Sandwich Catherine Newman Quotes

And this may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel. To say, Same. To say, I understand how hard it is to be a parent, a kid. To say, Your shell stank and you’re sad. I’ve been there.

Maybe grief is love imploding. Or maybe it’s love expanding. I don’t know. I just know you can’t create loss to preempt loss because it doesn’t work that way. So you might as well love as much as you can. And as recklessly. Like it’s your last resort, because it is.

Despair laced through with so much incredible beauty. We just keep showing up for each other. Even through the mystery of other people’s grief. What else is there?

People who insist that you should be grateful instead of complaining? They maybe don’t understand how much gratitude one might feel about the opportunity to complain.

Who wants a guy to last longer? Finish up is my feeling. My library book’s not going to read itself!

Mom, try not to hurt your own feelings for no reason,” Willa says. This is sensible advice.

I’ve heard grief described as love with nowhere to go.

Why do we love everyone so recklessly and then break our own hearts? And they don’t even break. They just swell, impossibly, with more love.

often an empty nest is two birds looking at each other, shell-shocked and nostalgic, over the single worm they’re now splitting for dinner, discussing what to do with the worm leftovers.

She waited to die until I left the room, which is a thing I’ve heard parents do. I can imagine it. I mean, you’re never done being somebody’s mom, ever, are you? She took care of me until the very end.

We're just ruined by sex, women---our bodies, our psyches. We're sexually assaulted every five minutes. We're infected with everything. Traumatized by conceiving, by not conceiving. But let's keep at it? Like, you've been in a maiming car accident and then you're supposed to want to get back in the car? I mean, what?

Life is a seesaw, and I am standing dead center, still and balanced: living kids on one side, living parents on the other. Nicky here with me at the fulcrum. Don’t move a muscle, I think. But I will, of course. You have to.

There are so many ways to lose our children, and I have imagined most of them

How alive your heart to feel such sorrow!

But grief was like a silver locket with two faces in it. I didn’t know what the faces looked like, but it was heavy around my neck, and I never took it off.

I mean you're never done being somebody's mom, ever, are you?

I try to stay vigilant because everybody's health and safety depends on it, and also, if I relax now I will fall asleep for the entire rest of my life and wake up dead.

It’s almost painful, the way little children just trustingly hold out their hearts for you to look at—the way they haven’t learned yet how to conceal what matters to them, even if it’s just chewing gum or a plush dolphin or plastic binoculars.

There are wounds that never really heal, no matter how much time they take.

This is how it is to love somebody. You tell them the truth. You lie a little. And sometimes you don’t say anything at all.

We call this style of childhood nostalgia the catalogue of grievances.

what she told me was that I didn’t need to draw so many conclusions, to make so many decisions. That I could just live with all the different parts of a life as they were. That I could be happy even though nothing would ever be perfect.

So much of privileged adulthood seems to take place here, in the space between the soaring highs and the killing disasters. It’s just plain life, beautiful in its familiar subtlety, its decency and dailiness.

I have had many ideas about myself - and many of them have been ruined. I do not share this thought with my daughter.

I'm so in love with her that if we were marsupials, I'd be stuffing her grown self back into my pouch.

How are these adults my children? is what I really want to say. And why are they so beautiful? Willa,

Willa once shared her theory that finding a four-leaf clover was a symptom of luck, not a cause. “It just means you have the kind of life where there are growing things and you have time to look at them,” she said. I think she was actually making a point about class privilege? But I like to imagine that luck is everywhere, even before you find it.

Menopause feels like a slow leak: thoughts leaking out of your head; flesh leaking out of your skin; fluid leaking out of your joints. You need a lube job, is how you feel. Bodywork. Whatever you need, it sounds like a mechanic might be required, since something is seriously amiss with your head gasket.

Don’t placate me,” I say quietly. “It’s not okay. Jesus fucking Christ. I’m right to be mad!” Am I, though? I fucking am! “It’s so annoying the way women have to do all the hard things and take care of everybody and pay attention to everything all the time. And then be soft and open and fuckable. It’s infuriating!

If menopause were an actual substance, it would be spraying from my eyeballs, searing the word ugh

The children’s features shattered me a little bit—as if someone had siphoned love out of me and tattooed it onto someone else’s face.

It’s true that I didn’t want to sit on the floor in the afternoon and play with trains or pour imaginary tea. But I was a good parent in the night.

He’s just wrong,” Nick says now. “He’s imperfect. This is not new information. It’s okay. You still get to love him.

They chafe against the very fact of you, the parents—against the judgment seeping out of you even while you’re busy impressing yourself with your own restraint.

When I'm jealous of my parents, I think: It was easier then. My worked; my mom stayed home. There was absolute clarity. Now there's just pretend equity, and it's not very romantic.

So you might as well love as much as you can. And as recklessly. Like it’s your last resort, because it is.

But share everything that matters. And keep loving each other massively.

... I am thinking of these people in the car with me. These no-longer-kids, who have emerged from the cocoon of childhood to fly away into the wild, so brilliant and beautiful. Whose brains have liquified and rearranged themselves to pilot this flight.

The older I get, it seems, the less I want to talk to anybody about their feelings or my own. Not in the usual way, at least. The responsible way. I want to behave badly and be immediately forgiven. Or maybe it’s not that I want that—it’s just what I do.

It’s so annoying the way women have to do all the hard things and take care of everybody and pay attention to everything all the time. And then be soft and open and fuckable. It’s infuriating!

But I did. I’m just a person. That’s part of choice—we get to make our own decisions, even if they’re imperfect. The potential that you might regret something? We don’t make anything illegal because of that.

I was pregnant. I was sick and thirsty. I was gutted with love for these sparkling children. Bodies of my body. Inside and out - brain, heart, uterus; mouth, skin, breasts - not a single part of me was my own.

More! It was Jamie’s first word. It’s the call of children everywhere. And it’s how I feel about my time with them now. About parenting in general, maybe, now that the days of oversaturation are long behind us.

They say that having a child is like agreeing to let your heart walk around outside your body. But really your heart escapes from your body directly into the jaws of a lion. It’s nothing you would ever agree to.

Sunglasses and sunscreen and sandy feet pressed against her thighs and stomach. Little children running across the sand with their little pails. Her own parents laughing in their beach chairs, shrinking inside their clothes as the years pass. Grief bright in the periphery, like a light flashing just out of view.

Here’s the thing about menopause, though, that I don’t entirely understand. We’ll exchange a few words like this? A seemingly slight disagreement? Only then rage fizzes up inside my rib cage. It burns and unspools, as berserk and sulfuric as those black-snake fireworks from childhood: one tiny pellet, with seemingly infinite potential to create dark matter—dark matter that’s kind of like a magic serpent and kind of like a giant ash turd. “Why do I have to be in charge of every single thing?” I hiss.

It's so tempting to waste the last of the time we have left in a state of preemptive loss that I have to actively stop myself from the ruing and keening.

Leave it, I think to myself, like I'm a dog with something in its jaws: a squirrel, a frankfurter, a pair of underpants, a grief habit. Leave it.

The children become the adults. It’s too beautiful to bear—and too much to be worthy of.

This day contains multitudes. Maybe every day does.

rolled up into a lump in my own throat that I have been trying to swallow for my whole life.

flops.” “Exactly,” she says, satisfied. We call this style of childhood nostalgia the catalogue of grievances.

Could we just not? I just saw an ad for men who want to last longer. Who wants a guy to last longer? Finish up is my feeling. My library book’s not going to read itself!

if I relax now I will fall asleep for the entire rest of my life and wake up dead.

I try to stay vigilant because everybody's health and safety depends on it, and, also, if I relax now I will fall asleep for the entire rest of my life and wake up dead.

It's so crushingly beautiful, being human," the mother sighs, and the daughter rolls her eyes and says, "But also so terrible and ridiculous." And maybe it's all three.

was deranged with responsibility, vigilance. Love. Tiredness.

... anticipatory grief is among the top five worst traits she's inherited from me.

Nick and I both scrambled through our children's childhoods, half-assing work, half-assing home.

Let’s not jump right to the blaming part. Let’s linger a while in the relief and gratitude part.

And this may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel.

I would pick this life too, I know. I’d even pick the way that pain has burnished me to brightness. The pain itself, though? I imagine I’d give it up if I could.

Activities that might injure you include ping-pong, napping, and opening a tub of Greek yogurt.

All the horrors that crept past without you ever looking up from your youth to take note of what they even were: They’ve circled back for you.

It’s up to me now, to unravel this rope I’ve twisted together from shame and guilt and rage and sadness.

All of that caretaking,” I say. I lean back so I can look at her. I’m crying too. Crying and talking. “All of it’s in his bones. It’s the actual stuff of his body and brain. The placenta you made from scratch. Your milk from nursing him. All those pancakes and school-lunch sandwiches, all of that food and care.” She’s looking into my face, nodding, even though I am fully winging it now, panicking, words pouring out like I’m a hose on the weepy consolation setting. “Everything you’ve ever fed him,” I say. “His whole self is made completely out of your love.

But also? Can we just, like, call it at some point? We’re sticking shit up our twats and the guys are taking boner pills—I mean, could we take it all as a sign to just, like, give it a rest?

You’re supposed to retrace your steps when you lose something, but none of my losses are like that. Where would I look for them? And what would I do if I found them? Little ghost babies, born babies, outgrown children’s bodies, missing teenagers. Loss like a shipwreck. Swim down to it, down, down, down to the pitch-black ocean floor, where nothing is visible and it never dissolves.

But I am struck by this fact. I am stricken. Willa always says she can’t spare anybody, and I’m thinking, Me either, baby girl. What, exactly, are we doing here? Why do we love everyone so recklessly and then break our own hearts? And they don’t even break. They just swell, impossibly, with more love.

We call this style of childhood nostalgia the catalogue of grievances. “Oooh, are we reminiscing about Mama’s failures?” Nick says cheerfully. He has walked over to join us. “Just that one,” Willa says. “Unless I think of others.

A couple of minutes later I hear my dad explaining the difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazel: a schlemiel is the kind of klutz who trips and falls into a shrub and scares a bird; a shlimazel is the person the scared bird shits on.

You wish you knew how to quit me,” he says (Brokeback Mountain). “But you can’t.” It’s true. Even with all the nonintersecting forms of communication, I can’t quite fathom a life apart. He is sometimes mysterious, this man, and often maddening, but he smells like home.

Tell me,” I said bravely, and what she told me was that I didn’t need to draw so many conclusions, to make so many decisions. That I could just live with all the different parts of a life as they were. That I could be happy even though nothing would ever be perfect. And

your memory bank is that ungettable Snyder’s bag, every movie star and city name and book title and adjective, and you’re shaking the machine, trying to snake your hand up through the slot, pressing the coin return button in a rage. Forget it. Oh, you already have! Ha ha ha.

What does loss look like, in your body? Where is it? It feels like an air bubble stuck in your psyche. It feels like peering down into a deep hole. The vertigo of that. The potential for obliteration. It’s in your stomach. Your spleen. Or it’s just your heart losing its mind.

I am here for all of it—the young people and their bodies. I wish I’d dressed like that when I was their age instead of in the burlap sack dresses we favored for their astonishing shapelessness. “What’s in there?” people surely wondered. A youthful human torso and legs? A truckload of Idaho potatoes? There was no telling.

They are so grown! So young. Mine and not mine, as ever they have been. Maybe grief is love imploding. Or maybe it’s love expanding. I don’t know. I just know you can’t create loss to preempt loss because it doesn’t work that way. So you might as well love as much as you can. And as recklessly. Like it’s your last resort, because it is.

In a pie chart of Nick’s personality, Dad Jokes would be, like, seven of the eight slices. He responds to every text in our family group chat with a GIF from a comedic film that is usually Elf: Buddy the Elf jumping up and down, yelling, “Santa’s coming!” if you’re excited; Buddy the Elf bent over a rabid raccoon—“Does somebody need a hug?”—if you’re sad about something. He’ll make the occasional exception, though. Like, if you texted him that your plane had been hijacked, he’d probably send you the scream face from Home Alone.

Bain de Soleil, SPF 0—

our pussies just kind of dry up and blow away and people are profiting from that. The fact that Viagra is so much fucking cheaper.

Nick’s curiosity about feelings and the people who have them is fleeting at best.

Hopefully I’ll be dead by the time you get skin cancer,” I say to Jamie, and he says, “Nice, Mom,” but doesn’t actually look up from his phone.

I just know you can’t create loss to preempt loss because it doesn’t work that way. So you might as well love as

not jump right to the blaming part. Let’s linger awhile in relief and gratitude.

I’ve seen enough videos of cats terrorized by cucumbers to know what my face looks like when I suddenly see the foam roller.

But this? These grown kids, after your own life has grown so quiet? (“Dad and I defrosted the chest freezer” is an actual text I once sent in response to a question about our weekend and how it was going.) The kids who shake cocktails and fry squid and drive to the corn stand and tell funny stories about the kombucha tap at work? I had no idea it would be this good.

Hey, Mama?” This is Willa, gentle. “This is a lot. It’s so, so much. But I wonder if you want to shift gears? Grandpa is telling you something about—about himself, really. More than he’s telling you something about you, I think.” “Thanks, honey,” I say, and Jamie smiles, says, “Did you just low-key roast Mama for being a narcissist?” I love these kids more every day.

A transition is so much gentler than an ending—and in a million ways, my mother is here with us still. In our photographs and our memories. In our hearts and even our lungs because she is the air we breathe.

We spread some of her ashes in Central Park, where the daffodils first come up in April. “Imagine trying to make that color yellow just from the soil and sunlight,” Willa said. She was leaning against my father, who was smiling and frowning and dabbing at his face with a handkerchief. “Like, if someone was like, here’s a bowl of dirt. Make two perfect shades of the brightest yellow you ever saw! You totally couldn’t do it.” We agreed that this was true. “So what is that? I mean, I know it’s nature. Photosynthesis. Adaptation. But is it magic too?” We thought that maybe it was.

In the passenger seat of one slightly rusting silver Subaru station wagon: a woman in her fifties. She is halfway in age between her young adult children and her elderly parents. She is long married to a beautiful man who understands between twenty and sixty-five percent of everything she says.

Hmmm,” I say now. I’m punching the word C-U-N-T-Y into the Spelling Bee, just to entertain myself. Not in word list, the Bee responds, deadpan. I see T-E-A-T but refuse to enter it. What am I—a sow nursing her piglets? “I’m lazy. Let’s drink our coffee and then make more coffee and then maybe go to the beach?

She has always pictured it both ways: squinting against the unbearable lightness of loving while simultaneously crouched under the heavy cross of it. “It’s so crushingly beautiful, being human,” the mother sighs, and the daughter rolls her eyes and says, “But also so terrible and ridiculous.” And maybe it’s all three

Hey, Mama?” This is Willa, gentle. “This is a lot. It’s so, so much. But I wonder if you want to shift gears? Grandpa is telling you something about—about himself, really. More than he’s telling you something about you, I think.” “Thanks, honey,” I say, and Jamie smiles, says, “Did you just low-key roast Mama for being a narcissist?” I love these kids more every day. “I’m sorry, Dad,” I say. “I’m so sorry. What a trauma—to grow up with so much pain in the house.” In his house. In everybody’s house. My god. All the motherless children. All the childless mothers. A canyon the size of a continent, and full of bones. “I can’t even imagine,” I say. “Forgive me.” I reach a hand across the table to him.

But also? Can we just, like, call it at some point? We’re sticking shit up our twats and the guys are taking boner pills—I mean, could we take it all as a sign to just, like, give it a rest? Could we just not? I just saw an ad for men who want to last longer. Who wants a guy to last longer? Finish up is my feeling. My library book’s not going to read itself!

I’m so mad now I’m crying, and when Nick lays a hand on my thigh, I push it away. Even though I want him to comfort me. I want him to scoop me up and rock me. I’m furious. I’m exhausted. I don’t really sleep anymore. Like, at all. “I’m not even totally sure what I’m mad about,” I say, and he wraps his arms around me. “Do you think we should split up?” I whisper, crying, and he whispers back, angry himself finally, “Jesus, Rock.” “I’m sorry,” I say, still crying. “Something is seriously wrong with me. Also, it is so fucking hot in here I’m going to die.” Nick and I have been together since we were practically kids, and in that time he has gone handsomely gray at the temples while I have gone full whiskered harpy.

What?” Willa says. She’s looking at my face. “What’s going on with you, besides being concussed or whatever you are?” How are you an adult? is one question I don’t ask. Are all those little girls nested inside you like matryoshka dolls? is another. All those summers of the kids with their sticky hands and sticky faces and excitedness! “Just sentimental,” I say instead, and kiss her perfect rosy empath cheek.

Here’s what foragers know: Most of what grows is neither delicious nor toxic. There’s a whole world between what we call the choice edibles—the hazelnuts and porcini and black raspberries—and, say, the destroying angel mushroom that will shut down all your organ systems after a single nibble. You can eat the grass, the lichen, the inner bark of most trees, a thousand kinds of leaves. Not that you would, but you could. So much of privileged adulthood seems to take place here, in the space between the soaring highs and the killing disasters. It’s just plain life, beautiful in its familiar subtlety, its decency and dailiness

Despite the many cheerful photographs suggesting otherwise, I did not love lunch on the beach when the kids were little. They were so committed, it seemed, to getting sand in the cooler, sand in the chip bag, sand in the cherry bag, the cookies, the pretzels. They dropped their sandwiches into the sand, spilled my iced tea into the sand, poured sand over their own sweaty heads for no reason and cried. They stuffed their sandy baby fingers into my nostrils. They groped me with their sandy palms. They tracked sand over the towels and through my psyche. All I wanted was two unsandy seconds to swallow down their peanut butter and jelly crusts and call it a meal.

There are some things I haven’t told you yet—and will. And there are other things I won’t. Willa, for example, has a story that’s not mine to share. I’ll just tell you that one spring morning three years ago I posted a photograph from a hospital window of a Boston park in bloom and a friend on social media—a person I had never even met in real life—wrote me privately to say, “Hey, I know that view. I’m here, head of pediatrics. Let me know if you need anything or if I can help in any way.” I cried then. I am crying now, remembering. Despair laced through with so much incredible beauty. We just keep showing up for each other. Even through the mystery of other people’s grief. What else is there?

When she was in hospice, her heart failing quickly while ours beat on and on, we watched the birds outside her window. The kids came and went, loving and devastated, but also busy with work and school. My mom dozed while my dad read the paper and I mended my jeans. Sometimes she was in pain, and it was awful. Sometimes I looked at take-out menus with my dad and she grinned at us from her weird bed. Her strength and coordination failed, and I climbed in next to her to help with her phone, using her thumb to unlock the screen like it was a tool in my own hands. “I’m still a person!” she said, indignant, as I repeatedly jabbed her thumb on the button. We laughed so much I cried and then peed a little, and then we laughed about that too: her continent on her deathbed; me borrowing a pair of her underpants.