Lifestyle
Sandwich generation: when kids, parents and creaky joints collide
Welcome to your ‘mid-century era’, where the kids are still needy, your parents chaotic and your body seems to be falling apart faster than a ham-and-salad sambo with the works.
By Rachel Mogan McIntosh
I’m in what I like to call my ‘mid-century era’. The name gives something of a sophisticated gloss to a period of life otherwise characterised by overwhelm and prescription medication.
It’s often called the ‘sandwich’ age, in which we’re squelched between the needs of elderly parents and needy children in late adolescence and early adulthood. The kids seem to need us as much as they did when they were tiny, so we’re still up in the middle of the night, but the baby is upset in the back of an Uber instead of in their bedroom down the hall.
Sometimes the wake-up call comes from a parent in crisis.
My Dad, for instance. Last week he rang to report his stomach problems, then described his most recent meal-prep hack, which involved combining 3 different ready-meals across 5 bowls and topping them all with extra curry sauce and a few olives. It was delicious, he reported, although the rice was a little gluggy.
When I popped over, I had to break the news that he’d been boiling shredded coconut. He still refused to consider that his chronic stomach-ache could be in any way related.
A pissed toddler with a bank account
Dealing with Dad is rather like talking to a pissed toddler with a bank account. He's been living alone for a while now, since Mum moved to a nursing home and passed away last year.
In the last month of her life, my sister and I camped out at her bedside, which required a lot of juggling for us both. It was hard, but it was also transformative, like climbing a steep ladder to unlock some new level of wisdom. Hard won, but precious.
Read this too: 10 signs your ageing parents may need more help than you think
Now that Mum is gone, I’m the first port of call for Dad, whose adventures in bachelorhood are literally dangerous.
He’s in his 80s now, but he’s always been like this. In my childhood he flew across the room backwards off a ladder after giving himself an electrical shock with some DIY wiring.
One particular hospital admission went down in family legend – digging a hole with a mattock, Dad miscalculated the trajectory and buried the tool in his testicles. (Don’t worry, Dad recovered. He always does.)
Recently, he was stung by several wasps when he stumbled upon a nest in the garden while watering Round-Up all over the edges of the lawn, like some sort of anti-Meghan Markle. Infuriated, he fashioned a Molotov cocktail out of a can of spray and a firelighter and incinerated the nest in revenge. Then he went inside and fainted.
The neighbours called me, and I took Dad to the hospital, where he was pronounced fine, but not before he asked a woman in a hijab, with earnest curiosity, whether she got hot under her little hat. As I said, dangerous.
Endless and varied emergencies
At my own house, my children are all growing up but I’m still the first port of call for their endless and varied emergencies. I’ve gone back to university part-time, and navigating the complex world of studying online requires a lot of peering through my bifocals.
Oh, I have bifocals now. My eyes are going, along with my oestrogen levels, my thyroid, my bone density and the full range of motion in my right hip. I also have what they call ‘silent reflux’, or a weak oesophageal sphincter. A weak sphincter is perhaps one of the more humiliating bodily malfunctions to report on at dinner parties.
In fact, an astonishing number of parts of the machinery seem to be creaking to a halt in midlife. Perhaps I should have regarded the bowel-cancer-screening invitation to poo on a stick that arrives as a 50th birthday present from the government as a humiliating portent of the future.
Men’s bodies start to break down a bit after fifty too. Prostate problems, heart disease and erectile dysfunction can start to pop up (or not, as the case may be.) And although hearing decline is a common mid-life symptom for men, I suspect my husband Keith bungs this one on in order to tune out my stories about Dad. It can also make dinner table conversation tougher. ‘I said a weak sphincter. A weak sphincter! A weak – oh, never mind.’
Make me one of everything
Still, ageing is a great gift, considering the alternative. By mid-century, most of us have washed up on the painful shore of grief once or twice, and recognise that a life lived long is not an option open to us all.
Speaking of ‘sandwich generation’, there’s an old joke about the Dali Lama at the sandwich shop who orders ‘make me one with everything.’ The more we have on our sandwich, the more we have to juggle, and the more we have, in the end, to lose.
Despite the aches and pains and stress of this period of life, I love that my young adults come to me with their worries. And I would not give up that last month spent with Mum for the world. At the end, she sat up in bed, reached for an imaginary bundle and said ‘Help me, I have to feed the baby.’ In her final moments, she returned to the work of caring for those she loved. I’m grateful that I was able to be there to look after her, and if I’m lucky, the sandwich cycle will roll on and my children will do the same for me.
Dad called tonight to tell me his new fish recipe. Remove the fillet from the freezer, he said, microwave it for 20 minutes, then put it in the fridge until the afternoon, then into the air fryer for 11 minutes. He could not be persuaded to skip all the middle steps. ‘OK, Dad.’ I said. ‘I’ll talk to you later. Call me if you need anything.’
Knowing Dad as I do, I really do mean anything.
Rachael Mogan McIntosh is a mum, crisis counsellor, and author of Pardon My French and Mothering Heights. Her journalism has featured in magazines, newspapers and websites in Australia, France and the USA. You can follow her on Instagram or subscribe to her popular newsletter Crinkum Crankum.
Feature image: iStock/Ridofranz. Posed by models.
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