Sandwich Generation

It’s been a rough month and likely to get worse. Sometimes being human is just a bumpy ride and at other times, it’s talking yourself through the next minute without collapsing on the floor in a heap. I need to be in a heap for a bit.

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Something’s been brewing all month. I’ve been experiencing chronic insomnia and was struggling with National Novel Writing Month. I was burnt out on politics and the work associated with getting out the vote. And now, as we keep vigil over a family member in hospice, I’ve realized that I am just flat out exhausted. The daylight savings shift and sudden appearance of winter were the final kickers.

So I do what a lot of writers do, I write about my anxieties, in the hopes that they have just a little bit less of a hold over me. Putting order to chaos and words to the silence.

Aging Gracelessly

Being a member of the sandwich generation for the last 15 years, means that one is constantly needed. Parents to care for on one side and a child to raise on the other. But there comes a point when you realize in only a few years, you’ll be needed by no one and you discover how much of your identity was invested in caregiving.

I’m watching as my child becomes a young adult and goes out into the world and as parents shrink and leave the world. It also gives one a bird’s eye view of a human timeline. And how very short it all is.

On a more superficial note, I realize that I have to let go of the idea that I’m a brunette. I inherited the family gift of premature graying in my early 20s. Between dye jobs, I can see that my hair is almost completely white now. Over the next year, I’m going to go with lighter and lighter hair colors until my hair is its natural color – white. It means seeing someone else in the mirror, changing all my profile pictures, and being referred to as my daughter’s grandmother at awkward moments.

canstockphoto19169321 The positive side is that I’ll get the power of invisibility. I’ve experienced it off and on throughout my life, but the white hair will clinch it. I remember watching the members of my League of Women Voters chapter boldly approach strangers for voting registration and thinking how benignly people view older women. No one wants to tell grandma “no”. I have a feeling that it’s an advantage.

On the other hand, it might sack my writing career before I can even get this lead balloon off the ground. But that’s immaterial at this point.

Writing

It’s been six years since I first did National Novel Writing Month and it was apparently long enough me for to forget why I never wanted to do it again. I signed up this year, found some writing buddies to join up as well, and began the long slog towards 50,000 words. Day 7 – deleted 8,000+ words in a temper tantrum. Day 14 – Hit 15,000+ words and quit.

canstockphoto3436262 I love the idea and organization related to NaNoWriMo – it encourages people to do something they thought they couldn’t, as well as encouraging young writers. What I have to come to terms with is that I am an excruciatingly slow writer for a reason. I do everything slowly, because I have to rework sentences and paragraphs. I edit as I go and get overwhelmed with the mass of drivel that I tend to put out under duress.

There are great merits to pushing yourself to get past the inner editor and for the longest time, I have viewed my inner editor as a problem – something to cure myself of, so that I could be prolific. Getting older means that the time for curing oneself, for retraining a lifetime of habits starts to seem less efficient than just going with who you are and making the most of it.

During a discussion about goals at my writing group, I blurted that I wanted to write literary fiction. Someone asked me for clarification. I said I wanted to write layered, complex fiction – the kind that no one reads, but that gets awards. It felt like naked ambition to say that out loud and likely contrary to the kind of writing I’m doing now. I felt silly afterwards, as if I’d revealed some sort of shameful, secret fantasy.

Reading

canstockphoto1076788 There’s a trite saying about dressing for the job you want to have. I think the same thing goes for reading. I’m always reading above my grade level, because I think that’s one of the few ways that I’ll ever get better as a writer. Sometimes it feels like I’m putting on airs, being some sort of elitist, but this language and attitude is a holdover from my childhood. I was the kid who always had her nose in a book, something that was often mocked and derided. Our current culture carries a whiff of anti-intellectualism and sometimes I internalize it, because it feels familiar.

39891438 Still, I am submersing myself in the more challenging reads and coming up for air with a lighter read or two. Currently, I’m reading William Giraldi’s American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring and Rita Dragonette’s The Fourteenth of September, an enjoyable work of fiction about another time of social and political upheaval – the 1960’s. It reminds me of being younger and ideologically self-righteous. It’s a debut novel by an older writer. Obviously, I’m finding inspiration where I need to.

How is November going for you? What are you reading?

I’ve written before about being a member of the “sandwich generation”, caring for a child and aging parent. It’s a flippant phrase thrown off to encompass and neatly categorize a myriad of emotions and actions. This week has rendered me battered and exhausted, sleepless and emotional. If there were any time for me to be anti-Zen, it’s now – as in, I’d rather not be in any more moments. I would like to daydream, write feckless fiction, doze off in a chair thinking of an island in Greece.

My daughter experienced her first “frenemy” moments, crying for the second time in a week when one of her friends was deliberately cruel to her. It’s a rare thing for my child to cry and while she is sensitive to others, she’s not easily upset. This is new. And it’s the first time I’ve ever wanted to drop-kick an 11 year old, who tells my daughter she’s only joking, after a cutting remark. I calmed and comforted, talked about how some people didn’t know how to be good friends and that if this friend continued behaving in a hurtful way, the friendship might need to be reconsidered. I sounded reasonable and mature.

That night, I tossed and turned, alternating between rage and fear. I felt that gut-wrenching pain that only the tears of my child seems to bring on. I railed against myself for projecting all my childhood anxieties onto a kid who has more confidence than I’ll likely ever have. I thought about how this was just the beginning. That more hurts would come, that I’d have to be diligent and listen and try to hold back my adult anger and defensiveness. Then my mind spiraled into a darker place. The pain of mere social interactions was nothing compared to thinking about the years ahead when I might lose her or she me. Part of me wondered if there was anything I could do to protect myself, never imagining I’d be so connected to another human.

Morning came. We talked at breakfast. “How are you going to deal with so-and-so?”

“I’m just going to act like nothing happened.”

My dull, tired brain harrumphed, but I kept my mouth shut. Where’s the righteous indignation, the fiery cry for justice?

And off to school she went.

I began my newest morning routine, packing up some exercise gear and headed over to my mother-in-law’s for the now daily physical therapy exercises she must do. She is 85 and living independently as long as we can keep her moving and engaged. Early stage dementia was diagnosed many years ago and over the last couple of years, cognitive impairment has shown up in the form of short term memory loss. Lately, it’s started to scare her.

Last week, I met with the services coordinator. My mother-in-law, for as long as she has lived in this senior building, has played Friday night cards with a group of her peers. Until one Friday, she went down and they had shut her out of the game. The other players were becoming irritated with her forgetfulness and decided they no longer wanted to play with her. My heart ached for my mother-in-law, who contrived her own explanation for no longer playing cards. As I waited to meet with the coordinator, I heard her in conversation with a couple of elderly people in the the hallway.

“I never said she couldn’t be in the library. She told Joan that I said that, but I never did.”

An old man piped up “She’s a troublemaker.”

I sat in the coordinator’s office and sighed. She came in, apologizing for the delay. I said “It’s like grade school all over again, isn’t it?”

“You don’t know the half of it. Every day is like this – gossip, fighting, misunderstandings. I spend a lot of my day just mediating.”

I shook my head. “And I suppose you can’t just tell them to grow up!” We laughed and proceeded to discuss a plan for my mother-in-law to get interaction with some of her nicer peers.

I headed upstairs and knocked on my mother-in-law’s door. She opened the door with a smile. “I’m ready – I took my shoes off.” We laughed – taking off her shoes had become part of the routine before starting exercises that required her to lay on the bed. Her table was littered with hastily scrawled notes. Tomorrow. Thursday. 1:30. Next week. Notes she took when I talked, ignoring my typed schedule that sits prominently in the middle of the table. She is trying hard to hold on, to keep cognizant of time and day, to keep herself from drifting away. Sometimes I just want to grab her writing hand and tell her it’s okay, but I know that the effort anchors her.

A low grade depression has settled over me. Some weeks, I feel like I’m disappearing. Dramatic life moments are happening all around me, but I’m inconsequential, a blank white board getting covered in reminders and lists and other people’s needs. I remind myself with a mental kick, that this is a luxury, to have problems that don’t belong to me. To be able to lend a shoulder, a hand, sage advice I earned years ago. But all the aphorisms in the world don’t change the fact that empathy has a price and I wonder how much I’m capable of paying, in these years of learning and losing.

As my daughter got off the school bus later that day, I watched from the window. Hmm, usual bounce in the step, turning and waving to the friends on her bus. Maybe a good day. Later that evening, I asked how it went with her friend, expecting a same as usual response. She said, “I told her that she was mean to me and needed to apologize and she did.”

I slept well that night.