![]() ...what I was doing. 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. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What about you? What question do you wish you had the answer to? Tell me below!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorBausenhaus lives in Vancouver, BC, with her husband and their two children. Archives
March 2024
Categories |