Reflections from the Sandwich Generation
The trajectory of human life can follow innumerable pathways. We don’t all live to a ripe old age, nor do we all end up taking care of our elderly parents. My own mother’s mother died just after her forty-ninth birthday, from complications of childhood scarlet fever. Her father died of an aortic aneurysm while on his way to teach a class at the age of seventy-seven. Although she didn’t have the experience of caring for elderly parents, my mother raised five children, of which I am the youngest. My mother spent those early years in what must have felt like an endless cycle of birth, diapers, feeding, bathing, rocking—never without an infant or toddler for the better part of a decade.
I had my only child at forty. Although I had but one, my daughter’s infancy and toddlerhood is a blur of exhaustion mixed with awe. We muddle our way through to each new milestone, visualizing the next, and gradually letting go of each earlier version of our evolving offspring. We rouse ourselves from survival mode to celebrate each new event—first tooth, first steps, first words, first day of school, and on up the exciting ladder to young adulthood.
As this adventure progresses, there is frequently another one taking place at the other end of our generational cycle. One of the most humbling, poignant, and often very frustrating aspects of caring for an aging parent is the many ways in which the roles become reversed, and you once again have someone depending on you, but with much less celebration and more of a sense of loss.
Over the past few years, my mother’s body has been gradually losing its independence, and her mind, while still quite active, has been releasing its grasp of many of the more mundane details of daily life. It is not as simple as the parent becoming the child. When you help your parent up or down stairs, in and out of the car and seat belt, off and on with shoes, there is no goal of eventual independence.
Repeating the answers to questions becomes more frequent, not less. There is the knowledge that this is how it will be. The challenge is to assist in a way that allows this person to retain the dignity of her many years of life experience. My mother has the good or bad fortune (depending on the day) to be fully aware of the decline in her abilities, and somehow this new dependence must be reconciled with her long, previously vibrant and competent adult identity.
When she first came to live with us, moving 1,200 miles from Maine to South Carolina. I helped her bathe, guiding her arms out of nightgown sleeves and her weakened legs out of adult diapers, and adjusting the temperature of the water before easing her onto the shower chair. I stood by until she called me to wash her back. I both loved and grew weary of this task. Being needed trumped my weariness, ultimately, but I had to work to adjust my sense of who I was, just as my mother was adjusting her own view of herself and our relationship. My mom, previously the captain of her ship and her own beloved home, was now no longer completely in charge.
Part of why this has been challenging for me, as I’m sure it is for many adult caregivers, is that I don’t have particularly clear or fond memories of my mother’s physical care of me as a child. She wasn’t in any way neglectful, but I didn’t feel demonstrably adored or cherished the way I have always felt towards my daughter. My mother had her own very prominent strengths, but gentleness and warmth were not at the top of the list. We both grew and matured over the years until we achieved a mutually satisfying bond, but it took some time.
So, as I have gone deeper into the role of caregiver-daughter, I have been struck by the myriad of feelings that come up for me. I travel through the ever-changing terrain of tenderness, annoyance, compassion, irritation, and back again to tenderness. Some days, I start off prepared to give openly and generously, and then my mother shows her bossy side, ordering me to do this and that, and my switch flips to annoyance. Practicing mindfulness with the more difficult emotions can keep me out of a downward tailspin, but I am not always able to pull out in time and can end up just going through the motions of what is needed until I can escape. Now and then a well-placed retort on my part can depose the dictator and her tone softens. My mother respects a show of strength and, to her great credit, she never holds a grudge. I think she must have been quite the warrior in another lifetime.
And then there are days when I go into the assisted living community where my mother now lives, feeling aloof, lonely, perhaps with a tinge of resentment. I sit down on her couch to tend to her mail and pay the bills and I am suddenly awash in tenderness. Maybe she has said something funny, or there is a crack in her tough exterior and the light of her vulnerability shines through, and I am filled with love and acceptance. This is where we are. This is who we are. I owe her a huge karmic debt for being such an exquisite mirror, and for enabling me to include my daughter in an important lesson about caring for each other.
The other day, when my mother was at our house, we sat down to our dinner and I realized that the thick, barbecued pork chops were going to be challenging for her to cut. How to help without insulting? Allow her to try, then step in? Having had a scary experience in a restaurant last summer with her choking on a piece of meat cut too large, I decided to err on the side of insulting, and suggested I cut it for her. She sat, patiently, but the air was filled with the awareness that this kind of assistance still feels a little strange—the same kind of strangeness that happens when she has an occasional bout of incontinence and needs help getting cleaned up—that is vulnerability of a very raw sort for the adult on each side. Much of the time, we can find the humor in awkward situations, or at least be matter-of-fact, and not much time goes by between her expressions of gratitude for my being there when needed. As I filled out the paperwork for an appointment with a new doctor, something fairly automatic for me now, she looked at me tenderly and said, “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Nowadays, I am no longer responsible for most of the everyday caregiving—meals, medicine, bathing, dressing—and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the staff at the assisted living community who do their jobs well. It boggles the mind that we pay people so poorly who take care of our most vulnerable. When I stop in a few times a week to visit, tend to her kitty’s litter box and bring other supplies, the routines we have established more often than not serve to remind me that my mother’s dependence is simply a natural resolution to a long, largely healthy and productive life. If I can keep that in mind, the experience we are having is truly worthy of celebration.