What’s on the Menu Today? Life Inside the Sandwich Generation
Have you ever tried to use your iPhone in the middle of a crisis?
I have had an iPhone for as many years as I can remember. Today, after my mom’s caregiver called to say my mom had fallen, I raced out of a breakfast meeting with my heart pounding. In the parking lot I grabbed my phone to call her back and let her know I was on my way home.
The problem was, I could not think straight enough to even remember how to make a simple phone call.
My mind had gone completely blank, so I did the only thing my brain could come up with. I pressed the button on the right side of my phone so I could tell Siri to call my mom’s caregiver for me.
But instead of waking up Siri I was continuously pressing the camera button.
The next thing I knew, I had three very clear photos of my black suede boots. Just my boots. No phone call. Just proof that I was standing in the middle of a parking lot with my life spinning around me.
At the exact same time, my younger son was texting to ask if I could help edit his college paper, which would determine his final semester grade, and my older son was asking me to call him as soon as I got home from work so we could talk through upcoming travel plans and book our flights.
In this moment I realized I was not just having a hard day. I was living what so many in the sandwich generation live every day. We are standing in parking lots across the country, trying to make urgent calls, and ending up with three photos of our black suede boots.
So who are we, this sandwich generation? According to AARP, out of an estimated 63 million family caregivers in the United States, roughly 16 million are sandwich generation caregivers, juggling care for both older and younger generations at once. Many of us are also working full time.
We are living squeezed in the middle, with a parent on one side, a child on the other, and work, bills, and our own health pressed into whatever space is left. On paper it sounds like a simple label. In real life it looks a lot like my morning in the parking lot.
If any of this sounds like your life, I want to pause and call it what it is. This is not you failing to keep up. This is what it looks like to be pulled in more directions than one person was ever meant to handle, while still trying to show up for the people you love.
What you are doing is real work. It is emotional work and logistical work and physical work. It is the work of showing up for an aging parent and for children and for a job, often without a break and often without anyone outside your closest circle really seeing how much you are carrying. It has a cost. On sleep. On health. On patience. On the simple ability to remember how to place a phone call in the middle of a crisis.
In America we are living longer than ever. That is something to be grateful for, but it also means more of us will spend more years in this squeezed middle space, trying to keep everyone else steady while our own lives keep moving. So it is time we start putting our heads together and deciding what we are going to do about it.
In my role as Community Relations Director at Always Best Care of Greenville and Spartanburg, I meet families who are living some version of this every single day. I see the love that drives all of this effort and I also see the weight of it. My hope in sharing my story is simple. To put real words around what life inside the sandwich generation feels like, to remind you that you are not imagining how hard this is, and to open the door to more honest conversations about how we can share the load. Because for many of us, what is on the menu today is not just what we are having for dinner. It is everything we are carrying between the generations we love.
If you or someone you love is struggling with how to care for an aging parent, click here to get help today and start a conversation with our Always Best Care team. (Link: https://alwaysbestcare.com/greenville/contact/)
