Unlike being a Boomer or a Gen-Xer or a Millennial — categories assigned by birth year — anyone can find themselves part of the “Sandwich Generation.” It’s the place middle-aged adults land when they’re caring for children or grandchildren while also helping aging parents. Sometimes that care is financial — college tuition on one end, nursing home bills on the other. Sometimes it’s measured in time and energy instead: younger kiddos who still need rides and reminders, parents who suddenly need help with medications, appointments, paperwork, or simply getting through the day safely.
The past few weeks have been a cold plunge into the Sandwich Generation for me, even though my children are grown and only one “boomerang” is currently at home.
My parents have always been fiercely independent, possibly to a fault (which, unfortunately, may be hereditary). But age and years of hard work eventually take their toll, and we’ve reached the point where they need more help. So it’s been a blur of phone calls, paperwork, medical reports, hospital trips, and hard conversations about what they want the next season of life to look like — and how to help them get there with as much dignity and independence intact as possible.
Oddly enough, parts of it feel a lot like filling out FAFSA paperwork when your kids head to college. You keep hearing that little voice in the back of your mind asking, “Wait a minute … why am I responsible for this?” There’s never really a satisfying answer.
What I’m discovering is that almost everyone my age has either walked this road already or is standing somewhere near the entrance to it. Nearly every conversation turns into shared stories, hard-earned advice, or mutual recognition of the exhaustion, fear and emotional turmoil that come with this stage of life. The exhaustion is potent. It’s not physical, it’s mental and emotional fatigue, probably connected to anticipatory grief.
Underneath it all is the same unspoken motivation: you want to do right by your parents because they’re your parents. The only ones you have.
The hard part is that they aren’t simply warm bodies to be managed. They’re still themselves — people with plans, pride, opinions, habits, stubborn streaks, hopes and fears of their own. People who know you. People you’ve always depended on.
After decades of everyone living independent lives, suddenly you’re back at the negotiating table most of us left behind sometime around adolescence — only now the roles are reversed.
Instead of my mother telling me I can’t skip class or go out on Friday, I’m telling her she has to do her physical therapy exercises.
And in return, I get the same eye roll and crossed arms I used to give her.
Ah, the irony.
