Sandwich Generation

I'm a late Baby Boomer, but still have the privilege of having to care for an elderly parent at the same time I'm raising my own kids.

Grandma's been going through a rough time lately, but until now has been fortunate --nearly 89 years of pretty good health. The latest: clinical depression.

I know adults who still look to their parents for support, both financial and emotional. I wonder what that would have been like --I've been more the parent to my mother since my father died 26 years ago.

I'd never DREAM of telling my mother my problems, or asking her help. Rather, she depends and leans on me. She always did.

I learned from my father to take control, and not worry others. I'M the one to worry. It's as if my father were Vito Corleone, who said that women and children could afford to be emotional and weak minded, but men couldn't.

I love Sidney Poitier's definition of the measure of a man: how he takes care of his family. I've been privileged to be in that position since I was 20.

How must it feel to be a child late into life? I'll never know.

Yesterday I was at lunch with my partner, office roommate Brian, and another lawyer, Sherry, and paralegal Carol. All of our fathers died in their 60s.

Brian's experience was the worst: his father died at 60, while Brian was still a teenager. Also, he died of ALS, one of the worst deaths there is.

Sherry asked Brian how that experience affected his life. Brian answered that no family knows about an early death until it happens to them. How true!

Brian says he takes a moment each day and savors something --even something as simple as the smiles of his children.

Brian is very much a man, in my estimation. He also takes care of an older mother, as do my partner and Sherry.

When we were all in high school, this wasn't something in the user's manual of life. We knew we'd have to figure out our own lives and then be responsible for our children. Where was the chapter about caring for a parent?

Oh well --I guess it's a privilege to be the caregiver rather than the care recipient.

Maybe I'll call my mother tonight and tell her I find the practice of law unfulfilling, and am having a crisis of identity. I'll ask her advice about whether I should teach full time, or start a different business. Right! As if!