June 2, 2025

Bread on the Bottom

As we head into June, school comes to a close for the school year, and I begin week 3 of the blog, I am reminded of the bottom bread in my sandwiched life, our Amazing kids. This week I plan to put out there some of our hopefully relatable experiences as we navigate life with live-in aging parents and our children all under one roof.

There is some cautious optimism about the summer in terms of the kids having more free time due to public school being closed for the summer. I will spend more time with them during the summer months and this year we need that more than ever before after nearly a full school year with my Mom’s ongoing hospitalizations and their mom off advocating. Shifting into the new summer schedule and balancing life’s duties with more hours with the kids at home can be challenging to say the least. But Mom is stable right now on her ongoing liquid diet and I am finding a little margin here and there to dig myself out of some of all of the crisis time backlog.

My hair stylist has a little sign in her salon that says “Hairapist” and it’s perfect for her because not only is she skilled at making so many look their best, she also is a great listener and conversationalist. On Friday I spent hours there having the best morning (a little bit of occasional self-care that is important for us all, especially those advocating and caring for others) and bent her ear about the following interaction with my husband that led to quite the disagreement between us on Wednesday night. As a fellow primary parent she immediately understood my point of view and actually finished my sentence.

Another beautiful friend (also a primary parent of several kiddos) recently mentioned to me that she and her husband at the time weren’t “on the same page” and that is now my favorite way to share with others that my husband and I are in conflict at the moment. On Wednesday night we certainly were.

As the primary parent at home, only adult child of two live-in aging parents with various health concerns, and a golden doodle in a busy household, my chores are simply never ever ever close to being done. I choose to participate in part time work for multiple employers to retain some semblance of my career and to contribute financially to all we are keeping afloat. We volunteer our time in our neighborhood and within the community and are uber drivers for our kids’ activities constantly. My piles have piles and my to-do lists and notes litter the dining room table while my home office has quite a few tasks awaiting my divided attention as well.

The scariest pile is an area in my garage piled up with everything from the kids’ upcoming summer birthday parties to Christmas decorations (from our celebration in March this year when Mom was out of the hospital briefly) and Easter items that never made it back to the attic…. Yet is one of my favorite words to instill hope in my clients, but my husband is understandably quite fed up that that huge pile hasn’t received my attention…yet.

So we didn’t have any kids’ activities this past Wednesday evening and no plans so I shared with my husband (days in advance) my plan to spend a couple of hours making a significant dent in that pile by taking trips through the dining room and up two staircases to the attic storage area. I made an announcement to the kids at dinner sharing with them that there are some birthday surprises hidden in that area that I need to clean up and so they were to be in the basement, outside, or upstairs in their rooms, but not on the main floor while I was walking through with the items. I also reminded my husband how much he wants that area cleaned up and asked him to be the primary parent for 2 hours (which at our kids’ age involves being a bouncer in voice only- reminding them to stay out of temporarily “restricted” areas and breaking up battles between them). I sought personal space and uninterrupted focus and no one was more full of false hope that evening.

No sooner had a walked in the house with the first load but I found my youngest on her wobble board living her best life in the dining room while my husband clearly had no idea where she was and admitted such when I questioned him in irritation. I am the one who tends to be the most emotionally expressive and he tends to disengage, shut down, and retreat in the face of conflict. Later we used the tools that we know and have applied sometimes inconsistently during our 20 years of marriage and I shared how frustrated I felt when he chose to prioritize cleaning up unnecessary parts of the dinner mess in the kitchen (gotta put the food away because of the dog) that could have received attention later, over corralling the kids as I requested ahead of time.

He responded by letting me know that it is an unreasonable request for one parent to be expected to know where the children are while also cleaning up from supper. And my hair stylist chimed in right on cue that mothers everywhere are doing that every day. Nailed it.

If you have children or grandchildren, please do something special and encouraging for their primary parent and get to know more about the weight of the world on these individuals so often. And start ongoing conversations in your home about not only what your priorities are, but also how you’re going to attempt to handle everything when things that cannot be controlled (such as health issues of an aging parent or a challenging season in a child’s behavior) come up for you. Some have a partner or other support person to help share that primary load, others are running a one-person show whether they truly chose that or not.

My hair stylist’s understanding of my POV definitely made me smile and I may have laughed out loud a bit because I may have responded to my husband’s statement by saying that I could line up 20 mothers who would tell him that doing that very thing is a huge part of their day to day. What’s reasonable though does of course vary based on the individual, the situation, and the circumstances. While that may have been a bit of a cop-out on my husband’s part, which we have since chosen to put behind us, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of examples of responsibilities in life’s mental load and task load that are very real for the juggling in the sandwich generation.

How can we find better ways of sharing them I wonder?