How We Grow: Catherine Newman

Becoming while mothering, anxiety, love and writing the book of summer with New York Times bestselling author, Catherine Newman.

I haven’t been able to get over the fact that I’m interviewing Catherine Newman (!) Catherine is the author of Sandwich, the book I saw people reading over and over and over again until I finally read it myself. This book made me giggle, cry and stop to hold my heart. To me, Sandwich is ultimately a book about love. It’s about embodying it and giving it away freely, especially when it feels hard (i.e. when you’re standing in a porta potty with your little kid at the beach.) Sandwich left me with a better understanding of my own capacity for love and a vision for what that love can create.

This interview kicks-off a new series I’m going to explore called How We Grow (I’m so excited about it!) More on that later. For now, I’m so so honored to have Catherine with us. Here she is:

Olivia: A lot of my readers are moms of little kids. What would you tell your younger self who was working to become the writer you are today while moving through the early years of motherhood?

Catherine: Oh man. It was so hard to do both things--even though I honestly don't think I could have become a writer without becoming a mother. But I have these memories of trying to put the kids to bed--I had the kind of babies and little kids who needed to be bathed and then rocked and read to and sung to and nursed, and then even after all that you'd have to lie down with them for an hour in their little beds--and I'd think, "You have so much work to do still. DON'T FALL ASLEEP!" And then I'd wake up and it would be 1 in the morning. Oh right. But what would I tell myself? I guess the obvious: Don't panic. It will get so much easier. And all this parenting will have honed your discipline and drive and opened up your heart--just wait.

Olivia: We all want the kind of closeness with our kids that your protagonist, Rocky, created with hers. How did she do it?

Catherine: Ahhh. Gosh. I think she did it by enjoying her kids' company as they were growing up--by sharing her favorite things with them (good food, live music, board games) and including them whenever possible in those experiences. And, as they became teenagers, by being as bedrock trusting and trustworthy as possible: no snooping, no tracking; good faith benefit of the doubt in all things; invite their friends over always; give everyone space and freedom to experiment. Now, as they've become young adults, I (Rocky) try to be very respectful of their lives and decisions and even of their time. They don't have to spend it with us, and we're lucky that they choose to.

Olivia: What struck me most about Rocky’s marriage was that her husband, Nick, did everything he could to create equality in their partnership and still Rocky was left with the resentment that almost every mother I know carries. For those of us in reproductive bodies co-parenting with men, is it even possible not to feel that way?

Catherine: That's such a great question, Olivia. I don't really know. My husband Michael and I were just out to dinner with my parents, and my dad was kind of spacing out watching a woman at a nearby table nurse a baby, and he had this total epiphany: "Wow," he said. "The mothers--they're pregnant, they give birth, nurse the baby, do the bulk of the caretaking. It's really quite inequitable." I laughed--I mean, I've written an entire novel about this, which he's read--but I understood how he could still be experiencing that kind of basic phenomenon as a revelation because sometimes I do too. I think it's really common to feel this kind of rage about it when the kids are younger--about the way we can end up doing so much of the invisible and emotional labor, even on top of all the overt regular labor of child-raising and home-making and other work, like the paying kind. And I know that for me this abated some as the kids grew and I was not so constantly and bodily summoned to be every last thing for everybody. Also, I learned to do a better job of asking for what I needed rather than slamming around being angry that my partner couldn't intuit it. I still have mixed feelings about that--I mean, there are things you feel you shouldn't have to ask for or that you can't really ask for at all--like *noticing* that someone has a fever, say. But you just have to do your best to communicate what you need in good faith.

Olivia: Rocky’s constant fear and anxiety that something bad will happen to one of her loved ones is something I really relate to. Ugh! Is this discomfort something in need of fixing or a natural by-product of love?

That's a really good question. It depends how much it gets in your way, right? I once interviewed a psychologist about anxiety for a piece I was writing (annoyingly, I can't remember her name--this was years ago) and she said, "I sometimes say to patients, 'What else could you be doing with your time and energy besides being anxious?'" And that made a big impression on me. I take an anti-anxiety medication now (Zoloft) and it has been a huge game-changer. It's not that I'm not anxious anymore. It's that I am not preoccupied with catastrophic scenarios to the exclusion of other activities. Although it also turned out to help a lot with the mood swings (i.e. disorder) that seemed to accompany perimenopause, when I wanted to murder everyone with some sort of hatchet or icepick.

Olivia: Motherhood is a theme that you’ve so beautifully explored throughout your work. How do your adult children feel about it? Asking for a friend :)

Ha ha ha! My kids are incredibly loving and polite. I have solicited their feedback on this question, and they have only ever been delighted and supportive and claim to be pleased at the way I represent them. I mean, I think it helps that Sandwich is basically a love story about Rocky's kids. And it is fiction, of course (to some extent--but at least it's got a kind of built-in screen). And I encouraged them to read it before publication in case there was anything they wanted changed. But I'm not sure they would say, exactly. I hear the way I'm like, "Well, I tried, and they won't say, and what can I do?" which honestly sounds kind of defensive and awful. But that's what I've got.

Catherine Newman

is the author of Sandwich, We All Want Impossible Things, Waiting for Birdy, Catastrophic Happiness, How to Be a Person and What Can I Say? She also writes a delightful newsletter, Crone Sandwich, here on Substack.