The Squeeze

People talk about the mental load of parenting, and I’ve come to know it well, but increasingly, I’m seeing another arm to it – the squeeze. 

The squeeze is something I’d read a lot about. That particular type of pressure felt by parents of smallish children who find themselves having to manage ageing parents as well. You are squeezed from both ends. I had thought it happened later on, when the children were older, or at least able to walk and talk. But that is not what is happening to us, or my friends in many cases. 

If I think about it, this situation has been building slowly for years. Before I had children, one parent started to get ill, then came the complications associated with it. The hospital visits, the medications, and the physical and mental impact on them meant they started to lean on my sibling and me more. This slowly rising pressure felt somewhat manageable as, compared to now, I had shit loads of free time. 

As time went on, I realised, where once I turned to them for support, now the tables had fully turned. When I had thought about them getting old, I did envisage some of the practical help they’d need, with new technology, or medical appointments but it’s the emotional side that has caught me by surprise. I find myself trying to cheer them up or problem solve as they used to do for me. I worry I am doing it badly though as my mind feels scrambled from the task of looking after little people. 

As a parent I’m already walking around with multiple tabs open in my head and now, I need to make space for a few more to factor in parents. Some days I feel like my head is about to explode with the number of things needed of me, which makes me wonder, not for the first time, how other people manage it. Do people have more help than we do? Stupid question maybe. Lots of people do, but then lots of people don’t. How do those people cope? Are they as similarly scrambled as I am? Are they torn between guilt and overwhelm? 

To complicate matters, many of us live far from the place we grew up and so caring for our parents feels even more complicated than it might have been in generations past. Then we’re having kids later so our parents are older when our kids are at their most physically demanding. Most families have both parents working now too, so there is an issue of time constraints and our families are smaller. Where there might have been a few siblings to share the load in years gone by, now more than ever before, there are often only one or two.

I also look ahead to what might be our future and I can’t help thinking of the scary headlines about care homes and caring. We’re not quite at that point of needing it but to manage the situation in my mind I’ve had to create a structure to it all. What I mean by that is to put everything in a box that I can manage. On certain days I focus on my parents, while managing my kids alongside, on the other days it’s just my kids and if there is any time left over, I try to do something for me. This does not work perfectly. I have not even figured out where my poor husband fits into this. It’s taken me ages to get any kind of system but for now, it’s the best I can do.

Things change, they always do, so my finally balanced system is likely to be upended at some point as certain demands outstrip the others but for now, I’ll muddle on through.