On Tuesday I helped my mother with her medication and on Saturday my daughter called to ask about hers.
Different medications, different needs, different directions of care flowing through the same woman in the same week, which is what the researchers call the sandwich generation in language that makes it sound like a structural observation rather than what it actually is, which is Tuesday and Saturday, which is the specific weight of being the middle person, the one through whom the caring flows both ways, the one who receives from neither direction in quite the amount she is giving in both.
I do not say this as complaint.
I say it as testimony, as the plain record of what this particular season of a woman’s life looks like from inside it, without the softening, without the affirmation that it is all a gift, which some of it is, and without the martyrdom, which helps no one and which I have tried to refuse as a mode since I understood that performing suffering is not the same as naming it. What I am doing is naming it. The naming is not the same as drowning in it.
My mother does not know she is in the sandwich.
She knows I come and she is glad. She knows the medication is sorted and the appointment was kept and the coat was held and she is loved. She does not know the Tuesday also contained the Saturday and the work call and the errand and the thing I did not do for myself because there was not a slot for it, because my slot was full, because the middle person’s slot is constitutionally harder to protect than the slots at either end.
I am learning to protect the slot.
Not perfectly. Not without guilt. But I am learning that a woman who gives from an empty vessel gives badly, gives with a thinness and an exhaustion that the people she is giving to can feel even if they cannot name it. I am learning that the slot for myself is not the indulgence. The slot for myself is the infrastructure. The rest of it runs on the slot I protect for the woman in the middle, which is me, which is the one who makes Tuesday and Saturday possible, and she deserves a Wednesday too. She deserves a morning at the water. She deserves the coffee while it is still hot.
I am fighting for Wednesday.
I am getting better at it. I am not done yet.
