A book I loved and the nostalgia I fear
On time, a mum's ever changing place in a family and the universality of motherhood
I haven’t feverishly consumed a book since my son came into the world two and a half years ago. This has been a sort of reckoning with identity, a challenge to the ego. Overnight, I went from being a voracious reader to having a mind that was either too chaotic or too weary — sometimes, both — to properly take any words in. It feels like a sort of missing out, a dulling of the mind.
This week, Sandwich by Catherine Newman changed that for me. Over three days, I laughed and I cried and I laughed and cried some more.
Set in Cape Cod during a family’s annual summer holiday, Sandwich for me felt like a meditation on the complexity of the nostalgia we all experience in motherhood — the tension that exists between the things that we wish away and the things that we miss, or fear missing, one day.
I think a lot about what I might miss and what I won’t. And this book hit me just at the right time as I grapple with so deeply wanting some space and one full night’s sleep (why am I so tired? I am so. bloody. tired!), and how at odds those feelings are with not wanting my babies to grow even a second older.
The book’s protagonist Rocky recalls and longs for beach days when the babies were little, but really — if she’s honest with herself — being at the beach with little people that wouldn’t eat their food and got sand all over hers wasn’t quite as fun as the sun drenched, sepia-toned image her mind sometimes conjures. The mind can play tricks on us, you see, and it was the comforting reminder that I needed: that while, yes, you will miss a lot that comes with the younger years, there’s also a lot of beauty in the ones that follow them. Of getting to know that little person and having space to write and read and think and dine and sleep and drink and sun bathe and swim.
Sandwich is also an exploration of a mother’s perceived place within a family: reckoning with the realisation that, despite growing from your very womb, your child’s evolving body and mind is not yours. And really, it never was to begin with. The beautiful yet aching experience of slowly breaking up with the baby that once clung to your chest and making way for the adult you still can’t believe stands in front of you; of figuring out where you fit into all these different versions of your children.
It’s a feeling that I can’t pretend to understand yet, but as you might have noticed, it’s something I already think of. In fact I think a bit too much about everything, unfortunately.
I so related to the depth of Rocky and Willa’s characters. The deep thinking. The worrying about everyone else in the family to the point of feeling buried beneath it. The “I can’t be okay if you’re not okay”. The partner that is the antidote to all of this over feeling, and how that is at once the sharpest breath of fresh air and the most maddening thing.
Finally, it reminded me of the universality of motherhood. The ways motherhood makes and breaks our hearts is unique, but I posit that if we brought together all of our unique pieces — our sharp edges and soft curves — the whole would be a fully formed shape. I imagine the final piece as a work of art. It would hang in a gallery and it would be titled ‘Motherhood’ and people would marvel at how intimately beauty and pain can coexist.
They would be in awe of how the piece survived all its iterations, but then they’d laugh and say, of course it survived! It is mother!
Tell me, have you read Sandwich? What are you currently reading? I’ve love to know.