finding strength and peace as a new member of the sandwich generation
Even at 50, I wanted to escape this level of adulting.
About two weeks into my first extended visit with my parents in 2021, I realized the current crisis was not an unfortunate, temporary event but an initiation into a new, unwelcome phase of life. When I arrived at their doorstep, I encountered a profound, downward shift in their health and well-being. While my stepdad had been declining for some time, my Mom — the glue, the caretaker — looked ten years older and struggled with unexplainable health issues.
I pushed aside a deep-seated dread and immersed myself in the tactical: driving them to doctors’ appointments, physical therapy, and pharmacies, cleaning and decluttering the house, organizing their paperwork, and seeking ways to simplify their daily routines and chores.
As I dug deeper into the situation, the ramifications of this new reality felt endlessly complicated. While I felt tremendous love and compassion for my parents, and an urgent compulsion to help, I also wanted to hold onto my life as it had been before the visit. I wanted to hold onto the routines and projects that gave me vitality. I held tight to the belief that my life’s goals and aspirations could somehow remain on their own track of progress — that I could work on my projects in the early morning hours, refuel with what gave me strength, and then return to the work of figuring out how to fix the situation — without losing momentum or focus on the stuff I had set out to do before this crisis emerged.
I kept thinking if I filled my visit with tasks, it would help them, but my efforts were a band-aid. The reality was that my parents lived six hours away, and as my Mom’s only child, it essentially came down to me. Moving forward with managing their needs long-distance was excruciating to imagine. I did not want them to be alone. I wanted to return to my hometown and care for them, but I needed to consider the well-being of my sons and how a move might impact them. I believed that with enough strategic thinking, I could contain the messiness, find my way through these wrenching circumstances, and come up with a solution that worked for everyone.
Discerning needs versus wants and shoulds versus heart desires yielded no satisfying solutions — forcing me to dig deeper into my relationship with my parents — specifically my Mom — and redefine our roles. It was not easy, and at times, it was infuriating.
Although Mom and I had been tremendously close throughout my life, old resentments and unspoken anger emerged — stuff I had never faced or even been aware of. Experience had proved that it would be less damaging and hurtful if I could work through those feelings on my own.
During this process, my life coach shared a helpful nugget — the idea of trading expectations for appreciation. She explained that many of us have expectations in relationships — how people should behave, how they should treat us, what they should do for us, how things should be between us, etc., etc. When reality (or what people actually do) does not align with our expectations, we get angry, and this is what causes schisms.
If we can shift our perspective from what we lack to appreciating them as they are or finding things that we CAN appreciate about them, it’s much easier to find the gifts in the situation and more easily work with What Is instead of What Should Be. Shoulds are our own constructs. And it is likely that we, too, are not aligning with another’s Shoulds for us in some way or another.
This idea helped me see that I was burning hours, days, and weeks being angry at my Mom for things she could not do anything about — nor should she necessarily have to.
But the anger finds new targets, and that is a shitty thing about grief. Grief is so personal, so individual, and so random at times that even if we are all grieving the loss of the same person (in this case, my stepdad), we are going about it in different ways and likely triggering each other over and over again. My grief is more than someone else can hold space for, and vice versa. It digs into all the old family dynamics, the frustrations that are right under the surface, while dually calling us to put down our grudges and come together to figure out the best plan.
My intention is to write about this stage of life in a way that provides catharsis and relief — for both myself and for those with whom it resonates. I’ve been devouring books about dharma — finding your purpose, your vocation, your sacred duty — and while it seems like a different topic, I cannot help but view dharma through the lens of my surroundings, and it’s given me some new and liberating perspectives.
One book in particular, The Great Work of Your Life, provides a new lens for life’s pursuits, especially the ones I hoped to separate from the complexity and grief that comes with navigating this life stage. I hope to write more about this book in another post, but in this context, the book helped me appreciate the beauty of allowing all parts of life to co-mingle and influence each other.
It’s also given me a more expansive sense of dharma — that dharma can morph and evolve from one focus to the next — that my dharma can be focused on developing my writing skills while also encompassing being there for my Mom with daily phone conversations — holding space for her grief, sharing in the process of this long goodbye and helping her troubleshoot problems that have no satisfying solutions.
As I surrendered my ideas for how things Should Be, I wondered if my dharma might also encompass the stuff that is easy to overlook or dismiss as mundane — being fully present at work and at home, learning how to work more effectively with difficult colleagues, and continually asking the question: “What’s the most important thing for me to focus on right now?”
This is not the tactical, straightforward guidebook I was looking for at the outset of this journey. But the more I realized there are no magic bullets or satisfying solutions in navigating the raising of teenagers alongside the care of an aging parent, the more I felt okay with breaking things down to the present moment and asking the question, “What is the most important thing right now?” and surrendering to where it takes me.
Alix - as Bruce said, this is a powerful piece. So much shared that made my heart hurt and to contemplate how we as a society handle these very difficult elements of life's journey (not well). Thank you for the book recommendation - The Great Work of Your Life, added to my reading list!
Powerful and insightful piece Alix. Love it.