The Tender Middle

Linking today's post with Talking About It Tuesdays hosted by Joanne

We've recently moved my mom south, out of my sister's home in PA where she's lived for the past six years, and into an assisted living facility. Safety is paramount when you're in your ninth decade and that was the tipping point for all of us in making this hard decision. By all of us I mean myself and my three siblings. We've had a loose plan knowing this might someday become necessary but not going to lie, reality hits harder than you might imagine. 

I'm not going to talk too much about the process because every family has to do what's right for them. I will just say my younger sister did her homework and knew all the questions to ask. We looked at many places in two different states and between the four of us saw each one in person. 

There are so many factors to consider coupled with a lot of emotion, so if a move like this is on your radar start visiting and collecting information now. Just know that nowhere is perfect and settling in takes time. For everyone. 

I have a mishmash of thoughts I want to put into writing but the mishmash is real. Hubs has asked me a number of times this month, 'What are you thinking? I can see the wheels turning." 

Turning but not really getting anywhere. 

So what am I thinking? 

I'm thinking about how difficult it is to reach a point in life where your decisions are not your own. Not where you live or if you drive or sometimes even what you eat. 

I'm thinking about how every member of a family has feelings about how best to meet the needs of an elderly parent and how emotions run high where love, sadness, and exhaustion coexist. I'm thinking about how much grace is required in those moments. Grace given, and also grace accepted. 

How sometimes we have to do hard things we wish we didn't have to do. 

How giving an elderly parent as much independence as they can safely handle is a good thing, but knowing when too much is too much is maybe the more important thing. 

I think about everything our parents once did for us, and how that memory helps us now do for them. 

How often we frustrated them, tested their patience, wanted our own way, didn't want to be told what to do because we were certain we knew best. Suddenly that gets flipped on its head and now you're the one digging deep for patience and a gentle tone. The one trying to give in a little whenever giving in is possible. 

How you learn the parent you've known all your life is still there inside the person who now needs a walker and some help remembering the life they lived. 

There is also, somewhere in the middle of all this thinking, the unsettling realization that one day you might be that person too. The one needing all the things you're now being asked to give. 

How you will likely buck and dig in your heels because you still feel like yourself, an independent capable person who cannot imagine being anything but. 

Except now you kind of can. 

And it's a little bit frightening. 

I think about the term sandwich generation and how apt that moniker is. I'm the filling and sometimes I feel squished. 

And sometimes completely overwhelmed with love for those doing the squishing. 

I think about how I don't have the energy I had even a decade ago, yet I still have opinions and wisdom and things I want to contribute. I still want to matter. Everyone does. 

I think about how time shrinks and expands at the same time and  how I want my children to have big beautiful lives, but not forget mine as it gradually but naturally will grow smaller. 

Mostly I think about how God holds each one of our lives in the palm of His hand. How He knows the number of our days from beginning to end, and how He walks beside us through every season we encounter. 

We are never forgotten. 

Never unseen. 

We are known and loved by the One who made us.