The Other Sandwich Generation

Adult children with the responsibility for care of both their own children and their elderly parents. (Definition of “sandwich generation” from Webster’s Dictionary)

Forget that stuff about diapering babies and elderly parents at the same time. Been there. Done that. Glad it’s over.

This blog is about the other sandwich generation years—when a giant, day-glo CLOSED sign hangs on one’s baby-making machinery. The years when a woman’s value is not measured by her potential to make babies, but instead by her potential to make sandwiches—lots of them.

Let me be the first to say that I never thought it would come to this. 

Recently, over lunch, I confided in my older cousin Margery that I was getting fewer and fewer of those kinds of looks—those lascivious, lustful once-overs that had been coming my way from men since I was 15.

Over the decades, I had grown used to this background buzz of male attention.   I had never asked for men’s admiration (okay, a few times), but had read enough to know that men’s interest in me was not necessarily personal.  The male urge to procreate is so over-powering that men, prepubescent to prehistoric, zero in on a fertile female like a mosquito gravitates to warm flesh.

Or, as Billy Crystal’s character in the seminal baby boomer flick When Harry Met Sally puts it so eloquently about ugly, fat women, “We pretty much want to nail them, too.”

But now, young men had taken to calling me “ma’am” and treating me as if I were, well, middle-aged.  In fact, I am middle-aged, but I as a card-carrying baby boomer, I truly thought I was frozen in time; forever young in the summer of love.

“Just wait until you’re 60,” Margery said, taking a sip of coffee.  “You become invisible.”

I didn’t believe her.

My new unseen status dawns slowly, creeping across my face leaving tiny brown footprints that I hope pass for freckles; creasing my face so that even in repose it still holds an expression.

The truth hits home at my annual gynecological exam with a new doctor.  “Date of last period?” she demands crisply.

“Ummm,” I said, trying to think. (Or, am I trying to buy time?)

I leave the doctor’s office feeling devalued.  In certain cultures, a woman can be returned to her parents if she’s infertile.  Or, if she’s done producing, her husband has every right to add a new fertile female to the family unit.  My parents are dead and we’re not Muslims or Mormons, so those options are out.  Why then do I feel so empty?

At Rite-Aid, I stare ruefully at the “Feminine Hygiene” sign hanging overhead. A young man passes behind me and I automatically grab a package of tampons and put them into my shopping basket.

I’ve got news for women who think this fools anyone.  Men can smell a fake.  At least when it comes to fertility, they can.  It’s something to do with cones in the nose and pheromones; science stuff.

Our nipples may stand at attention when George Clooney walks past us, but men’s entire bodies, pelvis-first, rotate like flower faces to the sun when Fertile Myrtle cruises by.  They cannot help it; I don’t blame them. Their seeds cry out for replication, “Drop us in that hole!  No, that one!  Oooo—va-va-voom, that one!  How about all of them?”

How fondly I remember my past fecundity and the resultant male attention that came with it. It comforts me when I pick up my 15-year-old son from school and ask, “How was your day?”

“Fine.”

“Anything special happen?”

“Nope.”

“Nothing?”

Silence.

“Want a turkey sandwich when we get home?”

“Yeah! That’d be great, Mom!”

It’s official. I’m a now member of the other sandwich generation.