Amanda Lamb: Cradle to caregiving in the sandwich years

If we are fortunate enough to have people in our lives that we love, we will spend at least a third of our lives caring for others. It begins with children, and it ends with aging parents. For many people, there will be “sandwich years” when they are doing both — raising children and caring for their parents.

For some people, the sandwich years can last a decade or more. For others, they last just weeks or months after a parent becomes ill. Either way, the experience is usually exhausting, and often comes on without warning.

When my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2012, it was a crisis for our family. In just 10 days, my formerly independent mother who worked fulltime and lived in another state, could not walk or feed herself.

As opposed to the slow decline of a parent that gives a family time to plan for care, this was like a bomb being dropped in the middle of our lives. My children were nine and twelve at the time. We moved my mother into our home, I took off work to care for her, and she died 80 days later.

And while it was the toughest thing I have ever experienced in my life, I am fully aware that many people care for their parents for years, adjusting their entire lives to make sure their parents are safe and supported.

My experience showed me that society doesn’t do a great job of figuring out how to help families in these situations. We all seem to understand the challenges of parenting and can relate to the struggle. Even people who don’t have children can empathize.

It’s understandable when someone misses a day of work when a child is sick or must leave the office to pick up a child at school with a fever. But the struggle of people caring for their parents is often invisible, only revealed to their inner circle.

Not unlike children, parents often revert to a helpless state, and need their adult children to care for them, and to plan for their care. It’s a role reversal that not everyone is prepared for. But I think as a community we can and should do a better job of helping families navigate these moments.

I know that I was lucky to have a big network of friends and extended family who helped me. I also had an employer who gave me flexibility to do what I needed to do — a rare privilege in today’s modern workplace. But had the experience lasted more than 80 days, I’m not sure what my life would have looked like, or how long the tremendous support I experienced would have lasted.

I don’t have the answers, but I do think it’s an important conversation we should all be having.