When I got to Duke in the fall of 1987 (do the math… that makes me 45 years old), I quickly discovered the combined lures of beer, pizza, unlimited snacking, and industrial quantities of industrial college food.  The result was the predictable “Freshman 15″, where I suddenly became more of a man, so to speak, than I had been before.  About 10% more.  Since I hadn’t started as a world-class athlete to begin with, this turned my 5’6” frame a little doughy.  I went through bouts of being more careful, but my roommates and I were well-stocked on Papa John’s coupons and you could go to “kegs” pretty much every night of the week.  It took me until about halfway through my sophomore year to keep the wheels on the car in this department.

Fast forward to 2014 (still 45 years old) and my latest bouts with stress eating.

I am in way better shape than I was in college.  I need to be.  A nutritionist informed me three years ago that men over 40 lose roughly 1% of their muscle mass every year if they don’t build it back up.  This could be a total lie, of course.  I didn’t ask her for proof and for all I know, she said it purely for shock value.  And it worked.  Over the next year or so, I developed a weight routine to which I stuck religiously, and which I even started to enjoy.  The alarm would blare at 5:40, I would emerge from bed, and hit the espresso maker downstairs.  I had it on a timer so that it would warmed up and ready for me to take a long pull before leaving to lift, run or swim.  I felt great.

I still visit the gym or run semi-regularly.  Unfortunately, at age 45, “semi-regularly” means not enough.  And the “semi” crept in there, I recently realized, when my father moved up here.

I think when juggling a lot of responsibilities, the easiest ones to drop are the least urgent.  Working out rarely feels urgent.  So my five times per week/every week routine dropped back to four times per week/most weeks.  Close enough, I figured.  I got a little less careful eating; I am part-owner of a burgers and fries chain, after all.  There were enough stressful afternoons and evenings that I might have added a beer that might not otherwise have been in the mix.

This got worse when I started spending a lot more time both at and commuting to work.  Now the 4 times per week/most weeks dropped to 3 times per week/some weeks.  I’ve had some weeks that are better than others, and even after these, I’ve noticed that I’m not making much progress back to the level I achieved last year.  I also notice that the more stressful days at work lead to poorer sleep, which makes exercise impossible, which in turn leads to poorer sleep.

The last piece of this newly doughy puzzle is the sound of the ticking clock of my children growing older.  Now they are 11.  Chances are that I have limited months and years left that they still want to goof around with me in the morning.  The kind of love they have for me right now is mortal.  I can feel myself fighting back against time by wanting to extract every last ounce of this time in their lives when they still think I’m funny, when they still want me to know how much they love me, when they want me around even when they are sleepy and fumbling for their school books at 6:30am.

So, I don’t want to sacrifice that time to be in a windowless gym with a bunch of fellow middle-aged men who probably had the same fatalistic nutritionist who gave them the same advice.

The result has been predictable.  It’s the Sandwich 15 and it happens when you have too much to juggle and want to savor the last moments of your kids’ childhood innocence.

I would like to be able to report in-depth statistics on Sandwich Generation dads putting on weight.  I don’t have them.  Sandwich Generation dads are less well understood than, say, freshmen in college, probably because the 18-34 demographic has decades of purchasing power ahead of them and we have… well, less than that.  But it’s too bad.  In any case, I have found my Sandwich 15 and now I am into my sophomore year, so to speak, of being Sandwich Generation.  Now I just need to find a rhythm and routine that lets me repeat the results of my last sophomore year experience, and work it back off.

When my father first got sick last summer and ended up in the hospital, I debated even going to New Jersey to see him.  Part of this was driven by the naive belief that his condition wasn’t actually that serious — more on this later — and part of it from the memory of conversations  past that went something like this:

Me: “If you moved to Boston, it would be a lot easier for me if something went wrong.  In New Jersey there’s not much I can do since I live here.”
My father: “I know — but don’t worry, I’m doing fine right now.”
Me (considering): “That’s true until it won’t be, and then we have real problems.”

I found out he had fallen ill when we couldn’t locate him for 2 days.  We had called him on his birthday and he sounded discombobulated, distant, not all there.  Now I know that C Diff has dementia as a side effect.  That was on a Sunday.  By Tuesday, my brother was worried.  He had called an ambulance that Sunday night, it turns out, and was admitted to the hospital.  From his room’s old-school phone (Side note: why do even brand-new hospitals have terrible telecommununications?  Makes no sense.), he couldn’t figure out how to call long distance, couldn’t get help to call my brother or me, and hadn’t grabbed his cellphone on the way out of the house.

Finally he had called a neighbor, who got in touch with us.

I talked it through with my business partner, who had recently lost his father.  He kindly reminded me that although it was probably nothing, I should go see my father.  So I skipped out of work and called to let him know I was coming.  Two trains and a car ride later, I made it to Princeton Medical Center.

So I arrived to his room.  The first thing he said to me in a dry-throated hospital whisper was “what took you so long?”  I had almost forgotten how angry he could make at moments where I wanted to feel empathy, love, respect, admiration for my father, anything but anger.  And then before I could respond, he croaked out 2 more words: “Diet Coke”.

The doctors wouldn’t give him Diet Coke.  That’s odd, I thought.  Later that day when I was talking to one of the doctors, I understood why they were being so cautious.  This is when I discovered that C Diff is a deadly bacterial infection with a 50% survival rate in people that age.  My father’s intestines were so inflamed that his stomach had begun to swell.  The Vancomycin and Flagyl pumped intravenously into his system had slowed the spread of the infection, but couldn’t stop it.  It seemed, she told me, that surgery would likely be required to repair them.

There are a few moments in your life where you realize that some moments ago, everything changed, and you just didn’t know it yet.  When you find yourself unexpectedly in love with the woman who will become your wife and you flash back to the time you first met her and were oblivious to the enormity of what had just happened.  When your child repeats something about themselves you once said in anger and didn’t mean, and you don’t remember it, but they do and maybe always will.  The instant when a doctor tells you that your father is probably going to die, and even if he lives, you understand that he is now your responsibility.

That happened when he had gotten sick on Sunday.  Now it was Wednesday.

I did two things.  First, I called my brother and told him that he had to drop what he was doing and get on a plane, right now.  I didn’t know how much longer my father would be himself, and I didn’t want my brother to miss it.  And I convinced the doctor to let him have a Diet Coke.

I don’t know why I zeroed in on this, my first real act of being a caregiver.  My father is a creature of habits and Diet Coke was one that made things seem a little more normal.  I thought that could help him.  Maybe I wanted to see if I could convince the doctor as some sort of way of using my competitive nature to re-inject some normalcy into a situation that blindsided me.

It had one unintended effect, which was to convince my father that I could and would take care of him.  As signals went, I probably couldn’t have picked a more powerful one.

Since this blog is about being part of the Sandwich Generation and this happened 18 months ago, obviously he survived.  By now, Death should know better than to come for my father uninvited; he’ll probably decide when he’s ready and give Death the nod.  Within 60 days of this episode, we moved him to Massachusetts so that if something like this happened again, one of us would be nearby.

It worked.  9 months later he was back in the hospital.

I wrote an entry a few months ago called “Irony Alert”, so named because I had set up a Sandwich Generation support group only to miss the first meeting because I was with my father in the hospital.  He had awakened to find himself unable to move from bed and needed to be lifted out of the bed, wheeled in a gurney from the building, and taken by ambulance to Metrowest Medical Center.

I knew exactly what to do.  I grabbed his cellphone, his iPad, his headphones, an extra pair of pajamas.  And 3 Diet Cokes with plenty of straws.

I’ve since learned that I can’t control most of what happens with his health.  But what he drinks while he’s being poked and prodded by doctors?  There I am the master.  And he knows that.  Our relationship has never been the same since.  It was the moment, I know, that everything changed.

This past weekend, I had 48 hours in my own house without my wife and kids.  It’s true.  You’ve had this fantasy yourself, so I will let you take a minute to daydream before jumping into the next few paragraphs.

Ready?  OK, here goes.

One facet of middle age is all the facets.  You become a part of many other things, sort of an anti-20’s.  Then you are largely on your own with limitless options for what to do with your time.  You can be spontaneous.  Should you hit multiple parties on a Saturday night?  Binge watch a TV series?  Do a short volunteer stint?  Sleep in?  Make a last-minute decision for Friday night without having to plan ahead?  Finally catch up on that stack of bills with no one tapping you on the shoulder?   Sounds like the weekend I just had.  And it was spectacular.  While never having boundaries is its own kind of prison, shedding them is a release.

It was also a couple of days where I had space to step back from my Sandwich Generation self and ponder.  Pondering is luxurious.  I considered the weekend as an opportunity to be true to my actual self, whoever he is.  The best context I could dream up was an internal monologue about which communities I really want to be part of.  This is how I ended up at my synagogue on Sunday morning to fulfill a long-overdue volunteer obligation, and crashed an elementary school class party even though I’ve been elementary schooler free for 5 months.  Halfway through it, a friend texted me and demanded that I show up.  I’d had no plans to come — but absent the usual constraints, his was an invitation I was happy to accept.  Plus, I haven’t spontaneously hit a second party on a Saturday night since the Clinton administration.

I also lingered over a leisurely lunch with my father – at Legal’s of course – without really having to watch the time.  We sat a table with me on his left so that I could get at his better ear, and then he recounted his new TV watching regimen (warning: heavy on Fox News).  Some habits die hard though; after 60 minutes I forgot to avoid getting anxious about getting home.  This is the weekend I should have spent more time asking him the name of the woman whose picture he showed me.  “She likes me,” he told me.  I hope there’s a blog post coming about that one shortly.

Finally, I spent most of Sunday afternoon standing over the stove and various cutting boards, pre-cooking a lot of dinners for the week.  I had forgotten how relaxing and centering this is for me, even when I do it without a beer in my hand.  As I did this, and the clock ticked down to Nova and the kids coming back from their dance convention — by the way, this is a real thing — I considered that this is something I could do even with the various sandwich demands on my time.

And then the brief daydream was over.  The other night I was back to helping with late night homework, feeling guilty watching Nova juggle babysitters and weekend plans while I worked through plans for my next (disruptive) work trip to Israel, and skimmed past personal email again without answering it.  For the 3rd day in a row, I didn’t follow up as new tasks piled up on top of my list.

I wish I could say that the effects linger.  Somehow they don’t.  Like you, I am back to daydreaming about it.

View from the bread, (who would liked to be called pumpernickel bread because that’s her favorite type of bread) Sophie Biro!!!

Before we even start, I have a quiz for you guys. Yes, I care about everyone THAT much. Anyways, here it goes.

What part of the sandwich generation would you be best at?

Are you…

1. Naive

2. Responsible

3. Loved

If you had a free day, you would…

1. Play outside or watch TV

2. I would NEVER have a free day!

3. Every day is a free day!

Do you like me (if you hate me then too bad because there’s no answer for that)

1. Such a great friend!

2. A really cute, awesome girl!

3. A darling.

Mostly A’s: You would be best at the freshly baked bread (the kid)

Mostly B’s: You would be the roast beef and lettuce (like my dad is)

Mostly C’s: You are the good but slightly stale bread (the eldest of them all)

Okay. Anyways, here’s my point:

Someone, though that’s not their age, might make a better older person even though they are the sandwiched man. The younger person might make a better sandwiched person. If you’re 123, you might make a better kid!!! See my point? If you don’t, then that means a person younger than you can figure out something you can’t. Thank you.

By the way, this is what my family looks like.

We are very complicated. If you want me to explain that, I’m going to have to get 3 comments that simply say: Sophie is awesome.

Bye,

Yours truly (AKA SOPHIE!!)

A brief story (by my standards):

When I lived in California during the dot-com bubble, I had a close friend from high school who I never, ever saw.  Back in 1999, you couldn’t drive from Palo Alto to Berkeley at rush hour if your life depended on it.  The Dumbarton Bridge might as well have been closed between 3pm and 7pm on any given weekday. Or, really until 9.

The main reason I rarely saw him, however, is that my job was intense. More specifically, the hours were crazy.

Fast-forward to late 2001. For a number of reasons, I was debating whether to quit this job. The money was decent but not spectacular, and I had a sensation that I was focused on the wrong things. It should not have been a difficult deliberation, but it was. While pondering it, the thought popped into my head that something was drastically wrong that I could never see my friend who lived only 20 miles away.

So, after a lot of thought, I laid myself off – one benefit of being partially in charge of a business unit. I did not regret if for a single second. Before long, I was a regular attendee at my long-lost weekly get-togethers in Rock Ridge and cemented a friendship that I almost lost. With the benefit of hindsight (i.e., getting older) It was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done, and it was empowering to be so true to myself.

A few things that happened recently reminded of this story and what a different time it was in my life.

The first is that I have a cousin in Toronto (technically my second cousin once-removed – she is a little older than I but somehow I am at the same generational level as her kids) who I would love to visit. I thought about this for about 3 seconds. Then I realized that it’s nearly impossible with everything else she and I both have going on being in our roles as parent, child, spouse, brother/sister, friend, neighbor, provider, cousin, volunteer, and of course, ourselves.

But the second and more pressing reminder is my expanding and out-of-hand work schedule, which this time I cannot fix by quitting.

For many years, I had both flexibility and a short commute. Nothing in life or career is free, and in this case, the tradeoff was a greater level of uncertainty and occasional (sometime frequent) travel. The good news is that travel is less an issue for me now. The uncertainty has been reduced nearly to zero, or at least I think it has.

However, the other two variables have shifted, and big. On a normal day, I am out the door just after 7, arrive home just before 7, and have very little slack during the workday. This is starting to crowd things out. Gone are the early evening times with my kids. They themselves have activities many nights so even if I could get home much earlier, they wouldn’t be there anyway. Fair enough. I still see my father once a week, but that moved to Sundays from Thursdays because getting out of the office reliably on Thursdays at 5 to see him regularly and for more than an hour or so became too difficult. This is easier for me. For the Sandwich Generation, no time shift is free, so there is a cost: Sunday evenings at home with Nova and the kids.

And I had a vision of hitting the gym occasionally during the day at work, which it turns out is a fantasy. I think I knew this intellectually. I have plenty of experience knowing things intellectually but not really believing it until I experience it. I believe that this state is called “adolescence” and apparently there is a part of me stuck in it. Denial about your body works great at 25, less great at 45. I went with the fantasy anyway. Then, once I stopped exercising regularly, my mid-40’s body responded, not surprisingly, by softening and creaking and leaking energy and self-confidence. My energy level dropped off.

Then I subsequently learned that coffee can solve almost all problems – but not this one. So I went back to morning workouts The other parts are back, except the result of trudging out the door four days per week at 5:45 is that I don’t get back just before my kids head out the door in the morning for school. So, now I don’t have morning time with the kids either.

Because my daily pace at work is fast, I arrive home a little bit wrecked. I don’t often self-medicate with a beer or two, which is code for “sometimes do”. My cellphone usually goes unanswered at dinner, and yet it’s so easy to push a couple of buttons “just in case”. After all, there is always something I could respond to right away.

This is all starting to come to a head now as more things fall through the cracks.

For Columbus Day weekend, we were supposed to go up to the New Hampshire mountains and hike a waterfall, a birthday present that Lily designed for Nova and my father offered to pay for. It would have been my responsibility to plan and book this. And I just didn’t get to it. I was distracted.

In the back of mind, I knew that I should have booked and organized it before the week preceding Columbus Day weekend. Intellectually I knew that if I put it off, it would cause a problem. But I let it get away from me anyway. Again, knowing something intellectually is not that interesting if you don’t act on it.

I had lunch today with a long-time colleague and friend from my days of a less structured work schedule. Presciently, he asked, “How’s this going for your wife?” And the answer is – it probably sucks.

When your colleague you haven’t seen in 6 months picks up on something in 10 seconds that you’ve been playing around with in your head for weeks, it is time to act.

So, I’m resolving to get work back under control. In trying to balance and optimize across multiple things, I can’t let any one piece get too far ahead of the rest. The essence of being Sandwich Generation, for me, and my “cousin”, and for you, is balancing and prioritizing across multiple contexts and in multiple permutations: parent, child, spouse, brother, friend, neighbor, provider, cousin, volunteer, and self. It is also a question of adjusting among these different competing contexts, and understanding when something has to be the first thing.

Sometimes, once in a rare while, something has to be the only thing. This is what happened my father got very sick last summer; everything else had to wait.

In this case, I have bumped ‘provider’ (and partially ‘self’ – it’s about that too) too often to be the first thing, or even the only thing. Now I know this intellectually. The trick now is to channel my 2001 self, rebalance somehow, and move being father, spouse and cousin back up the list where they belong. If I could do it because of a desire to cross the Dumbarton Bridge in 1999, I can do it now.

The following guest post is from my daughter Sophie – here’s how having a sandwiched parent looks from the vantage point of an 11 year old.  What she doesn’t know (yet) is that she too is sandwiched between 2 phases and perched precariously between being a kid and adolesence.  This is why she is old and wise enough to write a coherent post, and young and naive enough to write it about liking her parents.  I am savoring it while I can.  So here goes…

______

SOPHIE BIRO THE SUPERHERO HERE!!

Don’t worry, I didn’t hack into the blog. I had nothing to do during our writing time, so this was the best I could think of doing and my dad said I might as well. Thanks dad. Anyways, as much I like to go off and chit-chat about my life (I really do) I have to get down to business. So here it is: I like my parents. If I made a list of why it would be too long, so I’m just going to write about some of the key things.

1. They are good role models-

Though most parents try to set a good example for their kids, my parents don’t. They don’t have to try to (of at least I think they don’t). They just do their thing, but it always manages to get us inspired. From my mom working hard but always coming home and having a lot of energy to my dad being athletic, or even to the fact that they love to cook and stay healthy.

2. They do a good a job giving equal attention to everyone

Yes, they always give us the same amount of attention, but when we are with my Grandpa (or Apu, as I call him) sometimes my dad needs to pay attention to him, but right as that’s happening, my mom finds a cool game and we don’t even have a second to think about even getting jealous. It’s like they can read each other’s minds!!!

3. They are interested in the same things we are

Me and my dad could sit down and write for hours, or everyone could play cards, or we could all make a meal together, or we could all go to the gym or… (the list is endless). Though my parents have to work a lot, they always seem to find room for one of those things every single day (the list was cut short) no matter whether it takes hours or it’s just for ten minutes.

The last thing I have to say here (sorry, but my post has to end, I have a bedtime) is that below is a picture of me and my family. I’m the blonde one, that my sister is the one that looks like me, and if you can’t tell my mom and my dad apart… sorry. Bye… FOR NOW!

How’s that for a long break?

I haven’t written a post in almost 5 months, so maybe some explanation is necessary before just jumping back in.  Really, 2 big things happened, and my guess is that these are the ones that usually confound previously dedicated bloggers.  First, the main source of angst that was driving my blog — which was trying to juggle helping out my father with everything else I was juggling — really petered out.  That is, my father is doing great and continues to do great.  His C Diff is gone.  He is settling well into his new place.  The crush of trying to sell his house, figure out where the doctors are and whether or not we could trust them, deciphering the Kafka-esque mystery that is Medicare – all of that is done.

Part of what caused this is that I helped start a support group and the feedback I got from members who had been at the caregiver game longer than I had was “Give yourself a break.”  Good advice unless you are trying to stay motivated to write a blog about how you can’t give yourself a break.

So, writing as self-therapy didn’t have the same pull.

The bigger issue, really, is that I started a job.  I haven’t had a “real” job in a long time where I manage people, commute to an office, have a real manager, and have direct deposit.  Direct deposit is sort of a shocking and wonderful concept actually.  Anyway, I became CFO of a software company called ObserveIT back in April and it was quite an adjustment.  More on that in other blog posts.  Put simply: full-time employment is the enemy of hobbies.

I finally feel more settled at work, as defined by being highly committed and busy, but no longer scrambling.  To clear out space for writing, I made a pact with one of my favorite scribes, my daughter Sophie.  She and I have carved out a dedicated time slot weekly where we both write.  In the realm of multitasking and great parenting, I also plan to use this time to indoctrinate her away from dance music into what I am going to call “writing music”.  This is code for music to which it is my solemn responsibility to introduce her.  Tonight we are listening to Dire Straits.  Someone has to do it.

Which brings us back to the question of topic.  I have felt less angst-ridden about my father recently so I am pretty sure I can’t sustain a blog about that.  (Note: I hope I’m right!).

That said, I am still as sandwiched as ever.  Meaning, I have plenty that to explore related to work/career, raising children, marriage, being neither young nor old, and to being in a weird place called “middle age”.  Facebook recently has been just as much about friends who are fighting and beating cancer as it once was for baby or wedding pictures.

A friend mentioned to me that writing twice per week seemed an unsustainable pace.  Maybe — although I loved it while I was doing it.  So, I’ll start with my weekly time with Sophie and take it from there.  I’m glad to be back.