Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:05] Welcome to the Life in the Sandwich Lane. The messy middle of real life.
[00:00:10] That's really the only way I know how to describe the season I'm in. It's the middle of caring for aging parents and still parenting young adult children. It's the middle of building a life that looks different than it used to. It's the middle of marriage, business, family, worry, gratitude, frustration and hope all showing up at the same time.
[00:00:28] And honestly, that's probably where a lot of us live and we just don't think about it that way.
[00:00:34] So we're not at the beginning, we're not at the end, but in the middle, where everything's just a little messy and nothing is completely resolved. Like your to do list is just ongoing.
[00:00:43] So I'm an only child. Don't laugh. I could not control that. So when my parents need help, it all lands on me in a different way. My dad is 81 and he has NPH, which the easy way to explain it is that he has too much fluid in his brain. We've known about it for about a year after a couple of CT scans or MRIs or something I can't even remember now. And he's finally getting surgery this week if his blood pressure doesn't keep climbing. The surgery got delayed because he had to have another heart stent last year, and in the meantime, the condition, his mph, has just gotten worse.
[00:01:17] That has been really hard to watch.
[00:01:20] It's hard when you know something is wrong and you know there's a real issue and you're just waiting for the next step that might need help. And it's even harder when everybody's trying to help in their own way, but not everybody's on the same page. There's a lot of love there, but there's a lot of stress going on.
[00:01:35] So one thing that I've noticed is that doctor's visits can become strange little performances. Before I take my parents to an appointment, there may be a whole list of concerns. And we talk about it the night before, and we talk about it when I pick them up to go to the doctor. And when the doctor walks in and he says, how are you doing? And suddenly the answer is pretty good. Feeling fine. And I'm sitting there thinking, no, we are not doing that today.
[00:01:59] That can cause a blood pressure spike for me.
[00:02:02] So that's part of the messy middle too. Trying to get honest information in a room where everybody wants to be polite, quiet, hopeful.
[00:02:09] I've started thinking that maybe I should come up with some simple form to get Ready for appointments so we can walk in prepared, what medications need refills, what symptoms have changed, what's worse, what's better? What questions do we need answered while we're actually there?
[00:02:22] Because if you don't slow things down, some really important details get missed. And that feels true in a lot of areas of my life right now.
[00:02:32] So my son is getting married in a couple of weeks, and that brings a whole different kind of messy middle. When your child is grown and stepping into marriage, you're proud, you're emotional, very emotional, and a little heartbroken all at once. You want the relationship to work. You want him to be loved. Well, you want peace, you want wisdom, you want everybody to be happy.
[00:02:52] But you also know that life is complicated. Families are different, expectations are different, cultures are different. Faith is different. Everybody brings their own history into a marriage. And as a parent, you don't get to control any of that. You might think you do, but you don't. You can only hope that love, maturity, and grace are stronger than the friction.
[00:03:12] And that's not always easy to watch. Then there's the rest of life still happening. Underneath all of that, there's remarriage. I'm referring to mine that happened almost two years ago, which has its own set of adjustments. It has been fantastic, but nothing is perfect.
[00:03:29] There's business, which keeps growing, which I am very thankful for. I have been in business 21 years now, and things keep growing. That's fantastic.
[00:03:40] Then there's my house that I've been in since 2008. It seems to have its own agenda sometimes.
[00:03:46] Then there's my own stress level. I don't even know if I want to go into that, which I'm learning does not stay low just because I tell myself to be calm.
[00:03:56] When your eye doctor says, I think you need to de stress a little, you know, that you need to.
[00:04:04] So that's why I started this podcast. I think a lot of people are living in the same place, just in the middle, and they're just not saying it out loud.
[00:04:12] We're taking care of parents. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. We're trying to support grandchildren, maybe a little, maybe a lot.
[00:04:19] We're keeping our marriages going. We are working, we're managing homes, we're keeping track of doctor's appointments, our own. And for parents, repairs, bills, feelings, and all the invisible things that never make it onto a calendar. And from the outside, it looks like everything is fine, but inside, it can feel like a lot.
[00:04:40] So this podcast is going to be about telling the truth in the middle of it all. The truth about aging parents, the truth about young adult children, the truth about being married again after being single for a really long time, and the truth about running a business burnout. It's real anxiety. It's real family expectations. There are a lot.
[00:05:01] And the way life keeps getting more of us than we thought we had to give.
[00:05:06] I feel like I didn't say that the right way. The wife. The way life keeps asking us for more than we thought we had to give. That's the right way to say it.
[00:05:16] It's also going to be about hope, because I really think there's a lot of hope right here in the middle. It's not like this shiny, perfect kind of hope. It's more kind of the steady kind of hope.
[00:05:28] The kind that says, this is hard, but I'm going to still keep going. The kind of says, I may not have control over everything, but I'm going to still show up.
[00:05:34] And the kind that says, this is messy, but this is still real life and it still matters.
[00:05:40] You just have to take it one hour at a time. That's what life in the Sandwich lane is about. It's the messy middle of real life. It's the place where caregiving meets marriage, where parenting meets aging, where work meets worry. And we're trying to be present for everybody without disappearing yourself if you're in that place, too. I hope this podcast will feel like you found the right table in the school cafeteria. You know what I'm talking about.
[00:06:05] I hope it feels like someone finally said the things you've been carrying around in your head. Maybe you're afraid to say it out loud.
[00:06:12] Sometimes the most helpful thing is not a perfect answer. It's just hearing someone else say, me too. Or something like, that happened to me. So welcome. I'm glad you're here. And by the way, this is Wendy. I didn't even introduce myself. I'll be back soon for the next episode. This is life in the sandwich lane, the messy middle of real life. And we're going to walk through all of it together.
[00:06:32] Sa.
