Step 9 of 12 · Complete Wellness For Women
The Daughter Who Is Also Someone's Mother
The Daughter Who Is Also Someone's Mother
Step 9 · 13 min
🎬 Video lesson coming soon
I want to talk about a particular kind of woman today.
She is managing her children's school schedules and emotional needs. She is on the phone with her parents several times a week, arranging appointments, managing medications, navigating their fear of aging and their increasing dependence.
She is doing all of this while working, or managing a household, or both.
She is the daughter who is also someone's mother. She is sandwiched between generations of need. And if you ask her how she is, she will almost certainly say she's fine — because there is no space in her life for not being fine.
This lesson is for her. And if this is you — I want to start by saying: what you are carrying is enormous. And you are not carrying it the way you're told to carry it — invisibly, without complaint, as though it costs you nothing.
It costs you something. And that deserves to be seen.
The Sandwich Generation: The term 'sandwich generation' — coined by social worker Dorothy Miller in 1981 — describes adults (disproportionately women) simultaneously caring for ageing parents while raising children. Research consistently shows this group experiences higher rates of depression, anxiety, and health problems than single-generation caregivers — not due to the care itself but to the structural absence of support and the expectation that this double caregiving is simply what women do.
Role Overload and Identity Diffusion: Role overload — holding too many roles simultaneously with insufficient resources to meet each one's demands — is a primary predictor of burnout and identity diffusion (loss of a coherent sense of self). For women in the sandwich generation, each additional role is added without a corresponding reduction elsewhere — resulting in chronic overload that is often invisible even to the woman herself.
Grief and Anticipatory Loss: Caring for ageing parents involves an often-unacknowledged form of grief: anticipatory loss — the experience of losing the relationship before the person is gone, as illness or cognitive decline changes who they were. This grief has no recognised rituals, receives little support, and is often suppressed in the service of the practical demands of care.
In 1981, social worker Dorothy Miller coined the phrase 'sandwich generation' to describe adults — overwhelmingly women — who found themselves simultaneously caregiving for both their children and their ageing parents.
In the decades since, this generation has only grown. People are living longer. The care infrastructure for elderly people is inadequate. The cultural expectation that this care falls to women — typically daughters or daughters-in-law — remains largely intact.
Research is consistent: sandwich-generation caregivers experience significantly higher rates of depression, anxiety, physical health problems, and burnout than single-generation caregivers. Not because the care itself is inherently destructive — care can be meaningful — but because the structural support is absent. The woman providing it is expected to do so silently, gracefully, without complaint, as though it were simply an extension of who she naturally is.
Role overload — holding more roles than any person's resources can adequately meet — is one of the primary predictors of burnout. And for women in this situation, each new role is added without anything being removed. The daughter role grows as parents age. The mother role continues. The wife role, the professional role, the household-manager role — all continue, all making their demands.
There is also a grief that goes largely unrecognised.
Watching a parent age — watching them become more frightened, more confused, more dependent — is a form of loss. The parent you had is slowly departing even before they are gone. The relationship changes. Your role in it inverts. The person you looked to for safety and guidance begins to look to you.
This grief has no ritual. It happens in the margins of daily life, between one task and the next. It is rarely spoken of. And because it has no external form, it often accumulates without being processed — until it surfaces as irritability, or tearfulness, or a flatness that has no single obvious source.
You are allowed to grieve this. You are allowed to find it hard. And you are allowed to have needs that exist alongside the care you're providing.
Find a comfortable position · Read slowly
Two small things.
First: write three honest sentences about what this season of life is costing you. Not to complain — to witness. Just name what is being asked of you that nobody is naming.
"I am doing X and X and X. It is hard. It is taking Y from me."
Read those sentences aloud if you can. Let them be real.
Second: identify one person you trust — a sibling, a partner, a close friend — with whom you could share even a fraction of this load. Not necessarily to take over tasks. Sometimes just to share the knowledge of it, to be witnessed in it, to not be the only one who knows how much it is.
Is there one conversation you haven't had with someone about how much you're carrying?
One text you could send: "Can we talk? I need to tell someone how tired I actually am."
You are not a machine. You are not inexhaustible. You need to be witnessed too.
Find your witness. And let them see what you're carrying.
The woman who is everything for everyone is not superhuman. She is often simply unwitnessed.
See yourself clearly. Acknowledge what this costs. And begin, in small ways, to let others know — so that you don't have to carry it entirely alone.
I'll see you in the next lesson.