Caught in the Middle: Sandwich Generation Caregiver Stories

Inside this volume

Fifty first-person accounts describe caring for an ageing or ill parent while raising children or holding down work. The writers include a market stall seller in Kingston with a toddler, a baby and her mother in the back room, a firefighter counting his father's pills between shifts, a camp worker on two-weeks-on rotation, a nurse of twenty-six years and a hospital physician who missed his own burnout, from Tucson and Lagos to Gothenburg and Lahore. They look after parents after strokes, with dementia, on dialysis, through cancer and at the end of life, sometimes a mother-in-law or a grandmother too, and one mother had a daughter with leukaemia and a mother with a stroke in two hospitals at once. Decisions include care homes and memory care, home attendants, a live-in helper, day programmes in the right language, hospice in a back bedroom and assisted-living bills. Money, a lost job, a phone scam that took a mother's savings, siblings who send money instead of time, translating at appointments and broken sleep run through the book, alongside shared calendars, written rotas and respite weekends. Not every story ends well: some parents have died, one writer lost the sister who shared the load, and several are still in the thick of it with no end in sight.

Who it's for

For anyone caring for a parent while raising children or holding down a job, near or far, and for the partners, siblings and friends who want to understand what that middle place is like.

Format · Instant download · PDF & EPUB · Fifty first-person accounts · PDF: 280 pages

A collection of personal testimony, offered as companion reading — not medical advice.

• 50 single-author testimonies from real people
• A short, plain-language introduction to the topic
• Editor's note, contents page, and curated resource list
• Professional interior typesetting and an original cover

Every purchase includes a print-quality PDF (best for desktop, tablet, and printing) and a reflowable EPUB (best for Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, and phones). Files are DRM-free. You can download both instantly from the order-confirmation screen, and we email them to your inbox as well, so your books are always within reach.