Come Sit With Me

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. ”

— 1 Corinthians 13:4-8

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.”

Want more good stuff?

What's the Best Compliment You've Ever Received?

My mother in law collects snow globes from the places she’s visited. My mother collects angels. I have a friend with a basement full of bobbleheads of famous baseball players. But the collection that still kind of creeps me out is the one that’s common among young moms—you know who you are—the ones that save their kids’ baby teeth. (Ewwww)

Me—I am a collector of questions.

I have a notebook filled with them.

The other day, as I was scanning through my notebook, I fired off a few to my husband:

What’s one responsibility you wish you didn’t have?
What’s your biggest fear about getting older?

And then this one:

What’s the best compliment you’ve ever received?

A mentor once told me to pay attention to the compliments.

She said, “Always pay attention to your compliments. Write them down. They are a clue about who you are and what you are good at and where you can add value. Compliments help you figure out what you are supposed to do. Whenever you are unsure, one thing you can always do is pay attention to the compliments.”

So I don’t know what I expected him to say. Probably something regarding his work or education, but what he actually said was so unexpected and so beautiful it took my breath away.

Probably, “I do,” he said.

I do?

Can a promise also be a compliment?
(The best promises are compliments.)

I believe in you.
I love you.
I forgive you.

“I do” is akin to saying “You’re my favorite” every single day of your life.

"Do you, Chantel, take Gavin, to be your wedded husband? To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, so long as you both shall live?”

I do.
I do.
I do.

I promised on January 5, 1996, and every day since reinforces this reciprocal compliment, made all the more special because neither of us deserve it. Unexpected compliments are the sweetest of them all.

Want more good stuff?

Well, You Never Asked!

“There’s a weird smell in the basement. Can you please find it?”

“Don’t tell me what to do!”
”You’re not the boss of me!”
”Why do I always have to be the one to (fill in the blank)?”

Twenty years ago, that might have been how this conversation went down in our house.

But today, after years of practicing and failing and finally figuring out how this marriage thing works, Gavin said,

“Sure!”

Ok, I’m lying.

He actually said, “Okaaayyyy” and then gave me that frowny-face look that means, “I don’t want to do this, but I will because I love you.”

We didn’t have to play rock-paper-scissors.
No one tried to bargain.
And best of all, no one got upset.

Even though Gavin “claimed” he smelled nothing, I knew for sure something was either rotten, dead, or hiding in the spare bedroom currently occupied by the teenage boy living in our house. Gavin spends the better part of most days at work while spend mine running up and down the stairs to take the dog out to the backyard. (I think I know what the basement is supposed to smell like.)

He agreed to check it out.

In our home, there’s a very clear balance of power:

One in which he does all the stinky stuff.

“Stinky stuff” includes things like cleaning up vomit and sterilizing the trash bin that’s in the garage.

We don’t keep score. It’s just the way things are.

Keeping score would be exhausting.

And besides, keeping score is what you do when you both play for two different teams.

But Gavin and I are on the same team! We’re not competing against each other. We are always working with and for each other.

And that’s why he agreed to scout out the weird smell in the basement without pushing back.

To be honest, I don’t even have the energy for push-come-to-shove kind of arguments. It’s hard enough to manage the energy for all the other stuff I have to do around here.

“Energy:
The capacity to do work”

— My Physics Textbook

Life is work, and anybody who tells you differently is either trying to sell you something or has been retired for entirely too long.

I don’t get up in the morning and go to a regular 9-5, but everyday I do carry something that’s been dubbed “The Mental Load.”

Here’s a funny cartoon that explains it perfectly

The mental load is the total sum of responsibilities that you take on to manage “the remembering of things.” It’s emotional labor, defined by Arlie Hochschild in the 1983 book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, as the process of managing emotions and relationships with others in order to be more successful at your job. Moreover, it’s largely invisible.

• Making the dentist appointments

• Buying the groceries

• Doing the laundry

• Scheduling maintenance

• Paying the bills

• Setting the alarms

• Remembering birthdays, anniversaries

• Scheduling social outings

• Researching vacation spots, educational opportunities, summer camps, etc.

• Purchasing gifts

• Coordinating family pictures

• Mailing the holiday cards

The pace and strain of being in charge of all these time-consuming, menial tasks takes its toll. While the perception may be that this invisible work is insignificant, it is hardly inconsequential.

Is there anyone out there who hasn’t felt exhausted, overwhelmed, and burned out because she was responsible for #allthethings?

“To feel valued and valuable is as compelling a need as food. The more our value feels at risk, the more preoccupied we become with defending and restoring it, and the less value we’re capable of creating in the world.”

— Tony Schwartz, CEO, The Energy Project

There’s a feeling among some women that you shouldn’t have to ask for help, that the people that love you, especially your spouse, should inherently “know” what you need and offer to help before being asked.

Let me tell you a secret: Because the mental load is carried in our minds and because no one has yet figured out how to read minds,

Ima gonna have to ask for help when I need it.

The load I carry—so heavy and overwhelming at times—no one ever asked me to carry it. It is a burden I have placed on myself.

I know what you’re thinking:

“If I don’t do all those things, then nothing will ever get done!”

And you might be right. The smell in the basement was bothersome to me, not to anyone else. If I had kept silent, I’d be sitting here tonight pinching my nose and praying for a drop-shipment of Febreeze.

but Don’t let pride be the barrier that keeps you from asking for exactly what you need.

We want things to be fair.
We want things to be even.
But when one spouse begins keeping score everybody loses.
There are no winners.

So where does that leave us?

There’s a saying in our house that we use whenever we’re talking about someone who needs more experience or doesn’t understand something we think she should; we say, “She just needs a few more birthdays.”

And I guess that goes for married people, too.

“We just need a few more anniversaries.”

After awhile, you realize it’s just not worth it to stay silent and hope he figures out that the bed needs made or the dishwasher unloaded or the toilet paper changed.

Just ask.

It takes two seconds!

And I’ve got news for you, things will never be fair. They will never be even. And honestly, I don’t think I would even want it that way.

In a fair world, I would have been the one looking for the weird smell in the basement.

“She who smelt it dealt it,” Am I right?

Want more good stuff?