Comments on: The great Catherine Newman

By: Catherine

Catherine — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:08:11 +0000

Okay, I am *dying* from pleasedness and pride. Thank you so much for this. xoxo

By: Linda

Linda — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:38:41 +0000

Wonderful quote. Catherine Newman has written for Brain Child Magazine quite a bit, too, I believe. It’s hard to forget the name Birdy.

By: Shawna Cevraini

Shawna Cevraini — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:36:00 +0000

Once again, I’m teary eyed reading this! Thank you so much for posting this.

I have not read Catherine Newman before this. Wow. I am just speechless. The way she describes those feelings about our children…

Crying again, just thinking about the words.

Beautiful.

By: Jo@Mylestones

Jo@Mylestones — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:45:49 +0000

I haven’t been around these parts long enough to chime in on your writerly relation to Catherine Newman (though the comment evidence seems heavily tipped toward the proof of that hypothesis).
I do feel, after reading these excerpts, like this author has been rummaging around in my brain, articulating beautifully what I could never myself describe.

By: Terresa Wellborn

Terresa Wellborn — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:23:23 +0000

I haven’t read Waiting for Birdy but it’s on my “to read” list.

Inspirational quotes, girl. Pure life and inspiration (as I type this through tears, good tears).

I was talking my 6 yr old son the other day about twirling him. That the day will come that I won’t be able to heft up his weight and twirl around with him until we fall giggling to the carpet. And when that day comes, it will be his turn to twirl me.

By: Celeste

Celeste — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:21:42 +0000

I first heard of Catherine Newman when I became a mommy for the first time and she was doing weekly journals on babycenter. I enjoyed it so much I often printed her entries. Here is one of my favorites- a little long, but completely worth it:

” I experienced that thing again tonight — that thing where I was putting the kids to bed and I had to stop myself from wishing the time away. You know that feeling? Where you’re practically jiggling your knee with impatience, thinking, “Come on, come on,” while you watch the baby toss and turn. And maybe you try to sneak away and her eyes snap open, and she grabs you — her fingers closing around your arm the way a cop’s might — and you think, “Shoot,” because you are so busted.

And then you lie there, staring at her face in the gray light of the evening — just to pass the time until you can finally sneak off to check your e-mail and eat a stack of Lorna Doone cookies. You study the dark crescents of her eyelashes, the valentine of her mouth. You listen to the birds sing to each other from the trees. Maybe you inhale the baby’s milk-shakey breath, because really you have nothing better to do while you wait.

And then, if you’re lucky, a tiny something calls you to consciousness — a lone star rising up in the blue of your window, maybe, or the sound of your older child sighing in his sleep — and you remember that this is it. This moment. The moment you’ve been waiting for your whole life.

Which is still no reason to deprive yourself of the Lorna Doones afterward. But I will say this: I seem to have fallen even harder for that Birdy baby. I thought I’d already reached the tippy top of love, but I was wrong. Maybe this is it, now — the apex of passion, so high up that when you look down, your stomach swoops with vertigo.”

By: Kristen @ Motherese

Kristen @ Motherese — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:19:43 +0000

Yes, Aidan, Jeanne, and Kitch are right: Catherine Newman is certainly your writerly relation. Thank you for sharing her words, and for giving me the name of another author to add to my growing queue of must-reads.

By: Gale

Gale — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:10:44 +0000

“But the idea that the last time will go unmarked and slip away without being cherished just made me so sad.”

That sentence reminds me of the feelings I had about weaning my son. With her own kids my mother-in-law always wanted the last nursing to slip away unnoticed like that so she “wouldn’t have to be sad.”

But I need to know when things end. I want that pang of finality. Even if it hurts, I need to know.

By: Liz

Liz — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:09:03 +0000

The realization that the last time (being carried out of the car, being helped with the toothbrushing, being kissed one more time at bedtime…) will go unmarked made me so sad. Thank you. I need to remember this.

By: TheKitchenWitch

TheKitchenWitch — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:41:22 +0000

I agree–some of those passages sound like your voice, your thoughts, even down to the cadence.

It’s beautiful.

Moved to tears again.