~by Haley Lynn Gray~
My generation gets called the sandwich generation: young children at home, ailing parents to care for, and the need to work full time because pensions went the way of the dodo.
For a long stretch, I was the sandwich. I was the filling.
What it actually looks like
My father’s health was failing. I was constantly needed for decisions, large and small — by my family, by his caregivers, and by the medical professionals around him. Everyone turned to me.
One particular week, I was moving him somewhere that could care for him properly as his condition declined, while engaging hospice. At the same time I had one daughter working on a Girl Scout Gold Award and another on a Silver, a child who was struggling to read and going through extensive testing to work out why, a couple of trips, some banking to sort out, and a funeral to plan.
Some weeks, you fire on the cylinders you have.
The part nobody warns you about
It isn’t the tasks. Tasks can be scheduled.
It’s the decisions — the sheer volume of them, and the fact that they’re all yours. Which facility. Which treatment. Whether to call the doctor now or in the morning. What to tell the children. Each one small, each one requiring you to be the person who decides, arriving relentlessly on top of a business that also needs decisions from you.
Decision-making degrades when it’s continuous. By the time you reach the business questions, the good judgement has often been spent on the ones that couldn’t wait.
What I’d tell someone in the middle of it
Lower the bar, deliberately. Not everything gets your best work this month. Decide in advance what has to be excellent and let the rest be adequate, rather than discovering at midnight that you’ve tried to do everything properly and failed at all of it.
Plan for the low weeks, not the good ones. Your real capacity is what you can execute in a hard month, not a good one. Commitments made on optimistic arithmetic come due when you’re least able to meet them.
Buy back what you can. Cleaning, meals, admin help, anything that converts money into hours. During caregiving years, that’s not indulgence — it’s operational necessity.
Tell people something. Not the details. “I’m dealing with a family situation and may be slower than usual” spares everyone guessing, and most clients are far more understanding than you expect.
Let people help specifically. “Let me know if you need anything” is impossible to accept. Have an answer ready — collect this child, bring a meal Thursday, sit with him for two hours so I can work.
Accept that some things will be dropped. They will. Choose which, rather than letting the choice be made for you by whatever happens to be loudest.
If you employ someone in this situation
You will, eventually. Everyone hits this at some point.
Flexibility during a caregiving stretch buys loyalty that no pay rise matches. People remember exactly who made it harder and who made it possible, and they remember it for the rest of their working life.
Practical beats sympathetic: a genuinely movable schedule, work that can be done at odd hours, and a clear statement that the deadline can move if it needs to.
And afterwards
My father died, along with my aunt and my cat of twenty-one years, in the space of the same rough period. I’ve written about what that year was like.
The thing that surprised me was how long the recovery took after the caregiving ended. You run at a level of alertness you didn’t notice you were sustaining, and when it stops, the tiredness arrives all at once.
If you’re on the other side of it now, give yourself considerably more time than seems reasonable.
And if you’re in the middle of it: you’re not managing it badly. You’re doing something genuinely hard, with fewer resources than the task requires, and the fact that everyone turns to you means you’ve been the reliable one for a long time.
Fire on the cylinders you have. That’s enough.
