About one in four adults are part of the so-called Sandwich Generation, caring for our children and our aging parents simultaneously, if not always gracefully. And even if you aren’t part of this Herculean set, you are likely a caregiver for someone, perhaps an aging neighbor, a friend with cancer, or a beloved aunt.
Sixty-three million Americans are family caregivers, but many of us don’t identify this way. Perhaps it’s because the role creeps up on us. Perhaps it’s because we feel we’re not worthy of the label; caregivers should be saints, or at the very least, people with well-organized spreadsheets. Perhaps it’s because caring for someone, officially, requires them to acknowledge that they need care—a tricky prospect for the strongest and most stubborn among us.
I have been caring for my dad for the last couple of years—he has advanced dementia—as well as my two daughters, ages 9 and 12. I helped my dad transition to a memory care facility about a year ago and visit him weekly while monitoring his care; he’s now enrolled in hospice, which usually coincides with the last six months of a person’s life. I still live with my mom, and have helped her recover from a knee replacement. She’s grieving. I’m always rushing. My girls are exuberant and demanding and the older one is going through puberty just as I enter perimenopause. It’s a wild time around here.
I need community. I need to know that my morphing identity and my existential angst are shared. And I want to describe what I see—my daily delight in my dad’s wild brain and my daughters’ weird antics, my dreams about the afterlife, my walks through the redwoods with my big brother where we wonder how we became the adults in the room.
That’s why I love this collection of essays. They hearten me and I hope that they do the same for you, that they make you feel less alone in the intermingling joy and grief that caregiving up and down the generational line elicits for so many of us. Philip Kelly, writing of caregiving for his aging mother, explains that at one point he realized they were living separately, but their existences were undeniably combined: “Finally I decided that this was our life.”
I love that. It’s the whole thing. We are little maladjusted, beautiful ecosystems of care. It’s our lives.
Telling Time (Philip Kelly, The Sun Magazine, November 2017)
Philip Kelly’s roommate wakes him up at 3 a.m., not stumbling in drunk but rolling in, confused. She thinks it’s time for her tea and toast.
Philip’s roommate is his 86-year-old widowed mother, and his essay is filled with the sacred and curious rituals of a pair that decide to make a life together at a moment of transition. He is going back to graduate school to leave house painting for a career in teaching; she is breaking bones and losing the thread of reality. Together, they can save money and become who they are meant to be next. One doesn’t hear the end, but presumably the observant and patient Philip will make a great teacher, and his mother will make a great ancestor.
This essay makes vivid what is often hidden from public life—the ways some of us live alongside our parents during their final years, caring for them with the same creativity and patience that they once blessed us with as children. The naughtiness and sweetness come around once again—the circle is complete.
She loves learning as much as I do and always has a book in her lap. Twice now, on our weekly trips to the library, she has slipped books under her wheelchair seat and, when the alarm went off at the exit, given me a “Now, who put those there?” look.
The Branch of Philosophy All Parents Should Know (Elissa Strauss, The Atlantic, October 2024)
Elissa Strauss, author of a fantastic book, When You Care, explains a branch of philosophy that you might have never heard of, but which could prove indispensable in helping you understand your daily life: care ethics.
Philosophers—like Carol Gilligan, Nell Noddings (mother of 10 children!), and Alison Gopnick—grapple with what we do when we’re dependent on others and when others are dependent on us, which, as it turns out, is a universal human experience. These philosophers make clear that care is not altruism; it is an ever-evolving way to center vulnerability and make meaning. Care ethics can liberate us from a checklist approach to parenting, Strauss discovers. This philosophy also recognizes that while our children grow old, our parents do, too.
Care work, according to these ethicists, is one of the foundational places where our mortality, our curiosity, and our physicality play out in this one precious life. It’s not the second shift (as the second wave feminists famously dubbed domestic labor), but the center of the “good life.”
Humans spend much of their lives in dependency relationships: We start as children dependent on parents, become adults who care for our children, move on to caring for our parents or other adults, and later become older and require care again. Not always in that order, not always with all the steps. But true independence is the anomaly, not the norm. Care ethicists endeavor to confront the depths to which humans have needs, feelings, and bodies that break.
“Caregiving Can Test You, Body and Soul. It Can Also Unlock a New Sense of Self” ( Kat McGowan, NPR, April 2025)
We talk a lot in our culture about how becoming a parent alters your identity. Anthropologist Dana Raphael calls it matrescence. It basically means the developmental transition to motherhood is similar to the transformational nature of adolescence. What we talk less adeptly about is the way in which being a caregiver for your aging parents is also an identity shift worth marking and mining for its meaning.
That’s why this piece feels so critical. Journalist Kat McGowan profiles adult daughters who find themselves completely remade by caregiving for their ill and dying mothers and, through their stories, introduces readers to “caregiver identity theory.”
This framework, created by psychologist Karl Kosloski and gerontologist Rhonda Montgomery in 2009, outlines five phases of the caregiving journey, from running small errands and starting to tune into an aging relative’s diminishing capacity, to changing diapers and managing hospice. As the weight of responsibility rises, caregivers can become more and more isolated. They can struggle to integrate the version of themselves that existed before life was lived via the rhythm of medical routines and doctor visits.
Owning the caregiver identity can help fuse your selves back together. It legitimizes finite time and energy expenditure in a world obsessed with capitalistic pursuits and productivity. It helps you welcome change for yourself and your aging parent, and find your people—other caregivers you can share a gut-busting laugh with over gut-wrenching moments.
It’s well-known that family caregiving for sick or elderly adults can bring on stress, anxiety and depression. It can also turn you into someone you don’t even recognize. Caregivers say it scrambles old habits and patterns, rearranges intimate relationships, and forces you to confront your limits. It can excavate and reorganize the soul, what one caregiver calls mind and body fracking.
In Defense of Despair ( Hanif Abdurraquib, The New Yorker, May 2025)
Gen Alpha is despondent about a world dying just as they inherit it. Millennials are being crushed by Sandwich Generation caregiving. Boomers are aging fast and are as lonely as all hell.
But the truth is that these generations intertwine in infinite caring and healing ways. We just fail to write about it in public very well. That’s why this essay stuns me—not just for its candor about the farthest reaches of our most destructive feelings, but for its tender intergenerational texture. We need our elders to widen our aperture. We need our babies to clarify our conviction. Caring up and down the line saves us from the brink.
After three weeks, I was pulled aside by the elder who had brought me into the fold in the first place, and he told me something that has defined a not-insignificant part of my living ever since. He said, “Your pain is unique, because it’s yours. And you get to have that. But, when pressed up against all of the pain in the whole wide world, it isn’t special. It can be unique, but it can’t always be special.”
Highs at Lowe’s (Nicki Pombier, Mother Tongue, January 2026)
We need to be playful with the mundane and the metaphysical to honor the role of care in our lives. I know few who can travel back and forth between that porous membrane like Nicki Pombier, a writer and historian who cares for a neurodivergent son named Jonah. In her capable hands, even a weekly trip to Lowe’s becomes a meditation on care.
When we raise children, especially if they have brains that function unlike our own, we are faced with bridging that gap on a daily, even hourly basis. Sometimes language is the bridge, but it’s a less structurally sound one than we might think. It can lead to all kinds of misunderstandings—some that create tender wounds, and some that bring edifying laughter. The latter is what we read about in this whimsical romp through the hardware store, where Nicki and Jonah knock on all the front doors to the vast universe of caring for unpredictable, delightable humans.
We love Lowe’s. He has his little route. First we go to the ceiling fans, then we go knock on the front doors. Sometimes we stop by the rows of paint chips and try to find an exact match for our jackets. We always make our way to a stack of rugs piled high as our waists, where he bends in half and presses his cheek against the pile.
Just walking in I feel the sensory pleasure of the place. The ceiling’s high like Jonah’s palate; the light and order, the eye-level beauty of a shelf of PineSol, like creekwater bottled—that gold, that gleaming—lined up so the labels run a green ribbon from me to there. And there, a new display so word-perfect I clap my mental hands together, laughing: Bounty Bounty Bounty Bounty Bounty Bounty Bounty Bounty Bounty, Bounty stacked into its own fact, hundreds of paper towel jumbo-packs where last week there were racks of Carhartt shirts.
Courtney E. Martin is a writer and sandwich generation caregiver in El Cerrito, California.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
