How to balance work, kids and an elderly parent: the split week

If you typed how to balance work, kids and an elderly parent into a phone at 11pm, you already know the honest answer is that you cannot, not the way you are doing it now. Right now you are running three calendars in your head: the job, the kids, and Mom. You are the only person who can see all three, so you are the only person who can be blamed when they collide. The split week takes the calendars out of your head and puts them on the fridge, where other people can see them too. Once other people can see the collisions, other people can cover them.

Draw two rows, not a to-do list

Take one sheet of paper and turn it sideways. Draw a line across the middle. The top half is the kids' row. The bottom half is Mom's row. Mark Monday through Friday across both. Your job is not a row. Your job is the background, the hours you are simply not available, and it is the same every week, so shade it lightly across both rows and move on.

Now fill in only what repeats. Not this week's dentist appointment, not the one-off field trip. Practice on Monday and Thursday. The game night that is always Tuesday in the fall. Pickup at 3:15 if nobody drives yet. In Mom's row: the standing doctor visit, the day she needs groceries, dinner every night if she is not making it herself, and the block of afternoon she should not spend alone, if that has started.

Most women who do this are surprised by how short the list is. The dread was in holding it all in your head, not in the number of items. A week has about forty waking hours between the end of the school day and bedtime, and you are about to find out that only six or eight of them are the problem.

Find the yellow

Take a highlighter and mark every hour where both rows have ink. Those are the collisions. On this site we color them lemon, and the homepage shows a filled-in week as a method, not a story about one household. Almost every family finds the same four:

• The afternoon window, 3pm to 7pm on school days. The kids come out of the building, need a ride, need food, need to be somewhere by 5:30. Mom needs the same things in a different house, and the late afternoon is often when she is least steady. This is the collision that breaks families, and it has its own page.
• The mid-day appointment. A 2pm doctor visit in Pacific means leaving work at 1, and it means you are still in a waiting room when the bell rings in Eureka.
• The evening game. Tuesday at 7. The one your son has already asked about twice. Mom's dinner is at 5, and by the time she has eaten and settled, the first quarter is over.
• The weekend. Groceries for two houses, laundry for two houses, one teenager who wants a ride to a friend's and another who needs help with an application, and a husband who would like to see you.

Which collisions families hand off first

Here is the order that tends to work, learned from a lot of pickup-line conversations, not from a study. Hand off the afternoon window first, because it repeats every day and it is the one where being late has consequences for both generations. Hand off the mid-day appointment second, because one adult in a waiting room does exactly what you would do there and Mom gets home safely either way. Keep the evening game for yourself, and cover Mom's dinner some other way that night, because the game is the thing your kid will remember. Keep the doctor conversations for yourself too, because a hired person cannot ask the questions you would ask.

The weekend is where a husband or a sibling belongs. The Family Caregiver Alliance says the discord in families most often surfaces from the unequal division of caregiving duties, with one sibling taking the primary role because she lives closest or is seen as having fewer obligations. You live closest. You are the one with fewer obligations in your brother's mind, because he has never watched you drive from Pacific to a soccer field in Ballwin in twenty minutes. Show him the yellow.

Where the hours come from

You have four sources of hours, and the trick is to use all four rather than exhausting one.

• Family, by meeting and not by text. The Family Caregiver Alliance's guide to holding a family meeting says everyone who is or will be part of the caregiving team should be in the room. Put the split week on the table. Ask each person to take one yellow cell. A brother in Kansas City can own the Tuesday evening phone call that keeps Mom company through dinner, and that counts.
• Your employer. The federal leave law can be taken in separate blocks or as a reduced schedule, which is how a Thursday 2pm appointment becomes a protected absence instead of a favor. The FMLA page walks through eligibility and what to say to HR. The Caregiver Action Network's advice to sandwich caregivers is plain: talk to your employer about flexible working arrangements.
• Public programs. Missouri's Senior Resource Line, 1-800-235-5503, routes you to the Area Agency on Aging for Mom's ZIP code, which in St. Louis, St. Charles, Franklin and Jefferson counties is Aging Ahead. That is the door to meals and caregiver support, and the west county map lists what sits behind it.
• Hired hours. The National Institute on Aging describes respite as short-term relief for a primary caregiver that can last anywhere from a few hours to several weeks, at home or elsewhere. A few hours, two or three afternoons a week, at Mom's house, is respite. It is also the only source of hours that does not run out of goodwill.

What the split week does to the guilt

The guilt runs both ways because right now every hour you give one of them is visibly taken from the other. Once the afternoon window is covered by someone whose job it is, your presence at the game stops being a theft from Mom, and your Thursday at Mom's stops being a theft from the kids. Mental Health America, in its piece on caregiving and the sandwich generation, says anger and resentment are common in this position and calls those feelings normal. Normal, but not permanent. The Family Caregiver Alliance reports that about 50 percent of caregivers get no outside help at all, and that most, when asked, say they are doing fine. You said that last week. The split week is how you stop saying it.