The unspoken truth of the 'Sandwich Generation': How to parent your parents

Ageing: A perverse childhood without the cherubic rolls of pudge and baby voice softening the blow of paralysing helplessness. 

Parenting young children is fraught with physical demands: no sleep, constant confusion as to what it is they need and an unending list of demands. But then through the exhaustion there is the dangling candied carrot: a promise that children will eventually grow independent, and you will create space for yourself. And while you are working at all hours, you will smell your baby’s skin, feel his/her tender heartbeat, and melt… the biological pull superseding
every limitation.

What happens when the helplessness is degenerative? Where the candied carrot is rotten and there is no rainbow at the end of the tunnel, or mountain, or whatever challenging physical metaphor you chose… what if the helpless child is a parent?

No one prepares you for this eventual degeneration. This eventual death. Just like no one prepares you for birth. And so, here we are, floundering at mid-life, just expected to do it because so many have before. To be grief struck at our parents’ mortality, and smile the very next minute as we tuck our children into bed.

It is one thing to philosophise and quite another to experience it. To feel it. To see death creeping towards you, as somehow you propel yourself towards nourishing your children, and somewhere, yourself and
your partner. I know what you’re expecting next. For me to tell you how to navigate this. I don’t know. I am dumbstruck. Heartbroken. And trying valiantly to piece myself together hurriedly, with patchwork, so I can parent my parent; so I can parent my child.

I believe in truth. And not sugarcoating it. There is nothing pleasant about going through this. Nothing easy. Nothing makes it better. I have been talking to people around me, older people, who have been through what we at midlife are beginning to experience… and the answer is the same: Acceptance, followed by surrender.

There is wisdom in experience. Listen to them. They know. My father says, “Children give you the motivation to live.” I know what he left unsaid… the motivation to live… after you have seen death…

He’s right. What does acceptance look like? What does it feel like? I close my eyes and imagine a world where they are no longer there. I walk through my parents’ home, visualising empty bedrooms and soundless chatter… a whisper from a photo perhaps, but nothing more.

In the silence that comes with death, I hear a voice, a singular one. My child. And then, my husband. And I see the wheel of time, hamster-like in its cycles of life and death, and I see life for what it is… a space in
between where we anchor ourselves to the eternal. To faith.

I have no answers. I have only this: breath. I have only this: the ocean, the soft clasp of my child’s hand, the assurance that I am loved and have loved deeply. That grief is love persisting… and aaah, the pain of grief is only birthed when there is the privilege of love.

I have no answers. But I will tell you this. You are not alone. Neither am I. 

Follow Kavita on:@conscious.parent