Sandwich generation — the women looking after everyone
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Please take five minutes out of your day to fill out the survey. You'll be helping our show to be more your show. It's completely anonymous, so you can be brutally honest. Just don't say you love me because it'll make me cry. Wah! And thank you. Mum is refusing to shower. She just says she can't. She won't get out of bed. Being a parent is hard enough, but looking after your ageing parents while you've got kids at home, well, that's a whole different ballgame.

Welcome to the sandwich generation. I mentioned to her that I might arrange two weeks respite care at a nursing home and I just feel so sad like I'm forcing her into things. It's a hard place to be. There's a lot of guilt, a lot of guilt. Anyway, thanks for listening.

This is Alex. She's executive producer of Ladies We Need To Talk, and she's been caring for her 81-year-old mum, Di, for the past nine months. Alex is the classic meat in the generational sandwich. She's caring for two primary school-aged kids on one side while looking after her mum on the other. And Alex isn't alone. It's thought that there's around 1.5 million Aussies who are in this pickle.

The 2022 Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia, the HILDA survey, found that women were, quote, considerably more likely to be carers than men. Well, knock me down with a feather and flabber me gaston because who would have thought? And we are getting old. By 2050, Australia's elderly population will double what it is now.

And in the next 40 years, the 85-plus age group is expected to triple. So what can the sandwich generation do to take care not only of the people around them, but of themselves? And if we're not there yet, how can we set ourselves up to survive this stage of life? I'm Yumi Steins, ladies. We need to talk about the sandwich generation. MUSIC

Hi, Mum. Yeah? I've grabbed Alex for a chat in the studio. We're setting up and I'm talking to my other producer, Tamar, and meanwhile Alex is trying to get off the phone to her mum. I'm just at work at the moment. Can I call you back soon?

Right. It's the sixth time Di has called this morning. I don't know if you dropped it on the floor, but you texted to say, can you take the jumper back? Alex is a busy woman. At 42, she's a mum of two really lovely and spirited neurodivergent kids who are 9 and 11. She makes this really awesome podcast. She has a few thriving side hustles. And as the only child of a single parent, she's now the primary carer for her mum.

and you don't want to see the physio, but he's booked in anyway and he's really nice, so just do it. Yeah? Good to touch on that. All right, love you. Being the carer is totally different from the relationship she had with her mother growing up. She was fearsome. She was a school principal. She had a very big voice and a very big booming laugh and loved to yell. But she was also a single mum that did...

everything for me. Like she was that sort of perfect picture of self-sacrifice to make sure the daughter had everything. It was just the two of them. So the relationship has always been intense. We love each other to pieces, but we piss each other off like no one else can. When did you start to notice that mum was struggling? So it was just under a year ago. She texted me and

at 10 o'clock on a Saturday night, worrying about like legal paperwork. You haven't signed the power of attorney and you haven't signed the guardianship papers. And I was trying to placate her and she just kept pinging me back and pinging me back and pinging me back. And then it was 11.30 and I just started crying. I just think I knew from the urgency and the worry in her texts that this was the start of a spiral. And I remember going to bed like really upset and saying to my husband, like, something's wrong.

Alex's intuition was spot on. Di became increasingly anxious and depressed. She no longer took pleasure in the things that she loved and began having trouble just looking after herself day to day. Three weeks after this worrying phone call, Alex realised her mum needed more serious professional help than just her GP and she checked Di into a psychiatric hospital for what was supposed to be a short stay.

A couple of weeks turned into six months. And if anyone has had a family member that's older in hospital for a long period of time, the degradation is so rapid and so fierce. Like, you can just see them wither before your eyes. While her mum was in hospital, as well as the persistent mental health problems, there were falls, a broken arm, delirium, COVID and likely dementia.

Di's mobility continued to deteriorate. She couldn't walk from bed to the toilet unaided. Only months prior, Di lived alone, she drove a car, did the gardening and went to lunch with her mates. Alex realised that her mum wouldn't be able to live on her own anymore.

And I sold, you know, my family home at 35 years. Far out. Yeah. And instead of going through all the family photos and your childhood stuff, and it's so emotional. So for those months when your mum was in hospital, how was it trying to look after your own kids and run your home at the same time? Like, did you visit the hospital a lot? For a time, I was there every day. And the hospital's nearly an hour from our house. Jesus, Alex.

So I would drop the kids at school and then I would drive up the freeway for an hour and be with her until, you know, an hour before school pick-up time. And it was really important because she couldn't advocate for herself. And that's like it was such a learning curve about how hard you have to advocate for them. I mean, you learn as a parent that you have to advocate pretty hard at school for your kids, especially if they have challenges like neurodiversity. But in a hospital scenario, I had to fight so hard to get her the right care

For a while, Alex did keep working, but the demands of home and being there for her mum in hospital got too much, so she took extended leave. I'm really lucky that I have a job that says, if you're going through a hard time, take some time. I took unpaid leave, which was, you know, interest rates are high, cos he lives, babe, it was hard.

After six months in the hospital, Alex finally took her mum home. The plan was that Di would live in a granny flat at the back of the family house. Alex kind of knew it was going to be hard work, but nothing prepared her for the difficulty of trying to look after everyone all at once. Every day was spent frantically managing other people's needs. Get the kids to school, which sounds on paper...

fairly straightforward. But my kids need to be told step by step by step every day the same thing. Put your shoes on, brush your teeth, brush your hair. Now put your hair in a ponytail. Now mum will probably choose that moment to come over from the cottage or you'll hear a hand on the screen door. And like it's that sound is almost like a trigger for me now. It's like, oh, mum's here. My whole body just tenses up.

Anyone who's ever tried to get kids ready for school in the morning knows that at best it is chaotic. But add an ageing parent into the mix and it can turn into a chaos spiral. You're so overstimulated with kids making noise and then mum being a bit deaf talking over them and then yelling, you know, and then sort of unravelling and feeling guilty about it all.

Half a year in a hospital bed is tough on a human body, but it's especially hard on the elderly. Alex's mum had declined to the point where she couldn't do simple things for herself. She had to be cajoled into showering and getting changed and had forgotten how to cook. And then the food is too salty or too spicy or too dry or just too, too, the food is just too anything. It's not to her liking. And it's

You know, you shouldn't take that personally and on paper that just looks like nothing. But when you're so tired and all of your emotional reserves have been used up on everybody else for the meal you've prepared to be like, oh shit, like it can just break you some days.

As well as helping her mum with the basics, dressing, exercising, staying entertained, a team of support workers came and went daily, which required a tonne of admin and endless time on the phone. It was a full-time job trying to get Di back on her feet. And I think my dream was that she would come home to us, she would rehabilitate, and then she would get back to where she was before, in her own home, nearer to us.

cooking her own meals, maybe going to a CWA meeting or like the Lions Club or something like she used to do. But it certainly didn't pan out like that. Tell me about the grief of losing the version of your mum that you know and you respect and having this different version and it's when you need a mum more than ever. A lot of people sort of say, how nice it must be for you to have mum live at home with you, you know, like...

She gets to bond with the kids and have that closeness. But she's not herself anymore and can't really connect with the kids. And that makes me really sad. And you can see them trying. So time spent together is really just functional. Yeah. Are you warm? Are you fed? Are you showered? Which the answer is always no.

After three months of actively rehabilitating and caring for her mum at home, and now back at work at her paid job, Alex found herself fraying at the edges. To give herself a break, she got her mum a respite place for a couple of weeks at a local nursing home. That was the easy part. The hard part was trying to convince her mum that it was the right thing to do. With Di's permission, Alex recorded their conversation at the time.

Okay. So I called this place that we looked at last week to ask if you could have what they call respite care. Yes, I know all about respite care. Okay. So it's about for a two-week period. That's not long. It's like a holiday, right? Yes. And it would just give you the opportunity to be in a different environment with different people. I know, but we... But at home, you are staying in bed.

I don't want to stay in bed. I know, but you are and it's really hard to watch you lie in bed all day. I know it is. So I think this place would be good because it would mean that I just get to be a daughter and that other people have to convince you to shower and get up and walk, etc.

Alex had some upcoming travel for work, so she convinced her mum to have a short stay and unsurprisingly, Di hated being in a nursing home. She complained about the food and thought all the other residents were too old.

We'll come back to Di a bit later, but right now I'm going to hand over to Alex. She'll take over as host for this episode from here on because she's the one living this. Alex met with a really helpful clinical psychologist to chat about how to survive this stressful time of life.

My kind of pet peeve is homework cards that reward and praise mothers for sacrificing themselves for the sake of everyone else. This is Nassalithia Namwinga. She's a clinical psychologist and burnout researcher. When it comes to caregiving, Nassalithia sees women carrying the majority of the load.

And it's heavy. I think there's an expectation that as a woman, you will provide this care, you will do this. And sometimes that is unspoken in families or sometimes it's really explicit. I think it shows up in terms of who sets up mum's or dad's doctor's appointments in the family. Who is the one whose house they will live at? Who's the one that will go take the grandchildren to visit them if they're in supported living and how that plays out as well.

Nasser, I feel lots of your clients to your practice are migrants or from culturally diverse backgrounds where there can be different expectations of adult children.

What might you hear from these women? Yeah. So I suppose one of the things is that there's an expectation that your parents will come live with you sometimes for some cultures. I know for myself that is the expectation is that as my parents get older that they would come and live with me and I would provide them with that care. So I guess the expectations often is around the care responsibilities stay within the family and are not limited

Outsourced. Outsourced. Thank you. That's the word. For a lot of people in the sandwich generation, there's probably some feelings of resentment. I'm just going to throw it out there. Now they're having to give up their time, their money, their work, attention to their own family. How do they sort of reconcile with that resentment? It's a big one. It often happens when there are boundaries that you set and they continue being crossed.

Maybe because you allow them to be crossed because you're, you know, that's just the dynamic of the way you're parented. And because the boundary keeps getting crossed, you feel a sense of resentment. Then the cure or the solution for that is to have set boundaries and you honor your own boundaries about what you can and will do.

It's a tough conversation telling someone that you love they're overstepping the mark, especially when they raised you. Nassalifi says having chats with our parents about expectations while they're younger can be really helpful. How do we actually have those explicit conversations about who does the division of labour?

Because I think sometimes those conversations don't happen and may not happen while the parent actually has the capacity to engage or contribute. So I guess another way to set those boundaries is to have explicit conversations with our parents while we can, if possible, about their care as they age, as a family. I've thrown the word burnout out a lot in the past year, caring for my kids and my mum.

How do you know if you're experiencing carer burnout as opposed to just being a bit tired and over it? A definition of burnout that the World Health Organization uses has three components. The first is exhaustion, then cynicism, and then low efficacy, which is when things just take twice as long to do half as much.

I identify hard with this. There have been some pretty big balls dropped of late in my court. Stuff like I've been missing kids' appointments, I've been late on paying my bills, which is just not me at all. As for that second component, cynicism, Nassalifi says that's an important one to keep an eye on.

And that might play out as like anger or intense emotions that don't match, actually match how you feel about the thing that you're doing. So it could be something like, I feel really angry at having to sit with mum in this doctor's appointment because I really dislike her. If you were to break it down, you're like, I actually don't feel that way in this particular moment.

those are the feelings that come up that I'm cynical about this whole process. I just wish I didn't have to do any of it. That's probably where you're experiencing care burnout. It's a tricky thing to talk about because you're meant to love your parents. But when you're spread too thinly, feelings of resentment can really bubble over. I wanted to know how carers can protect themselves from burnout. I think the first thing is recognizing that it can happen, does happen, and sometimes will happen.

And if you know that and accept that, then you start, again, that word comes back, scaffolding yourself. So if I start experiencing exhaustion to the point that I'm struggling to get out of bed, who can I call? Who else can set up this appointment and asking them for support when you need it? I think a lot of people do struggle with asking for help. And I think especially mothers and women, maybe because we're used to doing it all and managing and we're really good at juggling a million things. But

Something so big as caring for an aging parent can really change that juggle. You know, one of the balls is much heavier. Maybe that's the analogy. How do you ask for help?

Yeah, I think the interesting thing that you've touched on there is that as women, we might be really good at looking after everyone else. And I guess it's how do you undo all that learning to make sure that you can look after yourself? So it's things like recognizing that it is actually really important for you to be okay. If you're the vessel of care for your spouse,

parent or the people you're supporting, how do you look after yourself as that vessel of care for others? And that means you have to prioritise yourself. On top of the day-to-day exhaustion, there's something a bit more existential that I know I battle with as I watch my mum get older. And it's that there's this living grief for the woman she once was. And a part of me is also preparing for the end.

It is complex grief to be watching someone you love slip away from you. Depending on what your parents' experiences as they age, if they experience things like dementia, they're losing memories, they're losing mobility, watching that process can be quite heartbreaking. And that's hard. It's hard because it's hard, not because there's something wrong with you or you're doing it wrong. It is hard because it's hard. ♪

It ain't a sandwich, it's a soup. When I think of sandwiches, I think of high tea at the Ritz. Sliced cucumbers and it's all very nice and twee and polite. I want you to meet Phyllis. She's in the thick of it right now, caring for her 94-year-old mum and her two teenage boys.

So Phyllis is in a bit of a different place than me. Her kids are older than mine and she's been the main carer for her mum, Barbara, since Barbara's husband died about 13 years ago. So in many ways, he was the filter through which mum saw the world. When he passed, I had to step into that role.

To be real, Barbara's in great nick for a nonagenarian, but she doesn't drive anymore, and Greek is the language that she's most comfy with. Phyllis is Barbara's emotional support, her cab driver, her translator and her personal assistant.

In a given week, it would depend. If mum's got a medical appointment, what I will need to do is juggle my week around. By the way, mum's also got a support worker who comes in and now finally we found a Greek speaking support worker, which is spectacular. She helps her shower. And when I say help, she supervises the shower. Mum doesn't want to be, she said, just stay there in case, but just supervise me. Don't tell me how to do it.

That's fine. So she will come in, but no one is ever going to be as good or as switched on as me, my mother says. We can have a whole staff of support workers, but it ain't me. So that's fine. No pressure or anything. There's none. I don't know what you mean, Alex. Phyllis has set some clear expectations with her mum when it comes to how much she can offer her. My sons come first. You cannot in this day and age...

take your hands off the wheel. You can't just say, hey, they're teenagers now, go, be free. It adds a whole other layer of complexity to the parenting equation. Phyllis's boys are 15 and 18. And with two younger kids, that's sort of an era I'm really looking forward to in my life. But the reality is, even at that age, the boys still need so much from their mum.

As well as taking care of her kids, Phyllis works four days a week. She also tries to squeeze in seeing her mum every couple of days. Whether they see each other or not, they're in constant phone contact. I know if she calls me, I have to be available. I can pick up the phone and within the first five, ten seconds, I know what mood she's in. Is she lonely? Does she feel isolated? Is she happy? Is she upset? Is she frightened?

I can tell immediately. And sometimes we'll have a conversation where she would have talked for two or three minutes straight and I've not gotten a word in. But that's because I'm her primary carer, but I'm also her counsellor. As the primary carer, Phyllis can sometimes feel the pressure of constant demands from her mum. I can relate. When I'm getting up at one o'clock in the morning because she stayed over a few nights running and she's got a nosebleed and she's calling me from the bathroom and

And I have to go and, you know, help her and calm her. And now we're doing the paramedic dance. With all the pressure and exhaustion, there's bound to be tension, even anger. And Phyllis can sometimes lose her cool with her mum. It's not pretty. I might yell. And the boys have been present when I've argued with my mother and we've gone hammer and tongs and it's been really ugly. Then they also see when we make up. She can be a really complex, you know, difficult character sometimes.

But she's very loving and she's very kind. And beneath all the bluster is a very frightened, vulnerable little girl. And that's what I try and hold on to when times can be tough. Being in the middle of the sandwich can be tricky. You're in demand and there's so much asked of you. But there are little moments of beauty too, little glimmers.

Phyllis takes Barbara to the hairdresser regularly, where they both get a touch-up, and after their last appointment, Phyllis recorded her and her mum admiring their fresh looks in Greek. What are you doing, Mum? We're eating, we're a bit pretty. When I want a little, pretty little triant. I can, I know. All right, my friend. Say hello. Hello, Panayia, how are you?

Ready? First, wait a minute. Wi-Fi kisses. Wi-fi kisses.

That laugh is just so gorgeous. What were you guys talking about there? She's saying, and here we are, and I think we still look good, don't we? And now she said, I need a boyfriend, a quite young one, I think, around 30 years old, and that's her patter. And it makes me emotional because she's just such a force of nature. She's been through a lot of, you know, rejection and pain, and yet she's still...

who she is unapologetically and dealing with the frailties of aging with as much grace as she can muster, really. I'm super conscious that my kids have front row seats to this changing relationship between myself and my mum. The idea of modelling healthy relationships to your kids, it's something that psychologist Nassalifia Namwinga leans into in her practice. And it's something that us sandwich Jenners, we can really hold on to.

When we mess up as parents, not if, when we mess up as parents, it actually provides a beautiful moment for repair with children, which teaches them something about relationships. It teaches them that you're not perfect, you can get things wrong, and me as a parent, as the adult, can also be wrong, and I can come back to you and say, I was wrong, and I'm sorry.

It's a really powerful experience for a child to learn that if my parent doesn't have to be perfect, then maybe I don't have to be perfect either. Something that I personally struggle with in this sandwich generation kind of moment that I'm living through is that most of the time or a large part of the time, I'm not being the daughter that I want to be for my mum because I'm exhausted and frustrated.

But I'm also not being the mother that I'd like to be for my own children. I kind of feel like I'm failing on many fronts. And to be honest, I'm not being the wife that I would like to be to my husband either. Do you think this is a common feeling for people in the sandwich generation? Absolutely. I think it is because you're being pulled in three different directions and you're being stretched to meet the needs of these particular roles.

I think as women, we have really high expectations of ourselves in relationships in terms of how we should perform parenthood, how we should perform partnership, how we should perform being a child to our parents. A really helpful thing that I learned while studying as a therapist was

around parenting is that you kind of just need to be a good enough parent the majority of the time. And the majority just means over 50% of the time, right? So if 60% of the time you show up as the parent that you want to be, if 60% of the time you show up as the daughter you want to be, the partner that you want to be, the other times you can fall short and that's okay.

Because for the majority of the time, you show up as the version of yourself that you want to be. I just needed to share something pretty positive. I spent the day with mum yesterday and she's been in respite for about three weeks, but I took her to another nursing home. And to be honest, I liked it better, but it really solidified for her that she settled into where she is. And I took her shopping and she bought herself a pair of shoes.

And she just thought she was hot shit. And it was so great to see her sparkling again. We went out for lunch and she had some conversation, which is pretty out of the ordinary at the moment for mum. Normally it's just a list of worries, but we chatted. And she talked about her friends Heidi and Alan and Verna in the place and how, yeah, they get together and they whinge about the food, but she's got a gang.

So I'm just feeling a bit lighter today that there is some hope and a light at the end of the tunnel. And look, long may it continue. I know there'll be many more bad days ahead, but she's in a good place right now. So I think we're going to sign her up to stay where she is permanently and we'll see how we go. So she's got a gang.

Yeah, she's got some mates, mate. Some mates. Mate, is that the lesson here? Is that friends are everything? Yeah. Well, thank you so much for sharing, Alex, everything that you have and thank you, Di, as well. Thanks, Mum. It's pretty vulnerable. Listening back to that, I also just want to add, which I haven't yet, what a privilege it is to be in a position where I can care for my mum. You know, life could be so different and it is a real honour to be able to pay her back for a lot of the stuff, you know? Yeah. I'm not going to cry.

Don't cry again. Don't cry. So what advice do you want to give us about how to survive being a sandwicher? Firstly, it's going to happen way faster than you think. You think you've got years, but one event can just send everything spiralling out of control and change the whole world for them and for you. So get your ducks in a row now. Talk to your parents about their power of attorney, their enduring guardianship. Where's their will? What wishes do they have? You know, all of that stuff.

They're hard conversations to have. Have you chatted to Yoshiko about this stuff, Yumi? I've tried. So Yoshiko's the same age as Di. Yeah. But Yoshiko's Japanese, so she's going to live to be 120. It's all the fish. It's all the seaweed and the rice as well and pickles. But she's really, really cagey about it. She doesn't really want to talk about it and she gets defensive. She thinks I'm trying to usher her into the grave or push her into

Into the nursing home, which I don't want to do at all. I just want her, I want to know what she wants so that I can make an informed decision when the time comes. It makes it so much easier for you. I'm going to wrap this episode up, Yumi, with some words that you gave me a while back when I was having a bit of a shitty week and it was, Lollback, don't be heroic. Did I really say that? Yes. Yes.

And I realised that maybe I was trying too hard to make it perfect for everybody and falling apart myself. So I've really taken it on board and it's now my current motto, don't be heroic. Does that mean you don't have a cape? I do wear my undies on the outside though.

This podcast was produced on the lands of the Gundungurra and Gadigal peoples. Ladies is mixed by Anne-Marie de Bettencourt. It's produced by Elsa Silberstein. Supervising producer is Tamar Kranswick and our executive producer is Alex Lolbach. This series was created by Claudine Ryan.