Sometimes we need to take a break

It's all part of Sandwich Season

Feb 07, 2025

<Welcome to Sandwich Season, where I explore the burdens and blessings of life in the sandwich generation—in the hopes of encouraging others in similar seasons.>

Hi friends—

On Monday I started drafting a Sandwich Season post that I’ve been putting off for a while. The topic gets me pretty fired up, and to tell the story well, I’ll need to relive a whole sequence of events and conversations and correspondence.

Beginning my research, I began paging through the journals I’ve kept of the past couple of years, pages and pages of notes—because how else do people tending the affairs of three generations keep track of it all? These journals are filled with conversations, passages I’ve read, notes from meetings and seminars, ideas and to-do lists.

After going through a couple of these journals, I felt as if I had been watching a reverse trainwreck of my life. (See summary here.)

I finally stopped when I reached the beginning of a red leather journal, its first entry being June 23, 2023, less than two months before my mom died. There I found hasty jottings—

“Yesterday took a catnap w/Mom, holding her hand.”

“Today … Dad to house for last check. He called the (clearing-out) task (that I had been doing) ‘monumental.’ Yes.”

“Found out why (our son) Max was attracted to downstairs bathroom: huge bag of Lindt (chocolate) truffles under sink!”

Tears came, tears I hadn’t cried in a while, and I wondered whether the last time I truly felt a sense of rest were those days when I had taken breaks from emptying out my parents’ house to visit my mom as she lay in her bed, quite contentedly dying. While Dad took a break, she and I shared bites of salmon-strawberry-spinach salad, and then I crawled in beside her for those catnaps.

I pushed back my chair and crawled under my desk, which stands in the exact spot where my mom’s desk used to be, and lay down on the carpet to catch my breath. I felt the weight of everything.

Recognizing a pattern

The truth is I have been feeling the weight of everything all along. But on Monday I suddenly recognized the weight of everything. That’s a different feeling.

The word “recognize” comes from the Latin recognoscere. Re-, of course, indicates something happening “again,” while cognoscere means “to learn.” So to recognize something, we’re learning it again.

On Monday I was learning again how much has happened in these past couple of years.

But also, earlier that morning, other memories had been rising up in my mind. I was learning again of when I was twenty-four years old and separated from my first husband, heading toward a divorce.

That looks so cut-and-dried on the page, just a fact, something that happened. But it was a terribly messy, heartbreaking time, and my life felt like a complete mess.

From the outside, though, I appeared to be a young woman on the move. Shortly after we separated, I moved forward with a highly regarded out-of-town summer training and internship, and then returned that fall for my second year of graduate school—not only to pursue my own studies but to teach a demanding undergraduate course as a graduate assistant. To that I added a position as freelance editor at the daily student newspaper … all the while nudging along a sticky divorce process. I ran back and forth between Minneapolis and St. Paul, depending for much of the year on the Twin Cities’ bus system to get where I needed to go.

For decades afterward, my parents marveled at how I kept going, how much I accomplished in the face of major emotional upheaval.

But when those memories surfaced on Monday, it occurred to me that it was not impressive at all. It was not marvelous.

It was my coping strategy.

Recognizing my crutch

I am learning yet again that busyness is my crutch. When things get hard, I add on, I move faster, as if I can run and spin and accomplish my way through pain or sadness or frustration.

Maybe you have the same crutch in your toolkit.

On Monday, I recognized that I’m still relying on that same old strategy that I’ve used many times before.

I asked myself, Why?

Part of the answer is that I love life. I love people. I love experiences and words and stories. I love doing.

But another part of the answer is that when I’m constantly on the go, I can “numb and dumb.” That is, I can override the big feelings that threaten my sense of well-being.

And then … well, then … eventually I sense—or my body announces, or my relationships reveal—that it’s time to take a break.

Here’s a different strategy

When I was in my twenties, I started to learn one of my most important (and, apparently, hardest to retain) life lessons: The kindest thing we can do for those around us is take care of ourselves.

At the time, I called the idea “benevolent selfishness.”

I don’t remember exactly why, but when I was pursuing that divorce, I had a sense that some people thought I was being selfish. I felt the same accusation—was it from myself or others?—when, after completing my graduate school coursework and two weeks after the divorce papers came through, I jumped ship entirely: Instead of writing my thesis, I put my stuff in storage and flew off to spend two years in Japan. (And later wrote about the whole experience.)

Here’s what I learned: Doing what I needed to do to care for myself, whether it appeared selfish or not, was the most benevolent thing I could do for all of those around me. Because when I was kind to myself and listened to myself, I could be generous and forgiving and loving.

When I was not taking care of myself, I couldn’t be there for anyone. I couldn’t celebrate with them, couldn’t cry with them. I simply withdrew.

I’m not exactly at that point now. But the memory of those hard times three decades ago and Monday’s recognition of the intensity of these past couple of years have grabbed my attention in a fresh way.

Let’s be benevolently selfish

Last week a friend told me that she had recently entered her own sandwich season—caring for parents as well as children. She told me how she had shared this realization with another woman, who had then asked her:

“Do you know what the most important part of the sandwich is?”

Can you imagine the answer?

A sandwich sitting on a wooden cutting board. Between two slices of whole wheat bread are are generous portions of sliced cucumbers, chopped tomatoes, sprouts, mashed avocado and maybe a black bean veggie patty. — Photo credit: The Matter of Food on Unsplash

“It’s the middle.”

That goes for all of us who are caring for the needs of others. When we’re in the sandwich season, the middle includes ourselves and our spouses and our friends. It’s our work and our hobbies and our day-to-day changing-the-lightbulb, dusting-the-dresser, putting-gas-in-the-tank lives.

Those of us in the middle are the meats and cheeses, the veggies and nut butters, the sliced-up banana and sprinkle of cinnamon. Without a well-stuffed middle, a sandwich is just a short stack of … well, toast.

So this week I’m trying to listen to my memories and to my friend and to my tired self. I’m working on being a bit more benevolently selfish and trying to refocus on the middle of my multi-generational family’s sandwich. Because although this season requires a whole lot of output, slowing down and stepping back need to be part of it too.

As part of my regrouping, I am going to release myself, for a little while, from my weekly pattern of posting here at Sandwich Season.

I expect to be back before long, so until then ...

Take good care—and be benevolently selfish,

Sarah

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Sandwich Season