In The Sandwich Generation (Guest Blog by Ruth Leigh)
When I was little, my mum used to make me tiny honey sandwiches which I fed to an assorted company of teddies along with a pot of pretend tea. Fast forward a few years and I’d take my peanut butter sandwiches from my school bag and sneak a bite or two in RE. In my twenties, a sandwich was the ideal lunchtime snack or weekend pick-me-up. At some point, people started talking about taking bites from reality sandwiches as American culture became more of a thing. But I hadn’t heard the phrase, “sandwich generation” until my fifties. No onewants to be a member of it, if they’re honest. When you’re bringing up your children and your parents start to need care, generally at a point when you are either peri-or full-on menopausal, it’s not great. I won’t lie to you. But it’s happening more and more and we stressed, exhausted middle-aged ladies are now part of said sandwich generation. I moved my parents from the family home in 2019 up to Suffolk when the children were 16, 14 and 11. I was juggling two households, sourcing cleaners, insurance, decorators, food suppliers and most importantly, carers. Fortunately, I already knew Sarah, founder of Sarah’s Carers. As soon as her Ladies in Pink appeared, things got a little easier. Someone else was washing up, helping with the laundry, cooking. I was still over there every day and fielding calls about running out of chocolate and tinned soup, but it wasn’t so intense. Two years later, I published my first novel and was able to start weaving my actual life experiences into my writing. My heroine, a glossy, self-important mumfluencer named Isabella M Smugge (it spells I Am Smug) had a difficult, spiky widowed mother who as the books progressed, needed more care. Issy is rich, posh and skinny, three things I will never be, but by the time I got to book three, in which she reluctantly hosts her mother post-stroke, scenes were writing themselves. Here is our heroine propped up against her award-winning pillows musing on the situation in which she finds herself. “Issy Smugge never thought she would be the smoked trout and Japanese horseradish filling between two pieces of artisan sourdough, but so she is. #responsibilities #sotired #sandwichgeneration” Naturally, Issy booked the local carers to come and look after her mother as soon as she arrived and with her limitless funds, assumed that it was all sorted. The fact that it wasn’t gave me a great opportunity to write both authentically and humorously. In any given situation, I am generally The Funny One. I am good at jokes. I laugh in the face of despair. But as my father’s dementia worsened, and I started getting calls in the middle of the night to say that they’d both fallen over and couldn’t get up, I reserved smiling for my professional life. I poured my conflicted emotions into my writing, and into a storyline where an elderly GP keeps escaping from his cottage and returning to the houses where once he was a respected professional. People cried when I talked about it. A new reader at an event told me about her own mother, a retired nurse in a home, with dementia. Her carers encouraged her to bandage up the other residents as it calmed her. “She’s got such gentle little hands,” her daughter told me, tears in her eyes. That made it into book four and people cried again. The Pink Ladies went from two to three to four visits a day. They were all lovely and kind and supportive. One day, at a conference in London, I had a conversation with my sister as she waited for the ambulance. Dad had fallen over that week and bashed his head and had now done it again, leading to a bleed on the brain. It was time to get in full-time care. Again, Sarah came to the rescue and found two wonderful ladies who would provide live-in care for my parents. I wrote and wrote and mined the feelings of sadness and despair for my fiction. People were touched. I reminded myself that life is copy. Dad slipped away peacefully this spring aged 98 and Mum is still eating chocolate and reading books voraciously. Book four contains some touchingscenes about the ravages of old age and book five will draw more on my experiences. It’s helped a lot, being able to write about feelings which are difficult to express, and using humour to do so. And having the Pink Ladies on side, both in real life and in the books, has been the chutney in an otherwise dry and sometimes inedible sandwich. Ruth is a novelist and freelance writer, the author of the Isabella M Smugge series, contemporary humorous page-turners with heart, “A Great Deal of Ingenuity”, a collection of “Pride and Prejudice” short stories and a poetry book. She lives in rural East Suffolk with three children, one husband and a cat. You can find her on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Twitter at ruthleighwrites and at her website, www.ruthleighwrites.co.uk.
