My first memory of kindergarten is of playing a game called Sandwich. The object was to lay flat on the floor as person after person piled on top of you, trying not to make the “sandwich” fall over. Even as a five year-old, I remember that feeling of being trapped, squeezed, pinned down, and unable to breathe.
Although I couldn’t have verbalized it back then, all I really wanted was a friend to sit beside me, not on top of me.
Fast-forward forty five years and even though we’re no longer playing that game I’ve discovered that I’m part of that unpopular club called the Sandwich Generation. You know the one I’m talking about—sandwiched between parents over the age of 65 and also caring for kids still at home.
The toppings are beginning to pile on. Do you feel it, too?
Two friends just found out that their parents have cancer, three other friends (my age!) are managing a cancer diagnosis themselves, another friend is getting divorced, and my older daughter just got engaged.
Yep, you read that right.
Christiana is engaged! (Something happy in the midst of so many hard things)
It feels a little surreal because:
#1: I can’t believe my daughter is old enough to get married, and
#2 I can’t believe I’m old enough to have a daughter who’s old enough to get married.
I remember my own engagement with such fond memories, the fun of choosing a venue and a dress and adding dishes, towels, and small appliances to a registry, like we were playing grown up with a pretend house in a make-believe world filled with real china and gadgets that you could actually plug into the wall. When Gavin and I walked into our first apartment together, I think we paused on the threshold and just STOOD THERE for a minute. “We’re home!” we cried.
Our first “chore” as a married couple? Recording a joint message for our family answering machine, a long and annoying song we wrote ourselves that drove everyone crazy. It was 1996, baby!
One night I came home late from work to find Gavin laying on the couch with all the lights off and the blinds open. He was watching the first snowfall of the season drift down to the parking lot outside our first-floor window. Together, we snuggled under a cozy blanket and watched the flakes sparkle in the dim glow of the streetlights.
Why does that one, random night stand out among all the others?
Those early years were filled with lots of trial and error as we navigated all the normal grownup rites of passage—like rejection letters and sucky first jobs and fights about who is going to make the bed in the morning. Stupid stuff and big stuff, too, like buying our first home and welcoming our first baby. I have an old scrapbook photo of Gavin cutting the grass. Our grass! We spent fun weekends with neighbors and met new friends. We hosted themed parties, and Gavin started graduate school. We moved houses, welcomed more babies, and then, like people everywhere, we realized that we’re not just growing up, we ARE grown up.
Now we’re smack dab in the middle of actual middle age. Our friends are celebrating milestone birthdays and retiring. I think I’ve been to more funerals in the last five years than weddings, although that’s shifting a bit now that our friends’ kids are getting married.
At Bible Study today, we talked about love, and of course you can’t talk about love without reading 1 Corinthians 13:4-8. If you grew up in church, you can probably recite these verses from memory.
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. ”
My friend, Ashley, said that years ago a therapist told her how you could tell if a couple was going to make it or not. The therapist said that the couples who think about the little things, like bringing a glass of water to their spouse when they’re getting one for themselves or filling up the car with gas without being asked tend to make it through the big, hard things. The big things don’t topple them because all along they’ve been working out their love muscles in these tiny little ways.
Maybe that’s why I remember coming home from work on that snowy night in January 1996. “Come sit with me,” Gavin said. Surely it had been a long day. I hadn’t even had dinner. I didn’t care. That one small sentence, “Come sit with me,” has been a part of our vocabulary these last (almost) twenty-eight years.
One person sitting next to another person.
As we enter this new season, I don’t want to take for granted a single minute. This middle life sandwich isn’t the curse the self-help articles make it out to be. I’m grateful for having both my parents and my children in my life in big ways. I’m also grateful for the wisdom that comes with the maturity of simultaneously being someone’s child and having children of my own.
Maybe you’re reading this, and you feel like that girl trapped inside the kindergarten sandwich—squeezed to the point of crumbling. I get it. This season isn’t easy. There are no pat answers to the hard things you’re experiencing right now. The human capacity for holding a multitude of emotions is spectacular. Fear, anxiety, anger, confusion, and love all live in the same body.
I’ve heard that gratitude is the antidote for scary feelings. But let’s be honest—who wants to be told to just be more grateful? And while Autumn is traditionally a season of intentional gratitude, my prayer for you today is that you’ll find the people who don’t pile on top of you, but instead sit beside you—in the midst of all the beautiful and terrible things we’re called to carry with us.
Be the person who says, “Come sit with me.”