...what I was doing.

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Imposter syndrome is real for those in the sandwich generation. For some of us, we’ve never witnessed our parents doing 'this' for their parents – maybe our grandparents passed away young, or lived far away. Maybe relationships were estranged. Or maybe we were saved from seeing it all, because our parents didn’t want us to see it. Or, it could even have been that we didn't want to see it. Wilfull blindness, blissful ignorance. Whatever you care to call it, it means that you have no baseline or expectation. You aren’t sure what’s required – or what’s needed.

Seriously, there are so many parts of this generation that you only learn from being in it, rolling up your sleeves and tackling whatever comes. Like until you have to change an adult diaper, you don’t. Until someone you love gets that life-changing cancer diagnosis, you won’t know what ACD chemotherapy and a triple negative carcinoma means….unless you’re a doctor. In which case, you know more than I would ever want to! Until you’re signing a Power of Attorney, you don’t know that a healthcare representative is something different.

There is no guidebook, no instruction manual for all of these things. Sure, there’s Google and WebMD but even after scrolling a million pages (which trust me, I’ve done after every single doctor’s appointment), you still have no idea what you’re doing. And even when you’ve figured out how to check blood pressure at home or how to change compression stockings, it doesn’t mean you know what’s right.

Am I doing what’s right? Am I doing what’s best for them? Am I doing what’s most loving? Did I make the right decision?

In absence of knowing what I’m doing, these questions haunt me. They threaten any shred of confidence that I had. They hang there, without an answer. And when I scream, “What am I doing?!” the silence is deafening.

No one knows.

Emily Freeman, host of “The Next Right Thing” podcast asks that titular question, “What’s the next right thing?” Is that the answer? Is all that I can do to put my next foot forward and do what I think is right? But what if it’s not? I won’t solve heart failure, but how can I also live with it?

While this question helps to keep focus on the steps, not the journey, it doesn’t solve my fundamental problem: what am I doing?

If this blog post is any indication, I'm asking more questions than I'm answering. 

But truly, what am I doing? I'm loving Dad as best I know how. I'm asking questions because I don't have answers. We are learning together, failing together. 

And maybe that's the only way to journey together.

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What about you? What question do you wish you had the answer to? Tell me below!

It’s easy to complain about taking care of your parents. I find myself there often, complaining about a trip to the bank, or yet another doctor’s appointment. Resenting that this is my life. That it feels like life is getting more difficult, instead of easy. I want to be the kid, not the adult.

Yes, these are all valid and yes, all feelings are feelings. But are they truth? Yes…but not the whole truth. The picture isn’t black and white, it’s a million shades (not 50 shades) of grey.

I didn’t realize when I started looking after Dad that it would be so…fulfilling. Before his stroke, I would go a month without seeing him, with the occasional text here and there. It wasn’t that I didn’t love him, we just didn’t ‘need’ each other. I was learning to adult and besides the occasional, “Dad, how do I plunge a toilet?” call, there wasn’t much we required from one another. He was giving me space, and I was trying to spread my wings.
Now, if I don’t hear from him daily, I get nervous.

The regularity of his texts astounds me. Their absence, destroys me.

I worry, I care. We’ve got him set up in a place where he’s safe and sound but I still worry.

What I’ve loved to see is his realness. So often, we look to our parents as superheroes. They’ve got all the answers. Nothing flusters them. They can fix the issues in our lives now as simply as they covered our boo-boos with bandaids when we were small. And now, when they rely on us for the same thing, I get smacked in the face with reality.

Without a doubt, the absolute best part of caring for your parents and kids at the same time, is the building of their relationship. Because we spend so much time together now, their familiarity and depth together is astounding. They relate to each other in a way that I can’t – and it’s not just because their brains operate at similar levels sometimes.

It’s that they don’t know any different.

My son doesn’t know Grandpapa in any way, other than as he is now. He knows that Grandpapa always has sweets, needs to hold hands when they cross the street and that Mom takes Grandpapa to appointments. And Grandpapa is just there. There’s no absence, no distance. They simply just are part of one anothers’ lives, because they have to be. But more importantly, because they want to be.
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Knowing my kids will have memories of their Grandpapa and how much he loved them warms every part of my heart. Even if there aren’t many memories or if it doesn’t last for long, they are there. And, by golly, do we have the pictures. TAKE THE PICTURES. TAKE THEM ALL. You’ll want them, they’ll want them. 

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What do you remember about your grandparents? I'd love to hear about what you loved most!