The Bubble Gum
When I used to buy condoms 700 years ago, I was careful to do two things. First, in a case of “optimism kills”, I stopped buying big boxes. Inevitably they led to breakups or droughts. Second, I always bought bubble gum with them. In my earliest days of buying them, I was nervous so this made me feel less conspicuous. Yes this was ridiculous but remember, it was 700 years ago. Then it just became a habit.
This popped into my head the other day at CVS when I was browsing adult diapers and pads. As a Sandwich Generation dad, I am many years removed from buying either condoms for myself or diapers for my now 12 year-olds. (Note: for them, puberty is the more imminent and scary challenge). Incontinence, however, is becoming a bigger problem for the other half of the sandwich. Hence my reading labels and trying to figure out a solution. There are many reasons that the standard adult protective underwear, if you will, will not work for my dad.
That’s a whole other post. What I will say is that when it comes to compromising purchases, I find that I still prefer to make them alongside gum. Some things never change.
The Ex-Millionaire
I used to be an adjunct professor in the MBA program at Babson and lecture on entrepreneurship. One of my most popular anecdotes was something I entitled with only minimal exaggeration “My Mother Isn’t So Proud of Me Anymore.” It is a tale of ever-descending brand equity of my employers, from Morgan Stanley, to Wells Fargo, to Exodus (who?), to working for myself, and sliding on down to owning a share of a Five Guys burger franchise. My mother used to measure vacations by the quality of the motel (eventually hotel) rooms in which we stayed and how low she could crank the air conditioning. So, for her, my devoting time, money and energy to serving better French fries to a medium-sized county in Massachusetts was something less than a dream come true.
“You didn’t go to Duke and Stanford so that you could work in a hamburger restaurant,” she told me.
“Well, I’m an owner, that’s different,” I tried to explain.
She paused to consider this, trying to absorb that each person in line was about to make a very small contribution to our income. Then she asked me a question.
“But isn’t your office actually in the back of the restaurant?”
“Sure.”
“So,” she pointed out, “you do work in a hamburger restaurant.”
I bring this up in a blog nominally about being a Sandwich Generation father because the balance of career and family is something that I have burned a lot of energy thinking about. It’s a new phenomenon that men even think about this; even millenials are considering it, although I’m sure in a “of course I can have it all” kind of way. More relevant to me is someone like Max Schireson, who was CEO of a tech company and quit because he felt he couldn’t do that and be a good father; his story is outlined in this great article in the New Republic.
Now that I am between full-time roles, I am considering this anew before I just jump into another extremely demanding executive role in a fast-growing business. My past job had so much about it I loved, but keeping things balanced was a high-wire act (see: The Juggling) that I am sure at times got the best of me. There are two main questions I am starting to really think about.
First, what does “career” even mean?
My father sometimes introduces me as “the ex-millionaire”. For a brief blip in time, my stock in my employer (Exodus – I know, “who?”) was worth over $6 million on paper. I still remember him calling me at work solely to inform me of that. Even then I knew that it would not last; before long, the Internet bubble burst and we were done in by too few customers and too much debt. Exodus actually went bankrupt twice, which is a pretty amazing accomplishment.
Anyway, I did not cash in millions. Part of me wonders whether my father somehow enjoys that fact, as his professional path was completely different.
For decades, he made a living as a one-man consultant in the Cable TV industry. He would pile complex signal testing instrumentation into his faux wood paneled station wagon and drive hundreds or thousands of miles to television reception towers on the outskirts of small towns in Alabama or West Virginia or Michigan. Once he had a project in Guam. Then he would drive back home and with my mother’s help, quickly compile a lengthy report and FedEx it.
His worn and oversized office desk and chair now sit in his apartment; my brother and I couldn’t bear to move him without them. They define him.
If we are the products of our parents, I have these two people on either shoulder. Sandwiched between them, if you will. One is saying “get a nice safe job at a big company that puts you up in nice hotels”. The other is saying “screw it, you don’t need anybody, just be a one-man consultant.” They can’t both be right.
Then, there is the question of what “balance” means.
In the midst of that parental cacophony, I hear two other voices. The first voice, which sounds a lot like my own, says, “you should have achieved more by now. You’re 45 years old! Time is running out!” And then another voice, which sounds suspiciously like Nova’s, chimes in with “What are you talking about? Focus on what actually matters to you and make work fit into that.”
In other words, you cannot have it all. You cannot drive yourself to accept nothing less than complete devotion to company or career, and simultaneously be present for your family and your community. You have to choose. Specifically, I have to choose.
A few weeks ago, I got another surprising data point for this internal debate. I was helping my father do some math around his finances. The arithmetic was pretty shocking as it says that he is likely to outlive his money. This was a real jolt for him. He always has worried about money; he was raised in the Depression in Hungary after all. He and my mother had epic screaming matches about the quality of the roadside motels we’d spend our summer vacations in. That’s an argument he was going to win either way, if you get my meaning.
But this time, he paused briefly, and in a quieter tone than usual, he noted the irony of having money and suddenly not being able to go anywhere, do anything, or otherwise use it. I could almost see him cataloging the things my mother asked for that he’d said no to, that maybe he wished he hadn’t. Somewhere deep in his mind I think he was apologizing to her.
To me, he was saying that I should invest more time, and therefore more money, to make a thoughtful decision.
So I am lucky enough right now to have a first-world ex-millionaire situation: looking for my next venture or job that balances “career”, whatever that actually means beyond quieting restless Type A self-doubt, with my more meaningful obligations as a husband and a Sandwich Generation dad with 12 year-olds who still love me and a 91 year-old father who is still razor sharp. The clock is ticking on both of those, I know.
Maybe I could tweak my mother one last time beyond the grave by ditching the whole thing and becoming a full-time self-employed blogger. Stranger things have happened.
The Four Stages of the Checkbook
As Sandwich Generation dad, I serve many functions for my own father. Primary medication distributor. Friend and companion. Personal shopper. Dedicated email correspondent – he sends a lot of email, much of it about recently about why Fox News is right. (I try to tell him that Megyn Kelly being attractive doesn’t mean that the network is always right, but I’m losing that battle.) Pedicurist (not my favorite role). Main technical support guy – only yesterday I bought him a new iPad and Zagg keyboard as his old ones are grinding to a halt.
Among these, one of the most demanding and complex is being his CFO: bookkeeper, investment advisor, compliance officer, head lawyer, and insurance manager. In particular, I manage his money. This was not a straight path from Point A to Point B. In thinking about it, I realized that like grief, it meandered at its own pace through the same 4 stages: denial, anger, depression, acceptance.
Denial
In this phase, the adult parent pretends there is no problem. My mother had managed the finances (along with most everything else) in the house, so after she passed away, my father was confronted with how to keep the bills paid. Or, rather, my brother and I were confronted with it as he had just enough interest in the problem to let us solve it for him. Which we did by (a) automating everything in sight, (b) consolidating the almost 10 bank accounts into one, and (c) trying to fix a very confusing credit card situation. We also got passwords to everything – which if you haven’t done with your parent already, you should do now BEFORE you really need to. Trust me.
We also pulled his investments from the full-service broker who, based on the floor-to-ceiling envelopes stuffed with trade confirmations suggested, somehow had turned my mother into a day-trader. We moved them instead into nice, simple, boring index funds at Fidelity.
Anger
Next the parent says “I can do this myself – what the hell do I need these kids for?” For us this happened about 4 or 5 months later. He changes the online banking password so that you are locked out, pays his own bills for a while, and to prove that he is smarter than you, moves all the money to a full-service brokerage at the bank down the street. Then he tells you “what the hell did I need you for anyway?” Then he brags to your wife and your sister-in-law about what he did. True story.
Depression
In the next stage, the parent realizes just how much work managing everything is, and also starts to worry that he’ll run out of money because returns are terrible. Which, when you move everything back to a full-service full-fee broker at a bank who sells you the bank’s own proprietary full-load mutual funds, they are. This took us about 6 months where I just had to hope that he wasn’t making truly catastrophic mistakes.
Acceptance
The parent realizes you had their best interests at heart and asks you gently if you’d be willing to look just once at their situation. You know, just to check it. Then they quickly give you the passwords back and accept your help in re-consolidating, simplifying and moving everything back to Fidelity. Tip: do not point that this what you tried to do in the first place.
In case I didn’t emphasize it before, for all you Sandwich Generation parents out there, get visibility as soon as you possibly can. This often is best accomplished in conjunction with a health scare of some kind as parents do not yield this information easily. Also, money is one of the great taboo subjects in our society, especially true between parents and children. This article from AgingCare.com lays out some interesting strategies; another one is from the Wall Street Journal.
Whatever you do, remember that it is not a one and done situation. It takes 4 stages. If you’re lucky.
The Concussion
A 6 year-old boy at our swim club decided to jump on Sophie’s head while she was bobbing in the deep end with her friends. This turned what had been a pleasant humid Thursday evening into an impromptu meeting at the lifeguard table, complete with filling out forms, a minor interrogation on symptoms, and following that, instructions on checking whether or not her headache and nausea meant a concussion.
They did.
We had sent Sophie to camp on Friday, but by Saturday, her symptoms had progressed to the point where her headache prevented her from sleeping, eating, or doing much of anything. She needed sunglasses even to sit in the house; she’s sensitive to bright light anyway, so the added trauma only made the situation worse. She became somewhat disoriented as well. After a 3 hour afternoon nap (made necessary by her inability to sleep the night before), she woke up totally unaware of date and time. “Why are we having sausage and vegetables for breakfast?” she asked. It was 7:30pm.
But I had seen this dazed state before. When this form of discombobulation – I think this is a real word despite what spell-checker is me – used to happen to my father, it was called dementia. This is a side effect of the C Diff infection he used to have. In a child, though, it’s assumed that the symptom will pass. In the elderly, especially in hospitals, it’s expected that it’s just the permanent state of things.
This Sandwich Generation connection occurred to me when I took Sophie to the doctor that Tuesday afternoon for a follow-up. Among other tests, the pediatrician recited three words to her: green, door, and something that I’ve since forgotten. Anyway, the test reminded me of my father’s post-hospital stay during rehab in the skilled nursing area at Stonebridge at Montgomery. He performed many exercises, among them cognitive testing and therapy to test whether or not the infection had wreaked lasting damage, and to mark his progress. He too had to recall series of words after a few minutes of other questions.
Of course, he now curates classical music performances by searching for performances on YouTube, transferring them to a playlist on Apple TV, and then using a complex projector/speaker/microphone setup that would make Rube Goldberg proud. So, I would guess he’s fine.
Just two weeks later, Sophie’s made a nearly total physical recovery. Her doctor suggested that at some point we might want to assess any psychological impact from suddenly being forced under the water. My father has developed immunity to most psychological tolls at this point in his life. But we’ll keep the jumping 6 year-olds away from him just in case.
The (Surprise) Father’s Day Post
It’s Father Day’s morning and I am sitting outside Peet’s Coffee in San Jose nursing the last ounces of a cup of coffee and enjoying a moment of solitude. This is one gift I wanted today for Father’s Day. Father’s Day (Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, you pick it) feels contrived and usually I’ve railed against it. Earlier today I blasted past the “Happy Father’s Day” and “I miss my father on Father’s Day” posts on my Facebook feed in search
At this moment, it feels special somehow. I admit it. It’s not only because given a moment to contemplate, I’ve realized that I bothh am a father and have a father; I suppose the guess the Sandwich Generation father tag on the blog is a giveaway for that. I’m at a brief window, a pause in the slipstream, where I am drawing strength from both sides. Summer is about to start, and if you just fought through the winter that we experienced in Boston, you too have had this day marked in Sharpie for months on your calendar. And to top that off, I’m with my family visiting my brother and his family, so my clan just doubled. People need clans.
And this is why this article in the New York Times (called “At Home, Many Seniors Are Imprisoned by their Independence”) caught my attention. If like me you are generally pressed for time, I’ll save you the trouble. It’s about the phenomenon of ‘aging in place’, where seniors try to stay in their homes. It seems best to let people live out their days in a familiar environment, but there is a tradeoff: it means that they are often alone. With no clan. And for many people, it is harder because it turns out that being alone as a general condition is not how we are designed. Not by accident is solitary confinement criticized as cruel and unusual punishment.
Even my father, who is a misanthrope 13 days out of 14, needs his biweekly “Classical Music Hour” to interact with other people, even if only to complain about them later.
So as I am finishing up this post and contemplating ending this short hour of blessed solitude, I am reminded why it feels so wonderful: I am generally sandwiched between responsibilities, being needed by people I love, and needing and loving them in return. The glass is half-full today. Happy Father’s Day.
The Juggling
I am the volunteer treasurer in my Temple, an amazing community where, as in many such cases, much is asked of the lay leaders. This particular time for our institution has been one of transition and rapid growth, which are two things not often written about synagogues in a country that is less than 3% Jewish. It’s challenging, fulfilling in a way that no job could be, and an opportunity to collaborate with some brilliant and very inspiring people.
It also has been at times like a part-time job, which since I have a full-time job and the Sandwich Generation dad responsibilities, is one part-time job too many. During the school year, there is a 50/50 chance I’ll be at the Temple on a Tuesday night.
Recently I was sitting my Temple president over breakfast. We have become close and candid with each other over 2+ years of working together closely. This scones session was no exception. I had recently told her that I was thinking of moving on from my volunteer role after 3 years instead of the maximum 4. She found this puzzling. So specifically, she wanted to know why I wasn’t planning to stay in my role for the maximum timeframe if I found the work fulfilling.
I had to stop and think about that one. It’s an great question. Here’s what I came up with: it’s the juggling.
I signed up for this wonderful and demanding role in the spring of 2013, which is before my father came into my life as he is now. My job was different – I traveled more, but the hours were less intense and my commute nearly non-existent. And my kids were 9, meaning that they had many years to go before slipping into adolescence and needing a different level of emotional energy. So yes, I am busier now.
But it isn’t being busy that is the issue.
On any given day, I have the Sandwich Generation father problem of switching contexts dozens of times or holding both in my head simultaneously. I am at work in the morning heading into a meeting when the associate director in change of my father’s community head calls me and asks me to call her back quickly. I am sitting in the evening with my daughter who is freaking about her homework and someone from the Temple calls and emails me in rapid succession about a meeting held earlier in the day that I didn’t attend because of course, it was scheduled during my workday. I am with my father on the weekend checking my watch, always checking my watch, because pretty soon I have to leave to pick up my kids’ carpool. I am in the car on the way to get them, and my company’s attorney calls to discuss an engagement letter. I am with my wife in bed late at night watching TV trying to stop my mind racing so that maybe I can sleep through the night.
I thought hard recently on when I’ve been happiest in my life, which is a great falling asleep trick that’s come in handy recently. I decided that it was not when I was laziest, although that’s wonderful too. It’s when I’ve had fewer things to handle, not more, and felt like I could invest more and focus on each.
Maybe one of my most fulfilling weeks was when I moved my father into rehab from Princeton Medical Center after he beat C-Diff the first time, and I dropped everything else except for talking to my family. Or when I went to Israel for work this past February after a juggling-filled and snowy week and had mornings to myself to swim, run, read, write, or have a cup of coffee. Or when I used to be a lifeguard in my sophomore year in college and I’d lose myself in the task of getting the floor of the pool cleaned on sunny warm April mornings. It’s the losing myself that does it.
The next few years have a unique urgency to them because my kids are almost gone and my father isn’t going to get stronger. I have found a work niche that is strangely and uniquely suited to me, and because of the Israel connection, has an emotional hook as well. I am learning more and more from watching friends that staying happily married requires investment. These things are the constants in my life, so anything else is juggling. Sandwich Generation or not, juggling is hard.
And by some small miracle, these are also the things I would want to lose myself in.
The X-Ray
Sometimes as a Sandwich Generation father, you find yourself in the hospital not with your parent – and right now, my father is as healthy as he’s ever been – but with your daughter. Such was my situation a few Thursdays ago. It turns out that when performing a gymnastics trick called a round-off back handspring, there is a penalty for not landing it correctly: a right hand that is swollen, black and blue, and probably broken. With that, you also win the right to visit the Newton-Wellesley Hospital radiology waiting room with your parent on a Thursday morning. Or so Sophie found out.
After so many trips with my father, it was particularly strange to be in a hospital with my daughter. The last 2 times I’d been bathed in that very particular neon light with the corresponding low air conditioning hum, I’d been with my father at Mass General for his treatment for C-Diff and in Framingham when he had hip pain so powerful that he couldn’t stand or walk. But that more than a year ago, an eternity when your father is pushing 91. It is a small miracle that this isn’t a more familiar experience for me. I suppose in time it might be.
Most radiology waiting rooms are filled not with parents who brought their daughters, but more often daughters who brought one of their elderly parents. That’s just the target market. When you sign in, you fill out the “Did you just have a fall?” card that warns you of the possible problems a spill might cause. They don’t have one for round-off back handsprings. (By the way, the possible side effects are not the hospital’s fault – they want to make sure you know that).
And 11 year-olds in hospital waiting rooms behave differently than their 90 year-old grandfathers. They ask a lot of questions because to them, hospitals are new. Why do we have to register first? How long do you think we’ll have to wait in this waiting room? They bemoan events they are missing, especially on a school day. They exude restless energy and fidget. By contrast, my father does a lot of staring and sitting still.
They also require more entertaining. We ran through the pictures on the wall of every doctor in the department and decided based on their headshot whether they liked their jobs or not. I ran through a long riff on what the likelihood was that they would have to amputate her arm. She laughed and told me it was ridiculous. I responded that it might be, but how amazing would it be if I was right? She laughed again and went back to asking questions about why we were in a second waiting room.
It was in that second waiting room that I noticed the biggest consistency, which is what a difference a friendly doctor makes. Both Sophie and my dad were anxious in that situation, Sophie because she is anxious by nature and my father because he is convinced that it was the hospital that killed my mother, and his world-class survival instinct puts him in high alert. Sometimes I can disarm him, sometimes I can’t. The radiologist totally disarmed Sophie, took her x-rays almost sweetly, and then took her into the back hallway to let her see the results. Sophie had never seen an x-ray before. “That’s so cool,” she said. My father doesn’t say that anymore. There the similarities end.
And then there’s this note for Sandwich Generation dads out there: when you take your daughter to the hospital, it is a special bonding experience in a totally different way than caring for your elderly parent. So when it happened to me, I commemorated it with a milkshake, just like my mother used to commemorate my broken bones with a slice of pizza.
The Orange Sky
I’m flying back from Israel, where I spent the past week at our office in Tel Aviv. I’m 5 miles up, and according to the map on the screen in the seat in front of me, we are somewhere over southern Canada. The sun slowly sank below the horizon an hour ago. But when you fly west, it just hangs around for hours. One time, flying back from Iceland, it set, and then came back up again before setting for good.
I left Boston last Friday night after what charitably can be called a really tough week. The snow in town was murder. The Sandwich Generation demands were the usual juggling act. More than that, I endured a week at work that, for the first time since I started, made me question what I’m doing and whether or not I wanted to keep doing it. So, leaving on Friday night and then being away from my family all weekend was not something I could get too excited about.
But, having been amongst the palm trees in Israel for a week, I feel more like myself than I have in a while. Mostly because I was able to slow down.
I read an interview recently with Lululemon’s founder where he talks about giving his customers an idealized version of themselves. That idealized version a woman, who among other things, is in her early 30’s who earns great money, owns her own apartment, and has plenty of time to work out every day. Women in their 20’s want to be her someday, and women in their 40’s wish they could be her again.
Although I didn’t become female this past week, I got to live out most of this fantasy. My life was simple. I missed my family and my father, but honestly, it was great to be just me for a week. I had plenty of time to work out, including running and swimming outdoors, which I really miss in the Boston winters. I went out with co-workers 3 nights out of 4, then came home and caught up on email. Stop and read that again – I got CAUGHT… UP… on email. That never happens.
Only when you stop being Sandwiched for a week do you really realize how draining it can be.
My commute was cut from 50 minutes including fighting either traffic or a crowded train, to a 25 minute taxi ride. Every morning I caught that cab at Cafe Xoho, the cool coffee shop 5 blocks from my hotel where I would have a cappuccino and a muffin while getting a jump on the day. It struck me that I lose almost 2 hours a day to commuting back home. When I was able to cut that by an hour, I could re-invest that hour back into not being rushed all the time.
So now I am headed back to that life. We are probably over Maine by now, although because the map is broken, all I can see is that I’m on planet Earth. Fair enough. Out my window I can see that the sky is turning a deep beautiful orange in a corner that is slowly shrinking. It has been wonderful to have a week, even one that I was not looking forward to, where I can appreciate the sky as it turns from blue to orange. Now the challenge is to find a way to sustain this final moment as I return to my family, my father, my job, and everything else that defines my Sandwiched Man existence.
The Today Show edition
Well, despite my best attempts to keep this blog obscure – poor tagging, inconsistent posting, few linkbacks and a general ignorance of other search engine optimization best practices, The Sandwiched Man was featured on The Today Show’s website as a feature on Sandwich Generation dads. Traffic has spiked into triple digits and my inbox has “New Follower” notifications from WordPress that are not outnumbered by bills I’m watching or paying on my dad’s behalf.
So, a brief introduction for the new follower:
Why “The Sandwiched Man”?
Sandwich Generation is a term many people have heard, but most sandwich generation care providers are women. They certainly are the predominant blogger set. So not seeing something written specifically about my niche, I decided to write it instead. I don’t know if men read blogs but I figured there must be some out there on the same journey as mine. Also, the URL was available.
What is this blog about?
I am in my mid-40’s and trying to be an active parent while helping take care of an elderly parent while juggling a career I care about, a volunteer organization that means a lot to me, and am also blessed with a spouse who has her own dreams, aspirations and opinions. She married me because she believed that I wanted to be her partner, and I still do. This is a lot to juggle and is sometimes endlessly frustrating and rewarding at the same time. It can drive a man to blog. Or drink. Or both.
This blog is about 2 main things. First, being part of the Sandwich Generation as typically known, helping take care of a parent and kids. And, second, being squeezed generally between career and home, volunteering and free time, youth and old age, confidence and terror.
How do you do it all?
As I mentioned in this post, I usually don’t feel like I am succeeding. This is normal, I think. Most times, like most Sandwich Generation members, I am acutely aware that I am pretty much making it up. Today I had a very frustrating conversation with someone at AARP Health Plans; I called on behalf of my dad and it turns out that my permission to call on his behalf from last August’s Medicare fiasco (chronicled here), was *temporary*, not *permanent*. C’mon. Really?
I have, however, come up with some systems that I describe in this blog. I am part of a bigger team, which I described in a post called You Need More Help. I put together some technology systems that help me manage the situation (see Top 10 Tech Tips for the Sandwich Generation). Also, I keep a stash of Jack’s Abby Smoke and Dagger lager in my dad’s refrigerator.
How often do you write?
I went through a lull where I stopped for a while, but that was bad for my psyche. It turns out writing about something intense makes it easier to handle. Now I post around once a week, give or take.
Any other blogs/resources you can recommend
I have been remiss on this one — but I’ll improve. (There’s a good story about that involving my dad and brownies — I’ll have to share that). I’ve been introduced by Carter Gladdis to the Dad Blogger’s group on Facebook, which is great. Maybe next time…
Thanks for reading – feedback and topic suggestions welcome.
The Short Change
The Sandwiched Man 
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