Episode 68
The Sandwich Generation, a 4am Fall, and a $6 Box of Equal
I broke the sacred Pact of Daughters. I let my mother run out of Equal.
That is the funny half. Here’s the other half.
My mother lives two blocks away, alone. She falls. I don’t let her drive. Her home health company didn’t show up for ten days and neither of them thought to tell me.
On Saturday she sent me to voicemail.
At four in the morning, my husband was standing next to the bed telling me my mother had called him — not me.
So the thing I kept telling myself wouldn’t happen, happened. And I don’t know what we do now.
Raising parents is 1,000 times harder than raising children, and I will die on that hill. And this week's episode is digesting all of this, and wondering what this crazy timeline has lined up for us next.
Then Alison brings a Small Talk from Nada, who raised her rates 40% and needed help with processing that.
But yeah, The sandwich generation is not for the faint of heart.
Mentioned in this episode:
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Transcript
My consistent concern is that she's
Speaker:gonna fall, and she's gonna fall and hurt herself, which has happened
Speaker:before, and I'm not gonna know, or nobody's gonna
Speaker:know. We were literally just calling because I needed somebody to help
Speaker:me lift her up off the floor, but they sent 8 people.
Speaker:And they're all very nice. They all have different roles. They're all responsible for different
Speaker:things. I get that. And I guess they just want to be prepared,
Speaker:but It is so many people. And also, don't
Speaker:let old people run out of their artificial sweetener. They will get upset
Speaker:and they will riot, and that gets dangerous.
Speaker:Boop. Hi everybody, I'm Lauren Howard.
Speaker:Welcome to Different Not Broken, which is our
Speaker:podcast on exactly that, that there are a lot of people in this world walking
Speaker:around feeling broken, and the reality is you're just different and that's fine.
Speaker:I broke the sacred Pact of
Speaker:Daughters of My Mother. Accidentally. She was back in the
Speaker:hospital last week, and I let her run out of Equal.
Speaker:And I didn't have any Equal at my house, so I
Speaker:couldn't bring her any. So I had to go to the store to buy Equal,
Speaker:which felt incorrect. Equal feels like the kind of thing that you
Speaker:should never pay for. You should always get it free because you stole a
Speaker:bunch from the coffee shop. Like, it doesn't feel like a thing you should ever
Speaker:pay for. But I bought a box of Equal. Did you know that a
Speaker:box of Equal costs $6 for carcinogens?
Speaker:$6. So anyway, I went and bought a box of
Speaker:Equal, and I checked out, and I brought it to her. And she
Speaker:was like, why did you go shopping? I had some at my house. And I
Speaker:was like, the store seemed less complicated than going to your house, even though
Speaker:she lives 2 blocks from me and I have a key. And I know where
Speaker:everything is. It just seemed like a lot. It seemed
Speaker:a much more direct option to just go to the
Speaker:sugar aisle, and it was pretty fast. Also, I've
Speaker:apparently become that person who's like, in my day this was—
Speaker:which is ironic. But also, as I was checking out at the store,
Speaker:I looked up and I saw someone who
Speaker:very much looked like a guy I went And so
Speaker:while I was trying to figure out who he looked like, I
Speaker:realized and then went, oh, that can't be him. That guy looks
Speaker:like a 40-year-old man. And I thought about it and I realized
Speaker:that is correct. That would be exactly— yeah, no, that's it. Yeah,
Speaker:like, I'm almost 40. He didn't stay 18. That's not how it
Speaker:works. And then I just was like, oh, beans. It's
Speaker:like, what do you do with that? The people around you age while you do.
Speaker:That seems incorrect. I don't know if that's what I signed up for. And so
Speaker:that was just like a cosmic letdown. So I'm headed to the hospital
Speaker:to see my mother who was in the hospital again, and
Speaker:again faced with my own mortality while heading to the
Speaker:hospital. And I was like, all of this feels very cruel.
Speaker:I don't think I did anything to deserve any of this. So I got
Speaker:myself a mango drink and I drank my sorrows. It didn't have alcohol in it,
Speaker:it just had sugar. That's how I drink my sorrows. It's just through copious amounts
Speaker:of sugar and syrup drinks. But yeah, I don't know if you know this, but
Speaker:we're old. Somebody let us get old. And I don't know
Speaker:when it happened because I am so sure, like super,
Speaker:super sure that I was in college
Speaker:like yesterday. I was even in high school
Speaker:like yesterday. I still can't believe that they let me graduate high school.
Speaker:I still have dreams almost every night that I
Speaker:forgot to graduate high school or that I didn't take a class that I
Speaker:needed to graduate college. Literally every night, the same
Speaker:dream that I forgot to do whatever I needed to do to
Speaker:graduate, and somebody's gonna find out
Speaker:despite the fact that it has been a lot more years than I
Speaker:care to admit. So there is a world where
Speaker:That guy you know looks like a 40-year-old man because he's a 40-year-old man,
Speaker:and that seems unfair to me. I do not appreciate that.
Speaker:And also, don't let old people run out of their artificial sweetener. They will get
Speaker:upset and they will riot, and that gets dangerous. So I'm in this
Speaker:weird kind of suspended place. I don't even know— I
Speaker:don't even know how to describe it. It's just a place, and it is
Speaker:not a physical place. It's like a Mental, emotional
Speaker:place that if you've been listening at
Speaker:all, you know that I have been caretaking for my mom a lot, which
Speaker:was never supposed to be my lot in life. I said it was
Speaker:never going to be my lot in life. Not supposed to be, but I said
Speaker:I was never going to do it. And then here I am doing it, which
Speaker:is shocking to no one except me, by the way.
Speaker:Shocking to exactly no one. But for the most
Speaker:part, it's kind of her and I against the world, and that has all
Speaker:sorts of implications. My husband is very instrumental and super helpful and takes
Speaker:care of a bunch of stuff for us. And I do have a brother who's
Speaker:nearby who will help out when he can, but he's not the
Speaker:decision-making type. He is not the critical thinking type. He is the be at
Speaker:this place at this time and do this thing type. And so I still have
Speaker:to kind of run the show even when he's involved, which I again swore I
Speaker:would never do. And yet here we are. Yay,
Speaker:eldest daughter. I was one of the full-time caretakers for my dad. There were
Speaker:4 of us, and we were basically at his
Speaker:house taking care of him all the time except to sleep. And one of my
Speaker:siblings lived there, so he was there all the time. And then I
Speaker:came and went. I had literally just had a baby, so I would bring the
Speaker:baby back and forth, and she was literally a couple of weeks
Speaker:old. We're not talking about infant stage, like she was still a newborn, and I
Speaker:was bringing her back and forth. The anxiety was constant
Speaker:then. It was about his eventual
Speaker:demise. It was not about his day-to-day wellbeing. I was
Speaker:not concerned that while I was gone,
Speaker:something was going to happen to him other than
Speaker:the worst possible thing. Like, I was concerned that was gonna happen. That wasn't my
Speaker:anxiety. My anxiety was this stage of life, the fact that he was so sick.
Speaker:But there were things that, as much as I worried all the time and it
Speaker:was stressful all the time, I didn't have to worry about. Because there were other
Speaker:humans there. And that is just not the case this time.
Speaker:It is so wildly different. And so my
Speaker:stress level about her general wellbeing is not nearly as high as
Speaker:it was when we were caretaking for my dad, because she is
Speaker:not as sick as he was by any means. But my stress
Speaker:level about her needs is 10 times higher
Speaker:because it's just me. Again, my husband does help out and I do have a
Speaker:brother who can help out, but nobody's jumping in and doing
Speaker:things unless I ask them to. Unless I'm directing traffic, nothing's
Speaker:getting done. She does do some things for herself. And so, went out of
Speaker:town 2 weeks ago, and I didn't leave anybody instructions
Speaker:on what to do with my kid, but I left instructions on what to do
Speaker:with my mother. And like, here's the key to her house, and this is how
Speaker:you get in, and if you need to do things, and you need to text
Speaker:her this, and ask her to do this, and make sure she does— like, I
Speaker:literally left instructions. On how to take care of my mother.
Speaker:But my kids, I was like, they'll be fine. They can scrounge for Pop-Tarts.
Speaker:It's fine. They're fine. Also, like, my husband is a competent
Speaker:adult who parents and doesn't babysit, so he didn't need
Speaker:instructions from me on how to take care of our children. He's fully capable of
Speaker:doing that as a grown-ass man. I don't have that
Speaker:for my mother because that guy died, which is rude.
Speaker:So Like trying to figure out what the right level of
Speaker:anything is for her because she is
Speaker:ambulatory, she is able to get around, but she also falls
Speaker:and she's had a couple of nasty falls. She's also had a couple of just
Speaker:like innocuous falls. Like she was fine, she just needed help getting up.
Speaker:She lives alone. There's nobody in her house with her. We considered having
Speaker:somebody move in there, but we haven't been able to figure out what the right
Speaker:balance is there. Like how much freedom does she need? I'm not letting her drive
Speaker:right now. So anytime she has to go to a doctor, I have to take
Speaker:her. Sometimes I can arrange with my I'd rather have him take her, but certainly
Speaker:not letting her drive right now. And so it's just like
Speaker:every day is, first off, like, are we doing any of this right? Are there
Speaker:resources we should be using that I don't know about? Like, I wasn't paying
Speaker:attention to her home health company and she's supposed to be getting PT
Speaker:multiple times a week and they didn't show up for 10 days. And she
Speaker:forgot to tell me that they hadn't been there and that they had canceled a
Speaker:couple of times. And the home health company certainly didn't tell me. And I'm like,
Speaker:my goal is to get this woman back up and functioning and you guys don't
Speaker:show up for 10 days? Why do I have to manage the home health
Speaker:company to make sure that they send somebody? Who is supposed to be
Speaker:taking care of this? And so it's just stuff like that all the time.
Speaker:But my biggest fear is that she's going to fall and she's gonna fall while
Speaker:she's alone. There's little things that you just don't think about that in the
Speaker:way we live currently become this like cascading issue.
Speaker:So when she was in the hospital, she kept saying, this weird thing keeps
Speaker:coming up on my phone about my voice services not being available.
Speaker:And I reset something and the prompt went away and I figured I fixed it.
Speaker:But she said, like she had said multiple times before that, and I had been
Speaker:there when she had tried to use Siri to like unlock the front door or
Speaker:turn off lights and it, it just hadn't worked and she just wasn't
Speaker:responding. And so I went in and tried to reset Hey Siri and do all
Speaker:the things, but like as soon as that's not an immediate problem in front of
Speaker:you, you don't stop. think about the fact that your mom's voice activation is not
Speaker:working. Like, there's 10,000 other really important things to be thinking about.
Speaker:That's not the one you're thinking about. And so
Speaker:I had known there was a problem. I didn't realize it was still a problem.
Speaker:I didn't know we needed to test for it still, but I did know that
Speaker:there was a problem or there had been a problem in the past.
Speaker:And my consistent concern is that
Speaker:she's gonna fall. And she's gonna fall and hurt herself, which has happened
Speaker:before, and I'm not gonna know, or nobody's gonna know.
Speaker:And so we're doing some things to take care of her and to take care
Speaker:of that. I check in on her all the time because it's the right thing
Speaker:to do, and I want to make sure she's okay. But like, mostly I want
Speaker:to make sure that she's upright and that she hasn't slipped on something or whatever.
Speaker:So 2 things happened over the weekend. One of them is funny, one of them
Speaker:is less so. Saturday I wanted to make sure she had food because she had
Speaker:just come home from the hospital the day before. And so I knew she didn't
Speaker:have groceries in the house. We got her something she likes to drink, but I
Speaker:didn't think she had food. And so I texted her. I said, do you need
Speaker:lunch or groceries? And she didn't answer me. And I was like,
Speaker:okay. And so I text again. I said, hello? No answer. Sometimes she misses the
Speaker:first one. She usually responds to the second one. So I did something I never
Speaker:do. I called her and she
Speaker:sent me to voicemail. And I was like, excuse?
Speaker:And I might have had the little Nancy Guthrie moment where I was like, did
Speaker:somebody kidnap my mother because she just sent me to voicemail? But
Speaker:went down that rabbit hole. Not that, like, if somebody kidnapped my mother,
Speaker:they would bring her back in 2 seconds. I would not worry about them keeping
Speaker:her out for long. So then she called me back probably like 5
Speaker:minutes later because I sent her a text that said, IS EVERYTHING OK? In all
Speaker:caps because she was not responding to me. And I needed to make sure that
Speaker:she was not dead on her kitchen floor. And
Speaker:I was grabbing my keys to her house. She lives close enough away that I
Speaker:can walk there in about 3 minutes. So I was
Speaker:grabbing my keys and literally just gonna walk over there and make sure that she
Speaker:was not dead on the floor somewhere. And then she calls me back
Speaker:and I was like, are you alive? And she goes,
Speaker:yeah, I'm alive. Kind of hedged. And I was like,
Speaker:are you sure? And she goes, I didn't want
Speaker:you to get mad at me, but I went out with my friend. And I
Speaker:was like, my, how the tables have turned.
Speaker:How many times did I get yelled at for the completely
Speaker:innocuous trips I took out with my friends, probably to do things similar
Speaker:to what she did with her friend on Saturday?
Speaker:That is the kind of trouble I got into as a teenager. And the number
Speaker:of times I got yelled at for going out with friends. And I was like,
Speaker:oh, oh, you went out with a friend and you didn't tell me? You didn't
Speaker:think to check in before you left? You didn't send me a text or a
Speaker:note? And she was like, well, I didn't want you to get upset. And I
Speaker:was like, well, you know, here I am thinking that you're dead on the side
Speaker:of the road. And she finally goes, I'm fine, Mom. And I was like,
Speaker:mm-hmm, mm-hmm. See what that's like?
Speaker:So anyway, she texted me a couple hours later and said she was home and
Speaker:staying in for the night. It was like 5:30. It was not late. So she
Speaker:was in for the night. I made sure she didn't need anything. I went to
Speaker:bed kind of early, I think, feeling like, oh good, I was glad
Speaker:she got out. She was out, she was walking around, she went to
Speaker:HomeGoods and terrorized people with a shopping cart. Good for her,
Speaker:good for her. I went to bed not thinking much about it,
Speaker:and okay, we survived day 1 of whatever this
Speaker:setup is, and I'm like Constantly thinking about, all right, we need to go to
Speaker:the gastroenterologist. She needs— I need to find her a neurologist. We need to make
Speaker:sure that the cardiologist has an appointment set up. She's not waiting for November
Speaker:to see the cardiologist. We need to find a different cardiologist. Like, this is constantly
Speaker:running through my brain. Do we need a caretaker? Do we need somebody to move
Speaker:in with her? Does she need somebody who's physically there? It's nonstop.
Speaker:I'm asleep, and if my phone rings at night, I
Speaker:wake up. I leave my ringer on now, so like I would wake up.
Speaker:But all of a sudden my husband is standing there and he goes,
Speaker:your mom just called me. She fell in her bathroom
Speaker:and she's on the floor and she can't get up. I look at the clock,
Speaker:it's like 4 o'clock in the morning, and I'm like, what? What do you mean
Speaker:she's on the floor? 'Cause the way he was saying it, he wasn't saying she
Speaker:was hurt. He wasn't saying there was an emergency. He was
Speaker:just saying she's on the bathroom floor. And I'm like, okay, but what
Speaker:does that mean? What am I walking into? And he really didn't know. And I
Speaker:was like, why did she call you? I looked at my phone like, oh my
Speaker:God, I must have missed 7 calls from her. Nope. Nothing.
Speaker:I'm like, why did she call you? What? That doesn't even make sense. And he's
Speaker:like, I don't know. But she called me. She's like, I will go over there.
Speaker:He said, I will go over there with you. If she's in her bathroom, I
Speaker:don't want to walk in first because I don't know what I'm going to find.
Speaker:And I was like, that's fair, but I have no idea what the hell is
Speaker:going on. So we go over to her house and
Speaker:She's in the bathroom and she's laying flat on the bathroom floor.
Speaker:It was terrifying. There was nothing wrong, but it was just the way she was
Speaker:laying. She was laying like basically like starfished on the bathroom floor.
Speaker:And I didn't turn on the light before I got
Speaker:to her. So I went over
Speaker:to her and I guess she had put like a shirt behind her
Speaker:head because she couldn't sit up and she didn't wanna have her head on the
Speaker:hard floor. But the way it looked with the
Speaker:shadows, it looked like there was a pool of blood behind her head. And so
Speaker:I freaked the fuck out and then turned on the light and realized it was
Speaker:like a navy blue t-shirt. And I was like, oh dear fucking God.
Speaker:Oh my God. I think I got her sitting up. I don't
Speaker:remember. I know that I texted her and she didn't open the front door, which
Speaker:she can do from her phone, which told me she didn't have her phone with
Speaker:her. So I had no idea how she called my husband. And so
Speaker:then he brought me the key, 'cause I didn't even think to grab it, and
Speaker:I let myself in, and that's when I found her on the bathroom floor. She
Speaker:wasn't hurt, but she had slipped and she couldn't get back up, and then
Speaker:eventually she got so exhausted from trying to get up that she just
Speaker:basically laid down on the bathroom floor. And she said she'd been down there for
Speaker:a really long time. Nobody knows how long a long time is. I have no
Speaker:idea. So both my husband and I tried to get her up, and we were
Speaker:not able to. We could have Literally lifted her, but she's
Speaker:just in such a weird kind of body habitus that everything hurts her.
Speaker:And she like screamed when we tried to get her up cuz it was hurting
Speaker:her shoulder and whatever. And we finally got to the point where we're like, we
Speaker:have to call somebody to help. So 4 o'clock, 4:30 in the morning
Speaker:on a Sunday morning, I had to call 911
Speaker:and they got there very quickly. And I don't, maybe this is just an Orlando
Speaker:thing. I said this to someone today who insisted that this must just be a
Speaker:Either an Orlando or a Florida thing. But when we call
Speaker:for medical support via 911,
Speaker:so anything that affects like EMT
Speaker:paramedics, they send both the truck,
Speaker:the fire truck, and the ambulance, and they're
Speaker:both full. So anytime, like we were literally
Speaker:just calling cuz I needed somebody to help me lift her up off the floor.
Speaker:But they sent 8 people and they're all very nice. They all have different
Speaker:roles. They're all responsible for different things. I get that. And I guess they just
Speaker:wanna be prepared, but it is so many people.
Speaker:And so these guys come in, they were able to very
Speaker:quickly get her back up. They gave her some time. They checked her blood pressure
Speaker:to make sure that her blood pressure was high, but her blood pressure's always high.
Speaker:Also, she had just been lifted off the floor by several burly men, so that
Speaker:could make your blood pressure a little high. The people who came were great.
Speaker:She was fine. Anytime this happens, because
Speaker:she's geriatric, they do what's called a mental status
Speaker:exam where they ask certain questions that you have to answer
Speaker:so that they can make sure that you're oriented to all 4 planes.
Speaker:Time, place, person. I'm forgetting one anyway,
Speaker:but alert and oriented times 4 is what they're looking for. So. So they ask
Speaker:you where you are, they ask you what your name is, they ask a
Speaker:couple of other things. And then the last one they always ask, or the second
Speaker:to last one, is the one that they always give up on because every time
Speaker:they ask her who the president is, she says something along the lines of, that
Speaker:guy can go to hell. And then they go, okay, she's fine. She
Speaker:knows. And so I was giving all of her information to one of
Speaker:the paramedics and I hear them start doing the mental status exam. And
Speaker:I was like, he asked me something about her medications and I went,
Speaker:her medications are, hold on, she's about to yell. And then like clockwork, I
Speaker:hear her go, that guy can go to hell. And I was like, yeah, that's
Speaker:what I expected. And the guy goes, did they just ask her who the president
Speaker:is? And I said, yep. And he goes, yeah, we get that a lot. So
Speaker:anyway, they left her there because she's fine. They said, will you sign this form
Speaker:to say that you did not wanna be taken to the hospital? She said,
Speaker:absolutely. She got in bed. She promised me she would not get out of bed
Speaker:without notifying me so that I could come over if she needed help. And then
Speaker:she was able to get up and around on her own that day. And then
Speaker:the next night I said, I'm probably gonna come sleep at your house tonight because
Speaker:I don't want you getting up in the middle of the night by yourself. To
Speaker:which, this is so unlike my mother. My mother is usually like, you want to
Speaker:come spend time with me and dote over me and whatever?
Speaker:Absolutely. And she was like, no, you absolutely will not. You are going to sleep
Speaker:in your own bed. You do not need to come sleep here. I will be
Speaker:fine. And I was like, that might be a sign of some neurologic
Speaker:problem. Are you okay? Are you sure you're— this is the, this is what
Speaker:other parents do. This is not what you do. What is happening here? But I
Speaker:said, okay, then do not go to bed without your watch. 'Cause that was part
Speaker:of the thing. So when she fell, and this is part of like
Speaker:all of the things you just don't think about, when she fell, she
Speaker:didn't have her watch on. She hadn't been wearing it because she'd been in the
Speaker:hospital. And she has an Apple Watch that has done an excellent
Speaker:job of notifying us when there are problems before, but also her
Speaker:Hey Siri was not working. So the reason she ended up calling my husband
Speaker:instead of me is because she just kept screaming for Siri to
Speaker:call somebody. It finally listened when
Speaker:she said Kyle's name the 10th or 12th time.
Speaker:So it just wasn't being reliable, and that's
Speaker:the one that it happened to catch. So it's like these little things, like who
Speaker:would ever think to be concerned that Siri isn't working on your
Speaker:septuagenarian mom's phone? And then it's like
Speaker:the one time it's not working, we have an actual problem. And so
Speaker:there's stuff we just have to consider all the time that I never would've even
Speaker:thought to care about before. But she did do okay the next day.
Speaker:She did okay the next night. She made all the appointments she's supposed to make.
Speaker:She did all the things that she's supposed to do. She's not. Having issues cognitively.
Speaker:It's all physical. But it's this weird suspended place to
Speaker:be of, oh, that thing you were scared about that you
Speaker:told yourself over and over you were probably overreacting about? Oh, that happened.
Speaker:So now what do you do? I don't have space in my house to move
Speaker:her in here. I don't. We are bursting at the seams.
Speaker:I could move in with her, but I have kids.
Speaker:My kids deserve as much of me as my mom does, probably more.
Speaker:Actually, lots more. I do have this guy I'm married to who
Speaker:I want to see like occasionally, not that often. He'd be obnoxious. But
Speaker:like for the most part, I do enjoy having him around. And so just
Speaker:like moving out isn't an option. Moving out to take care of my mom is
Speaker:really not an option. But like the thing happened. The thing
Speaker:that I have been telling myself over and over is not going to happen and
Speaker:this is fine, it happened. And what do we do now? I'm
Speaker:genuinely not sure what we do now. Are there old people night nurses? I
Speaker:don't know. I think there actually are. But also, like,
Speaker:hiring somebody to be in your house all the time kind of sucks.
Speaker:It's terrifying. Like, she's given her passwords to
Speaker:Russian hackers before. I don't know. So there are so
Speaker:many things, so many decisions we have to make now that I did not anticipate
Speaker:having to make at this point in my life. That I did not think I
Speaker:would end up responsible for. And 3 or
Speaker:4 days ago, I was worried about a thing that I had no proof was
Speaker:going to happen. And now I am worried about a thing that actually very
Speaker:much did happen. And that is so much
Speaker:worse. It's so much worse. And so
Speaker:am I just gonna have to bite the bullet and move in with her for
Speaker:a little while? So while we figure this out, I don't know. Are we gonna
Speaker:have to find a full-time person to live there? Can we find like a nursing
Speaker:student who needs a place to live who might
Speaker:wanna get paid to live there and help her out? Maybe. I don't know.
Speaker:But like, there are ways to solve these problems and
Speaker:none of them are good. Like my husband and I have talked for a
Speaker:long time about the fact that eventually we are going to have to get a
Speaker:house big enough for both my mom and his mom. We've known that
Speaker:since we got married. It's a conversation we have every couple
Speaker:of months. Are we getting to that point? And we started taking it seriously a
Speaker:year or two ago, but it's not like something we can do. We can't
Speaker:just build onto our house and end up with a house big enough.
Speaker:It's not gonna happen. We're either gonna have to buy a new house or build
Speaker:a new house that has a private space for one of them, a private space
Speaker:for the other one. And then we've always assumed that it would be
Speaker:like a separate unit where they would each have a separate space that's
Speaker:disconnected from the house, but that's not
Speaker:better than her living 2 blocks away. It's a 30-second commute
Speaker:rather than a 3-minute commute, but it's the same thing. Like, she's still not in
Speaker:the house. She's still by herself.
Speaker:Anyway, so yeah, that's where we are, and that's what we're
Speaker:doing and what we're trying to survive through. But it is a weird
Speaker:suspended place to be in where Sandwiched
Speaker:between our parents and our children, trying to do the best by
Speaker:everybody. And I just wanna go on the record to say raising
Speaker:parents is 1,000 times harder than raising children.
Speaker:If my kids get extra mouthy, I can literally just pick them up and move
Speaker:them. They are both very thin and very small
Speaker:comparatively. One of them's tall and thin, the other one is just
Speaker:thin. She has no tall in her body, but if she gets
Speaker:Completely off the rails or something bad happens, I can literally just
Speaker:pick them up regardless what the ramifications are to me
Speaker:and my body and move them. And at the end of
Speaker:the day, they are scared to do most things without me. These
Speaker:adults, these, these old people think that they are
Speaker:allowed to make decisions for themselves and that they have this like
Speaker:misguided perception that they are fully functional
Speaker:adults. Who can give their passwords away to strangers on the internet.
Speaker:And that is a different experience. So anybody who tells you
Speaker:that raising kids is the hardest thing you'll ever do has clearly not been a
Speaker:full-time caretaker for their sassy, irreverent parents who have
Speaker:all of these thoughts in their brains about what they
Speaker:should and shouldn't do with their lives and like what they should be
Speaker:allowed to do with their time and money and whatever. These
Speaker:kids don't have money. They can't do anything without me.
Speaker:These old people have money and they make bad decisions with it.
Speaker:Anyway, so that's where we are. And if you have been a caretaker,
Speaker:if you are a caretaker, if you've experienced any of this, I would love to
Speaker:hear your stories too, because I know this is far more common than I think
Speaker:we talk about. And yeah, the sandwich generation is
Speaker:not for the faint of heart. This is the wildest
Speaker:timeline yet, and I've had some pretty wild timelines. And now
Speaker:we'll go to Allison, who has
Speaker:this week's Small Talk. We have a question from Nada.
Speaker:I raised my rates up 40% last month and every single client said
Speaker:yes without blinking. Now I'm angry instead of
Speaker:excited. What do I do with that? You're angry
Speaker:instead of excited? I'm just trying to process
Speaker:through why that would be the case. Is it
Speaker:because you felt like you were undercharging before and you didn't realize it, and now
Speaker:you could have been making that the whole time? I guess that's a
Speaker:valid thing to feel, but if you didn't know that you could
Speaker:charge more, or you weren't in a situation where you had to
Speaker:charge more— everybody's financial situation has changed a ton in the
Speaker:last year, especially the last 6 months, but Definitely the last year.
Speaker:And so there's a world where the kind of
Speaker:intense need to raise your rates has become a thing more
Speaker:so in the last couple of months. Or maybe you
Speaker:changed your services. Maybe you added things that are of higher value that
Speaker:people need to pay more money for. I don't know, but you didn't do anything
Speaker:wrong and your clients certainly didn't do anything wrong if they
Speaker:paid what you charged them. And also, how awesome is it if every client
Speaker:you have was just on board for you
Speaker:charging a ton more for what you do. That means you're really good at what
Speaker:you do and you have people who think you're worth it. It sounds like maybe
Speaker:you're a little bit mad at your former self, and I understand
Speaker:that, but I don't think you need to be. You make the best decisions that
Speaker:you have available at the time, and sometimes those don't look
Speaker:like the decisions that you would have made later. And sometimes you find out that
Speaker:maybe that wasn't the best thing, but you didn't have the information to make a
Speaker:different one. That's fine. There is somebody who I really
Speaker:admire, Arlan Hamilton, and I was talking to her. She is the founder of a
Speaker:VC fund and she runs a, a bunch of entrepreneur groups that I've really enjoyed
Speaker:being part of. And I was talking to her a couple months ago 'cause I
Speaker:was in this place where I just like had to figure out, I had to
Speaker:figure out what to do next. I had to figure out where, what the right
Speaker:move for business was. I was getting more heavily into consulting. It was
Speaker:right around when we were selling the company. I wasn't getting the same kind of
Speaker:consulting work that I got before, and it wasn't the same magnitude. And I just
Speaker:kept saying, the last time I did consulting, I did this with 2023 and it
Speaker:was such a different world. It didn't work like this. This is different and I
Speaker:don't know if it's right. And finally, after like maybe the third time
Speaker:I said that, she said, why does 2023 matter? That was 3 years ago.
Speaker:Drop it. Stop worrying about 2023. What's in front of you in 2026?
Speaker:That's what matters. You can use that as a roadmap or as a guideline, but
Speaker:we can't make 2023 decisions in 2026. That's not gonna happen.
Speaker:Stop worrying about 2023. And that sounds like the same thing. If you were
Speaker:undercharging before because you didn't fully realize your worth, now you have,
Speaker:and I'm proud of you for that. And you did an amazing thing, and I'm
Speaker:so proud of you that all of your clients decided that they wanted to
Speaker:stick with you despite the fact that their bill is going to change substantially.
Speaker:Good work. Good work for doing good work. Good work for
Speaker:figuring out how much you should be charging. Good work for doing the hard thing
Speaker:and having the hard conversations about your rates changing. Good for you. You
Speaker:did all the things. You have nothing to be mad about. I'm proud of you.
Speaker:Thanks for being here, guys. Have a good day. Love you. Me— like,
Speaker:I literally have to put cameras in my
Speaker:mom's house to check for feet. Like, that's right.
Speaker:Like, that's— this is bizarre. This is a weird timeline.
