My husband's 70 year old mom lives next door and is in cognitive decline. It's not dementia, but it's like it. I hear the same stories over and over again because she doesn't remember she told it to us every other day for months. She brings up things like they happened yesterday, but actually it was three years ago. I have to schedule her appointments, take her to her appointments, schedule her trips and arrange for assistance when she goes on them. We cook her dinners because she can't be trusted with the stove and she doesn't eat enough if we don't serve her portions. My 5 year old never knows what he's going to get when he goes over there. Sometimes she's amazing with him and other days she treats him like he's two (like she really thinks he's that old). We used to get along so beautifully and now she drives me nuts.

We also take care of my husband's 93 year old paternal grandma (his dad died several years ago and his aunt a year before him, so hubby and his brother are her only living relatives - and my mother-in-law hates her guts). She's in a retirement community near us and we also take her to all her many appointments. We just spent the last three months trying to get her working hearing aids. OMG. We go in and the tech says she needs to wear these big ones that seal her ear (80% hearing loss). She insists she has tiny ears and needs the smallest ones. She pushes them all the way down to her ear drum and can't hear a thing. All we hear is reverb from her hearing aids. We keep going back and he tells her she needs these bigger hearing aids because her loss is severe. She tells him no, don't you dare put those hearing aids in my ears. He's now trying children's sizes and just about everything he can find, but none are for her level of hearing loss, but she insists she can hear by the time we leave. Two days later she's saying she can't hear anything. This was after so many visits. I'm telling you...we were about to lose our minds. We can't talk to her because she can't hear and she doesn't agree with what we write down. I had to take her to two different doctors appointments and translate via paper pad everything the doctor said or asked. My husband finally sits her down and writes out that we are going to go and try a different kind of hearing aid at the next appointment (but we all got the flu, so it was delayed). She calls him up after we recover and says, "I think I need to get those bigger hearing aids and not try to push them down into my ears". That's what we have been saying from day one. She had them custom fitted and gets the finished ones next week. Fingers crossed that this is the end of needing to deal with cantankerous deaf Granny. She was wondering why none of her great grandkids wanted to visit her lately.

So yeah, the frustrations of being in the sandwich generation. We also have a 20 year old in college and the 5 year old I mentioned in kindergarten. It feels like a lot sometimes. The 5 year old was a surprise, but I guess it worked out. We thought we were about to be empty nesters, but it doesn't matter because we can't go anywhere anyway now that we are in the unpaid business of elder care.