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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

How alive your heart to feel such sorrow!

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.

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.

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

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

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,

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?

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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 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 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.

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

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

Bain de Soleil, SPF 0—

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

... 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I lay awake at night, and fear was the drumbeat soundtrack of my insomnia. When I heard stories about women driving themselves and their children off cliffs or into oncoming traffic, I thought, ruinedly, Yeah. I get that. I wouldn’t have, but I understood why you might. I hope I wouldn’t have. I’m honestly not entirely sure.

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

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.

I bled the baby away into the brine. There were no sharks that I could see. I wanted obliteration. But also, I wanted life. I wanted to keep the life I had.

Back in the car, squashed between Maya and me, Willa says, “I always picture it like pickled sausages, pressed up against the glass. Her nose and lips and stuff.” “Um,” Jamie says from the passenger seat. “Say more?” “Eleanor Rigby’s face. In a jar by the door.” She sings the line from the Beatles song. “Also, Maya, you might know the answer to this. But when a caterpillar—what’s the verb form of it?—metamorphosizes, what happens to its brain? Like, does every other part of it get melted down to make a butterfly, but its little brain just stays intact the whole time?” “Most of the brain tissue gets broken down and rebuilt,” Maya says. “I mean, it makes sense, right? It has to be a pretty significant neurological rearrangement to get a brain to send fly signals instead of crawl signals.” “Wow” is all Willa says, but 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 liquefied and rearranged themselves to pilot this flight.

Are you scared?” I asked. “I’m not,” she said, and didn’t seem to be. “Death is no more than passing from one room into another.” Into another room where all the dead people are, I didn’t say. “Helen Keller,” she added, by way of attribution, and then she swished her hand in the air because now she was done with this kind of talk and wanted me to brush her beautiful hair before my dad got back.

About parenting in general, maybe, now that the days of oversaturation are long behind us. More, more, more!

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 this was so close to what I’d already been thinking myself that it astonished me. “Thank

It’s always so easy with grown kids! Okay, that’s not true. They struggle and stray and are sometimes heartbroken. They can bristle, take offense, go silent. 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. Still, there’s so much joyful contentment, at least compared to how it used to be.

What do you feel like, Mom?” I say, and she says, “Fine, fine. Just a little dizzy. I suppose I’m a bit warm.” Her skin is actually weirdly cool, though. Clammy. “Perhaps I should drink something.” “I told you to drink something!” Willa says, because her genetic inheritance includes scolding the people you’re worried about.

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. “Should we pack up a little before dinner?” Nick says, and everybody groans. “Let’s go to the pond instead,” Willa says. “Before we run out of time.” So that’s what we do.

They say that having a child is like agreeing to let your heart walk around outside your body.

You good, Mom?” Willa says now, and I turn from memory to face her. “What is going on with you? I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. I really don’t need another thing to worry about.” Nick looks up from his magazine. “Oh, honey,” I say. “I’m sorry. Don’t worry about me! I’m totally good. I’m so, so happy to be here with you.” 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.

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.

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.

Willa wrote her college admissions essay about this pond, and I loved it. It was about all her layers of memories and experiences: she learned to swim here; she was happy here, and also anxious; Jamie taught her about molecules while they lazed in the shallows; my mother showed her where the blueberries grew at the water’s edge; she came out to us here. In the version of the story she likes best, she splashes up to us to announce her gayness and I say, “No duh.” This is not strictly true, but close enough. It was such a good essay.

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.

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.

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.

I think I was. I think it was. I mean, I didn't know it at the time. Because I didn't experience myself as depressed. I was just really anxious and really tired. There was always this heavy, heavy feeling of potential loss. Preemptive grief. I worried a lot that you guys would die.

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.

It’s so crushingly beautiful, being human,” the mother sighs, and the daughter rolls her eyes and says, “But also so terrible and ridiculous.

Nick does my back like he’s a yeti with a yeti’s massive cryptid paws, getting sunscreen in my hair and all over my new suit in the process. You half expect to hear him groaning behind me like Frankenstein. “You’re welcome,” he says when I complain.

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.

uncovered walk from towel to sea. I used to cringe over all the

slap?

am very invested in you being alive, Mom, as you know.

We were in couples therapy once, and Nick said, “I’m just happy the way things are,” and I said, “Even though I’m not? That seems insane to me.” The therapist agreed that it was a problematic disconnect.

Oh honey," I say. "I'm sorry. Don't worry about me! I'm totally good. I'm so, so happy to be here with you." 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.

was deranged with responsibility, vigilance. Love. Tiredness.

that the days of oversaturation are long behind us. More, more, more!

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

And we are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love,