The Sandwich Generation: What It Is And How To Cope
When my elderly neighbor Joe was widowed, I did what most neighbors would do. I didn’t know Joe or his wife well, but I knew Joe was completely deaf and that his wife had just died. He was lonely. I started to visit, thinking I could help him if he needed groceries or something. What began as a neighborly visit, continued into a kind of adoption of Joe, by myself and my two sons, ages six and eight.
Watching out for elders had always come naturally for me. I grew up close to my grandparents, and during my teenage years, my paternal grandmother lived with us. We even built a different house to accommodate her stay.
So, for five years, the kids and I were Joe’s family. He had a son across the country and scattered grandchildren. I was his in-town lifeline. I made phone calls to his son, so Joe could talk. I would write down the answers for Joe to read, and then he’d talk again. It was a three-way conversation, but he looked forward to each Sunday call. My kids and I rescued his old bottle-brush Christmas tree from his attic and decorated it each Christmas. We had pizza parties at his house, and carried holiday feasts over to him, as he was uncomfortable in groups and wouldn’t come over to our house for holiday meals. I took Joe to Telephone Pioneers of America meetings (I was his “honey”), and the kids and I drove him, on a regular basis, 75 miles to visit his older sister.
I dragged Joe up off the floor after may falls and rode the ambulance with him each time he got hurt. The last fall broke his hip, and he died within a couple of months.
Shortly thereafter, my aunt and uncle moved from Virginia to North Dakota to be with us, their only family. Then my parents and in-laws began having health troubles. In all, I cared for seven elders over the span of two decades. During that time, I was raising my kids, one of whom has multiple health problems.
To the best of my knowledge, there was never a word, at the time, to describe what I was doing. I was just following my instincts and elders were falling like dominoes into my care. Meanwhile, I was running from doctor to doctor to get my son’s health problems diagnosed and treated, while fighting with school officials over why this bright kid was missing so much school.
During the last years of my elder caregiving, while my mother-in-law and my parents were still alive, and my son was still having major health issues, and I was working full time, I was reading about a term “sandwich generation.” I thought, “How clever.” Still, it didn’t occur to me that I was one of them. I was just a caregiver.
Maybe I didn’t have the time, or the will, to evaluate my own situation. That is the case with many caregivers. In fact, when I do presentations to groups of caregivers and professionals now, one of my subjects is “Caring for the Caregiver,” and I always stress self-identification. Caregiving is a job. When you have more than one generation to care for, it’s an even bigger job. Yes, sandwich generation is a very apt term. I was just an early “practitioner” and a slow learner when it came to recognizing what I was actually handling.
Today, I still have to remind myself that I continue to be a caregiver. My son is in his twenties, but he still has health issues, though we have hope that through a terrific nutritional program, plus his medications, he will eventually be a self-supporting man who can contribute his remarkable gifts as a screen writer, lyricist and musician to the world. For now, however, I am still a caregiver, though I am no longer “sandwiched” between generations.
The challenges of being a member of the sandwich generation are many, but here are the ones I found (and continue to find as I listen to my readers and speak to groups) most common.
1. Who do you help when everyone needs you? My son was barely coming out of a severe asthma attack, and resting in his room, when my mother’s personal alarm went off and the dispatcher called to have me go to her apartment to check on her. Can I leave Adam? Will he be okay? Someone has to check on Mom. She’s likely lying on the floor again. This particular time, Adam’s older brother was home and Adam was better, so I quickly ran to Mom’s apartment. Yes she was on the floor. I had to get the firefighter’s to help, but we got her up and she was amazingly unhurt, so I got her to bed and hurried back home.
2. Do you go to your son’s concert or to your mother’s birthday party at the nursing home? I had this kind of choice often. My kids weren’t in sports but they were in music. They had school functions and they had awards ceremonies and they had teacher conferences. When my aunt was lying on her deathbed in the hospital, my parents were still in fairly good shape. They were sitting with my aunt. I had to leave to attend my oldest son’s first band concert. How could I miss that?
Yet, I thought all the way through, “What if Auntie Marion dies while I’m here?” I’ve since learned that we have to make painful choices and live with them. My bottom line is this: what would my aunt have wanted me to do, if she could have told me? I knew her well enough to know she would have wanted me to go to my son’s band concert. That knowledge made it easier, though certainly not easy. Hard choices are the hallmark of the sandwich generation.
3. The day I forgot to go to work. During a time when I had five elders dependant on me to varying degrees, and young son still undiagnosed with several of his chronic health issues, my then-husband was pressuring me hard to “get a job.” What I was doing seven hours a day, seven days a week, apparently was not work. So, I found a part-time job at a thrift store. I was also freelance writing, but that didn’t pay much. The thrift store, as you can imagine, didn’t either, but it was “real work.”
One day, my mom called saying she had fallen on ice in the parking lot trying to get my uncle into the clinic. She was uninjured, but shaken, and I had to go rescue them both. My son was home in severe pain from a juvenile rheumatoid arthritis flare-up. I kicked into action, handled everyone and was home with my son by noon.
That’s when I realized I “worked” mornings, at the thrift shop. I had completely blocked it out! I called the thrift shop, apologized profusely, and the next day I turned in my time. I’ve never let an employer down like that, and I couldn’t believe I did. But the job simply wasn’t at the top of my priority list. Either was the $300 a month salary. I quit. I continued to freelance and got a newsletter for a health food store that paid more than the thrift shop and I could do it from home. Still, since I could do it from home, it wasn’t “work.” But that’s another story.
4. Who gets the majority of your brain – child, elder or employer? When each of my parents was dying, I was working full time. I had to juggle their need to see me each day (in the nursing home) with the need to coordinate their care with the nursing home, my son’s needs and my workload. There were doctor appointments for my dad, that I had to take vacation for, and the same went for ER runs when my mother fell and doctor appointments for my son. So that was my vacation time.
Then came setting up hospice care, first for my dad and then for my mom. Of course there were bedside death vigils, while wondering how my son was managing at home, physically and psychologically. He was very close to my parents, particularly my father. He was home on the computer the night Dad died, and when I got home he said “Grandpa died, didn’t he?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “I knew it, because he stopped by to see me on the way.”
Needless to say, between work, a sick kid and dying elders, it was hard to keep my brain fully function in each area. When I was working, I was thinking of my loved ones’ needs. When I was with my loved ones, I was thinking of work and how I’d get it done. It was hard ever to be fully present in any moment.
5. The peanut butter and jelly girls: accept help. I was the in-town caregiver and my elders were all spoiled rotten. They had their wants and needs. They liked things done just so. I went to their home/condo/nursing home each day and did all of the things they wanted done. Plus, of course, they wanted my company.
This is all well and good. However, I had a sister who lived less than 40 miles away. She did her best to make it to town every weekend. Once in a while, two weeks would go by, but that was rare. She usually came in on Sunday. We’ve joked that we raised our kids in a nursing home, as, since she’s 12 years younger than I, she had little ones in tow most of the time. Mine were older, yet their lives totally centered around the needs of elders, as well.
Considering all of this, a semi-smart person would have said to herself, “Gee, my sister is coming in to see the folks today, therefore I should take the day off.”
“Not I,” said this glutton for punishment. My parents still wanted to see me, and my mom wanted me to get out her clothes and get her ice bucket filled, and all of her other stuff so she could “enjoy” the visit when my sister came. It got to a point, as time went by, that our mother would totally have forgotten my sister’s visit by Monday, which was disturbing, but she came in anyway.
My point is this – don’t be a martyr. I didn’t complain or whine, but I did feel compelled to go and do everything my elders wanted even though I knew my sister would be there, and that should be enough. I was generally exhausted. Our parents may not have had us both, and they may not have had every detail done just as I did it daily, but that was not reason enough for me to not take a day off from the nursing home. Be smarter than I was. Take advantage of respite care, in any form you can get.
If you are part of the sandwich generation, please make it a point to have another “filling” in the sandwich. Make sure you have someone to share the load with you, even if it’s just occasionally. Make that sandwich peanut butter and jelly. It’s much more interesting and better for all.
Actually, my sister coined the “peanut butter and jelly girls” when I told her I was writing this article. Her phrase made so much sense. I was the peanut butter. I stuck to the job daily and gave it the “nutrition,” if you will – the daily protein of attention to detail and availability for emergencies and decisions. My sister was the jelly – the sweetener, without which the sandwich would have been gluey and boring. Beth gave my parents that sweet treat they needed. I should have slipped out on those days and let them just have a jelly sandwich now and then. We’d all have been better off.
