In the Sandwich - the long lost post

*I wrote this post back in November and it has been sitting in my draft folder. Looking back on it and rereading I decided I still like what I wrote so here it goes. Since November I turned 40 and life is still a little crazy as Craig and I try to balance work and home but we are lovingly walking through it all.

I was on a hot blog streak...then nothing. No, it was not writer's block. We are just in the sandwich. What is the sandwich? My mother-in-law described the sandwich to me a few years ago as a time in a person's life, let's say around the years of 40, when you are still caring for your children and your parents' lives change. Instead of needing your parent's help, your parents need you. Lois was speaking from experience, she had been in the sandwich and being a realist she recognized a few years back that Craig and I were entering this wedged place in our lives.

I am fighting the sandwich simply because I am not yet 40 and I so much want to consider myself sitting on the crust. I tend to think that Craig has slipped in between the bread and joined the ranks of all my siblings based purely on age but seriously one does not just slip into the sandwich. Life happens and you find yourself there.

Looking back at my own parent's lives and when they were in this phase of life makes me shudder because it was during this time that a majority of the marriages in our family fell apart. Mid-life crisis was a fresh new word rolling off my parent's lips as they shook their heads in disbelief. I was a child,there in the midst of it all, silently listening in on all this middle of life buffoonish behavior. The crazy talk that my uncle would bring to the dinner table, along with his 1970's satin brown shirt with its interesting city scene print that he chose to leave unbuttoned down to the middle of his chest only to be accentuated with a shiny gold chain, caused the eyebrows of me and my sisters to shift up to our hair lines. I enjoyed his time with us at the dinner table because just down the hall was a full length mirror that distracted my dear old uncle as he tried to talk to our family and admire himself at the same time. Vanity, pure vanity I tell you. He was at our house because he was scared of my aunt. Rightly so, she had shredded his precious water-bed which then flooded the house, Perhaps it was when he came home one night to see the moon shining through a new hole in the side of the house courtesy of Aunt Bobby's double barrel shotgun that he realized how angry she really was, maybe even scorned.

All of the happenings in my uncle's life and our family's role in being there for him was too much for me. It was too much for me to hold in and so each day I would give the daily brief of gossip fodder to my second grade class. My small town teacher was enthralled and I was happy to please. It was at the parent-teacher conference that my mother learned that the rumors flying around our small town about my Aunt and Uncle were coming from the mouth of her babe. That was the year I earned the nick-name Mouthy Martha from my mousy-brown haired mother. Needless to say, I am trying to be aware of all the discussions that go on about others...