The Sandwich No One Orders
I am caught between two halves that somehow never make a whole
I spent yesterday on the road, sprinting between cities for various appointments. The sun was shining, the trees were beginning to change colors, and the breeze was pleasant, but my outlook remained gloomy. I reached my turn only to discover it was blocked due to construction. Once again, I found myself at a crossroads, unable to press forward and incapable of turning back.
It wasn’t the first time I had found myself without direction, but with age comes complexity. As a young adult, I found magic in the unexpected circumstances that required personal change. My perspective could shift with the winds; my elastic psyche could turn on a dime. Every terrible thing had a silver lining in which I could find hope. However, as I slid into my forties, I discovered not all changes are so easily navigable.
In the last ten years, my life has changed so dramatically that I barely resemble my prior self. I remarried, retired, graduated two kids first from high school and then college, survived a pandemic, wrote a book, and added a dozen disabling diagnoses to my medical chart. I finished the era lost, bewildered, and aimless. Where career and motherhood had given me purpose, I was adrift in the maddening silence that came next.
I would love to say this is an isolated “me” problem. Unfortunately, many of my friends are currently grappling with similar struggles. While each set of circumstances is slightly different, the parallels are striking: young to parenthood, broken relationships, grown children, career redirection or loss, physical health crises, and/or taking care of aging parents. In some form, we all seem to be dealing with the abandonment of our children while emotionally detaching from our parents as they decline. This is frequently combined with a dwindling sense of self and loss of independence. We commiserate that we feel zero sense of direction, unsure of who we are and where we stand. Isolation and loneliness abound.
I have written previously about the pressure of being caught between generations, the so-called sandwich we form. The response was overwhelming, which validates my belief that I am not alone in this struggle. It is a fact I both take comfort in and lament for my peers. Our parents, members of the Silent and Boomer generations, raised us as dedicated caretakers. We emulated them as we cared for our spouses and children, forgoing our dreams to achieve their best interests. We strived to keep a clean home, raise responsible adults, and be everything expected from us, from gold-star employees to PTA brownie-baking triumphs. And, when the grueling task was complete, there was a silent vacuum where chaos once reigned.
I might be in the minority here, but I was shocked when those wonderful little humans I raised left me behind and took my life of details with them. Many tears and melancholic days passed before I realized all was as it should be. My grown-up children had moved on without me to become their own people with their own dreams and aspirations. Now, it was my turn.
For half a second, I relaxed and basked in a job well done. I concentrated on the mundane chores I never had time to complete and caught up on all the must-see TV missed while checking homework and chauffeuring to extracurricular activities. All my surplus time and energy was channeled into one unexpected source: myself — and just in the nick of time because my body had begun a mutiny.
Then, my mother moved in with us. Let me preface this by saying that my mother is a wonderful houseguest compared to the mothers of many friends. It was not her fault that we existed on different schedules with different routines. The growing pains of being an adult mother-daughter duo resembled my teenage years a bit, for which I should probably still be apologizing. Still, we persevered and found something that fit for all of us. Then, instead of a shoe dropping, the entire closet collapsed.
Without going into details, her health stumbled and mine took a bloody nosedive. The lifestyles we had each carefully curated no longer worked, and the support we had hoped to offer each other did not stretch far enough. The result was unrelenting guilt because I could not provide everything required for her in her time of need. She wrestled with guilt that she would become a burden. The realization changed the way we related to each other and how we viewed ourselves. Once again, I had to change my perspective, which could have been done sooner and less painfully with a rock to the back of the head.
With hard reflection, I realized it was no longer fair to make my senior mother the sole recipient of my weekly woes or expect her to dispense with expert advice as she had in my youth. The mother of my adulthood was already overwhelmed with empathy. Her sympathies were split between ill and dying friends, the loss of her mobility and independence, and struggling to retain her signature positivity (which I don’t seem to have inherited). Nor was it fair to expect my children to fill the void left behind by their absence. Like a newborn, I needed to cry until I learned to self-soothe.
In the meantime, COVID shut down the world and we all sat in timeout for a year contemplating where it went wrong. As restrictions lifted, we saw the world we knew had changed, something I suspect happens more often the older I get. When the dust settled, everyone had landed on opposite corners of the map. Now thousands of miles away from the family I’d tethered myself to since birth by an industrial-strength umbilical cord, I experienced a different kind of freedom. I could no longer physically rush to rescue them, whether uninvited or by request. I couldn’t play the martyr, giving up my days to chauffeur them to doctors’ offices or impromptu shopping trips after bad breakups. As a result, we all discovered a new level of independence.
On the flip side, that freedom came with crippling loneliness. Questions abounded. Who do I call when I’m at my wits’ end? What is my duty to those I love who neither ask for nor want my help, but surely need it? Where is the line between responsibility and self-preservation? Who the hell am I if I’m not someone’s daughter or mother?
Those in the Millennial generation, my kids included, excel at a skill most of us old folks never developed: the well-defined boundary. They are admirable in their ability to shut down a conversation or unhealthy codependency. “No” is not only alive and well in their vocabularies, but it has a power they fiercely enforce. It is through those lessons that my children have taught me new ways to cope. I forgive myself when I cannot accomplish every task I set. I listen when my body tells me to slow down, turn off my phone, or sleep later than normal. I remind myself it isn’t personal when my well-intended help goes ignored. I give myself the grace to fail, to hurt, to blunder, and the forgiveness to try again later.
But I am not so practiced at these new skills that it alleviates my guilt. Somewhere in these struggles lies a sense of filial responsibility to help parents who didn’t ask for it. A little voice in my head tells me it is my fault that the kids don’t visit more often or call me every day. And I drive myself crazy asking what my job is as a parent or child on the other side of emancipation. On both sides of the generational sandwich exists a sense of loss for who we were before, a burgeoning guilt for who we’ve become, and an intense struggle to find a bridge between the past and future, between ourselves and our families.
A buzzing in my pocket interrupts my thoughts. The heart monitor I now wear warns me of a steady increase in beats per minute. I show one missed call from my father and a barrage of texts from one of my children saying “I need to talk to you.” Either could indicate the next line of battle–a medical crisis, a life-changing decision, a cry for help. With a sigh, I slip on my reading glasses to type a reply when the familiar pressure constricts my chest. And so, the struggle continues to survive between two slices of life inside a generational sandwich.
