It’s that time again — linking up with Lisa-Jo Baker and her incredible blogging community to write for 5 minutes, without editing. It’s always intriguing to see what comes when you let the fingers loose!
Prompt: In Between
GO
We’re right there again, aren’t we?
In the middle, in between.
For most of our marriage, that’s where we’ve been — married younger than many of our friends, traveling far from home during our earliest years together, having children almost immediately.
We were the couple with the kids. . . all the kids . . . so close together.
And then, two decades later, we were the couple with the grandkids. And they just kept coming, didn’t they? A 20 year age span and we love ’em all.
But now. . .
. . . but now. . . we’ve got these aging mamas, both of them frail and forgetful. Confused — one combative, one paranoid — both lost to us in so many ways.
And here we are . . . in between.
In between a rock and a hard place a lot of the time and getting older by the minute our own selves. How do we wisely and compassionately divvy ourselves up? How do we best love our moms AND our grandkids? And somehow, also care for ourselves and do those things we’ve waited a lifetime to do?
Very carefully, it seems. Planning vacations long in advance, lining up family members to pay visits to 90-year-old grandmoms and great grandmoms, trying to cover every base.
And in between, saying ‘thank you, thank you, thank you’ for the riches that our ours, trying never to let discouragement win, asking for grace to find the beauty in the midst of the broken, the happy truth that we’re both still here, relatively healthy and enjoying the wherewithal to do the things we are able to do.
Even if spontaneity isn’t always easy!!
STOP
On vacation in May (and going again in July!). We’re heading into the last leg here and trying to do it well.