In the summer when I was visiting during college, my mom and I would go to the local market, near her house in the woods, and order a custom sandwich—always on a sourdough roll with all the veggies and condiments. The sandwich was a mess, the way I liked it. But we ate it outside on the deck, where it didn’t matter, surrounded by her garden and the many strategies she had in place to keep the deer from eating her garden. The sandwich in that setting was a perfect experience—the flowers, open-air chewing, and my mom.
My son has his own sandwich preferences. He likes them spicy. I keep the pantry stocked for his specific needs, a jar of jalapenos at the ready, even though his various meat-on-bread concoctions are, to me, disgusting.
That’s one of the many reasons I’ve loved sandwiches. They give you room as an individual to be your own person, with peppers or without. They offer all the food groups in a single bite. And they’re colorful. A natural rainbow.
But recently, in a lot of different ways, sandwiches have betrayed me.
First, it was all the new scientific guidance around the chemicals in deli meat. For the last few years, I’ve tried to come up with sandwiches for my kids’ lunches that get around those meats. My son has found each version somehow lacking, though, even as a teenager, he’s tried to find a polite way to express his belief that the guidance is wrong and I’ve ruined his life.
Then, there’s the whole “sandwich generation” thing. I’m in the age range as a middle-aged adult but hadn’t really felt the pinch until the end of September. My mom had been complaining about being tired. But she’s busy, I thought. She should be tired. She runs a gardening program at a women’s shelter. She has a group of women who come to her house on Thursdays. They pick flowers, make bouquets, and then deliver them to memory care facilities and the local food pantry. I assumed she just needed to nap more, like a lot of people her age. Heck, I enjoy a good nap myself, especially since I failed at crate-training and now sleep with my exhausting puppy.
During one of her flower deliveries, however, someone commented that she looked jaundiced, yellow skin. She went to the doctor and they found a tumor on her liver. My beautiful mom, who never gets sick, is suddenly very sick.
In the week that followed her diagnosis, I’ve bounced between phone conversations with my mom and the normal parenting demands of raising teenagers. “So, when’s your next appointment?” I’d ask my mom. “Do you need me there?” At the same time, from my daughter, “Hey, mom, did my green eyeshadow arrive?”
In another conversation, I checked in to see what my mom was able to eat that morning while trying to get my son’s Beatles shirt on my puppy because my daughter’s math teacher was giving extra credit to anyone participating in that spirit week’s “twin day.” My daughter was already at school in a Beatles shirt and hoping I could send her a photo of the dog, her twin. I would have refused the assignment but it amused my mom.
It’s been jarring, to say the least. In this sandwich generation scenario, I’m the sandwich meat, I guess, and probably not the healthy kind, free of unnatural additives. Really, this all feels a little toxic.
A few days later, I received a text from my dad. My mom had had a bad night. She needed a call to help cheer her up. I immediately pulled out the phone as I was pulling the kids’ water bottles out of the dishwasher and getting myself ready for school drop-off. It turned out that, the night before, my mother had decided a buffalo burger might be the protein boost she needed. The cancer hadn’t done its worse in the night. Weird meat had. A bad sandwich. I was relieved but reeling. It was only 8 am and I had already bounced between high anxiety and humor. A rollercoaster. I was ready to call it. Day over. Let’s try again tomorrow.
Experts have identified middle age as the time when a person is statistically-speaking the most unhappy. Age 47.2 is apparently the absolute worst. I just turned 47. This all tracks. Articles about the challenges of being in the sandwich generation often stress the heavy toll of caring for kids and aging parents—caregiver burnout as well as the financial burden. Still, more than unhappy, at this point, I feel something else: scattered, as if my mind is splintering into a million different pieces, constantly pulled in different directions.
Obviously, I’m used to a to-do list with a hundred unrelated tasks. Work tasks and a trip to Target to fulfill a teacher’s random classroom request, probably glitter. But getting sandwiched is a new level of multi-tasking. And it’s not just my thoughts pulled by the very different needs of different people. It’s my heart, too.
As usual, I’m looking to humor to help. I’ve got a running list under the heading “Things You Should Definitely Say To A Person Who Just Found Out Her Mom Has Cancer.”
Some top contenders:
“That’s so weird. My mom has Restless Leg Syndrome. So I can relate.”
“It’s really hard to know what will happen. I have a friend of a friend whose uncle had cancer and he died.”
“Actually, I have some news too. I’ve decided to go to law school. It’s going to be hard in a different way.”
Routine also helps. Work. Distraction. But, in some moments, the noise in my head is too loud, too discordant. When I can, I take the puppy on a long walk and focus on the everyday sounds around me. Just that. For a little while. A simple break.
In the past, I might have found peace with my mom, siting on the deck with our overloaded sandwiches. But we don’t live in the same town and that deck no longer exists—lost in the 2017 Tubbs Fire. Also, my mom can only eat plain foods these days, especially after that buffalo burger.
I have to keep finding new versions of peace as the old ones fall away or are taken away. That’s particularly true when I’m there, visiting her in the hospital as I am today, responding to a text inviting my son to a paintball party.
I wish I had wise advice. I could use some, and I’m sure others could too. What I do know: Soon, I’ll be 47.3. On the upswing apparently. Maybe that’s something.
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