Here’s to anyone serving as their own Emotional Sandwich Generation —simultaneously healing our current selves, reparenting our own wounded inner child, AND creating a safe, loving space for our future older selves to thrive.
I stumbled upon the term “Sandwich Generation” in a podcast a few months ago. The podcast described “Sandwich Generation” as that complex mid-life phase where someone finds themselves trying to curate their own life while sandwiched firmly between the demands of raising kids and caring for aging parents. According to recent reports, it’s a phenomenon currently impacting almost a quarter of American adults.
As soon as I heard the definition, I immediately thought to myself: “I am currently living as my own Emotional Sandwich Generation — I am doing the emotional work for my past, present, and future selves.”
The Messy Middle of Life Can Actually Hold Space For Every Version of Us
And it’s true. In this messy middle of life, I often find myself tending to multiple versions of myself. At any given moment, I am gently addressing the wounds of my past self, cultivating kindness, self-care, and new practices for my present self, and building a framework:
Of balance
Of healing
Of growth
Of peace
Of joy
For my future self to thrive.
It’s important and worthy work — but it’s also exhausting.
Maybe you can relate.
The terrain of the emotional sandwich generation is rocky, unpredictable, and, at times, downright draining. It’s discovering the steps through trial and error in the delicate dance between:
Past scars.
Present wounds.
Future tender places.
It’s equal parts triage and treatment and triumph.
It’s learning how to simultaneously hold and alternatively shift between the continuous cycling of chaos and calm to find the gifts waiting on the other side of our emotional blisters.
The Perpetual Emotional Sandwich Generation
I’m starting to understand that I might always be navigating some version of my own Emotional Sandwich Generation — that there may always be some version of me working to:
Round out the sharp edges of who I am.
Find empathy and compassion for who I was
Build a sturdy foundation for who I am yet to be.
Some version of me might always be feeling that pull to tend to the previous versions of me I had to be to survive — and leaning forward to ensure the future versions of me never have to.
Some version of me celebrating, over and over again, the beauty of being my own best caretaker.
Because I know now that healing isn’t linear or even directional; it’s slow but ongoing and spreads itself wide like a blanket designed to comfort…but still has to be knit together, stitch by careful stitch.
The pace ebbs and flows, but each step does get easier, better, and richer. An endless journey that reaches for the horizon and then wraps itself back around as we continuously come home to our past, present, and future selves forever.
“Hi. It’s me again,” I say every single time I arrive back at my own front door.
