. I was still putting out fires while the nurse strapped a cuff to my arm. I apologized for being on the phone. Of course, I’d have an emergency the morning of surgery. She laughed and said it was fine.

In the background, I could hear my son asking for things, speaking his needs like he’s supposed to. And me, not there to meet them. We hung up once it was sorted, and I thumbed out one last email to the client, one-handed, while the nurse dug around in my arm trying to find a vein.

“Your veins are so tiny,” she said. Dig. Dig. Dig.

They say this every time. More digging. She looked at my hands, switched arms. More digging. Finally, a vein. I finished the email, tried to breathe.

“When will I be out of surgery?” I asked.

She looked at the ceiling, counting in her head. “You should be out before noon.”

I nodded, but my body felt like a bomb, and I couldn’t place why. I tried to ignore it, slipped in my earbuds. An hour to kill before surgery. I listened to an astrology podcast and drifted to sleep.

The anesthesiologist came, then more nurses. They read my chart, said I was healthy, that they loved when they got a healthy patient, that it only happened once a day. They wrapped the blood pressure cuff. Then, “Okay, it’s time.”

I still wasn’t scared. I just wanted it over, wanted to get back to my life, my son, my dogs, the flowers in my garden, summer.

Then the bed started to roll. They pushed me toward the operating room, and my heart dropped into my stomach. A deep sadness washed over me like a wave, held me down, my body suddenly heavy.

The anesthesiologist cracked a joke, “Keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times.” I forced a laugh, but I was already slipping, as if I were leaving my body. The double doors swung open, and white light flooded my vision.

Fear arrived, and sat heavy on my chest. Do you remember this? It asked. And I was back there again, drowning in the sticky, tangled memories of my son’s birth.

“You’ll have a baby before noon,” the nurse had said. Noon came and went.
“You’ll have a baby before dinnertime.”

But there was no dinner. Just darkness, desperation, screaming, sorrow. There was no having the baby. He was cut out, yanked out. I could feel them pulling him from the birth canal through my stomach.

So close, but not close enough.

I’ve known that feeling all my life. So close, but not quite.
Mom’s coming home, finally released from prison. We’ll be a family now. Oh, whoops, there she goes again, back on drugs, back in prison.
So close, but not quite.

And Dad, look, he has a real job, not the meth lab in the garage. He’s doing it, he’s getting his life together. Oh no, whoops, picks up the bottle. Another kind of loss.
So close, but not quite.

The memoir’s done, agents request the full manuscript. Even the dream agent. Another writes, I’m a hundred pages in and loving it. And then, Sorry. Not the right time for this story. Good story though. Good work.
So close, but not quite.

And here, my son! We can see his head, his hair, the doctor said. Oh my God, he has hair, how beautiful. I’m going to hold him in my arms, finally, finally, finally. Oh, whoops. He’s stuck. Five hours of pushing. Nope, still stuck. Then the drugs. The scalpel. My arms strapped down wide like a crucifix. White lights. Yank, yank, yank. His cries lasted for forty-five minutes before I even saw his face. Before I held him.

So close, but not quite.

In the OR, the nurse told me to slide from the rolling bed to the operating table. It was so narrow that my arms felt like they might slip off. They pulled out two side panels, wings opening wide like a cross. Spread your arms, they said. Back on the crucifix.

They asked if I’d ever had anesthesia, though of course they already knew. I’d told them. Then the mask. “Think of your favorite place,” they said. I couldn’t name one. I don’t think I have a favorite place. I love everywhere, and yet nowhere feels like home. All I could think of was water. Big, blue, powerful water. So I said, the beach. Any beach. Lake, ocean, white sand, black sand, mountains in the distance. I don’t care. Just give me a beach.

“Great. Go there.”

Deep breath, take a deep breath, they said. I thought I was, but they kept repeating it. Let it out. Release. Like you’re blowing out birthday candles.

For someone who depends on breath to survive, like really depends on it in a somatic sort of way, my breath felt like it had gone rogue, on its own journey apart from me. I couldn’t find it.

Like you’re blowing out candles, they said again.

And I thought of my son in Chicago, sitting outside, tall buildings stacked around him, blowing out candles on a rainbow-sprinkled cake donut for his fourth birthday. Make a wish, we told him. Make a wish.

I searched for a wish. But then everything went black.

I woke to the nurse’s voice. My husband and son were downstairs. Did I want them to come up? No, I didn’t, not really. I wanted to go back to sleep, to sleep for a hundred years. But I said, sure.

They slipped off my blue hair net. This might scare him, one of them said. Let’s take it off so you look like you.

But my son has seen more than this. He met me here once already. Under the knife, under the white lights. He’s seen me stitched and silenced, half gone, half returning. White floors, white walls, white, white, white. Sterile and empty, the buzzing and beeping of a million contraptions neither of us understood. But we knew each other. Already knew each other from the inside out. We carried the knowing in our blood, the pulse of recognition, the ancient vow of mother and child.

My son walked in with my husband, his small hand tucked in his father’s. His face was so pure, so beautiful. His dark, deer-like eyes fixed on me, wide and curious, wonder at the center, fear flickering at the edges. I could see it. I could feel it.

“It’s okay, baby. Come into bed with mama,” I said, scooting over to make room for his little body. He climbed in, and I leaned my head against his, drifting in and out of the sleeping realm.

The nurse was talking to me, but I couldn’t hear, couldn’t focus on a word. Just like the birth. Everyone talking, voices vibrating around me, and all I could do was ache for my son. Where is he? Can I see him? Where is he? Can I hold him? Where is he, where is he, where is he?

Back then, I could see nothing but the blue gauze curtain they’d hung, the barrier to keep me from watching them cut me open. I didn’t want to see. Didn’t want to believe it was happening. So I went somewhere else. Disassociated. A survival instinct I’d learned in childhood and kept like a shield against every bad thing that ever came for me. I stared into the blue, tried to imagine it was the sky, blue sky, blue ocean, any other blue. Maybe that’s why blue makes me think of longing. Longing to hold my son, to see his face for the first time. And then, there he was. My son in their arms. Still crying, until they placed him on my chest. Immediately, he went quiet. His giant eyes looking up at me.

My first words to him were, “You’re so brave, baby. You’re so brave.”

So maybe it was about bravery after all. The long, winding journey to each other, stitched with light and loss.

And here we are again. Life blurs blue at the edges. I reach for him, his hair, his face, anchoring myself in the heat of his little body. His voice is clear. I can hear him whispering into the fuzz of my half-sleep, You’re so brave, Mama. You’re so brave.

We’ve been saying it to each other all along, passing the word back and forth like a torch we never asked for, but carry anyway.

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P.S. I’m teaching a 2-hour workshop this month called Write the Hard Thing: Let the Body Tell the Story on Saturday, September 20th at Noon ET on Zoom (recording included if you can’t make it live), hosted by Trust and Travel’s writing community, The Practice.

This one is for anyone carrying a story they don’t quite know how to tell. Maybe it’s grief, maybe it’s family complexity, maybe it’s a truth you’ve been circling for years. Together, we’ll begin where stories actually live: in the body.

We’ll start by naming the fear and shame that so often keep us silent. Then I’ll guide you into the body so you can find a single doorway into your story. From there, we’ll explore the “double perspective” that memoir requires: the voice of the one who lived it, and the voice of the one who is ready to write it now.

If you’ve been carrying a story inside you that’s asking for air, I’d love for you to join me. Learn more here.

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You can read the full birth story here…