Couples, Coping

By Francine Russo

For most of the past two years, Jeff Roberts, 53, spent virtually every weekend away from his wife Doris, also 53. Not for sales trips, not for hunting with the boys and certainly not for anything illicit. Jeff has been caring for his 86-year-old parents at their nearby home in southeastern Ohio. After his mother had a stroke in 1999, the family hired a five-day-a-week live-in caretaker for her and her husband, a dialysis patient who had lost one leg. (He died last June.) When the care worker took off on Friday nights, Jeff stepped in.

This routine was burdensome in many ways but especially in the toll it took on the Roberts' marriage of 33 years. "My wife and I started out working as a team," says Jeff, "but gradually she became more and more distant, a little more resentful of the parents and jealous of the time I spent with them." Doris, whose surviving parent--her mother--is still healthy, wishes she could have been more understanding. "Jeff's parents were wonderful people, and this is an obligation you feel in your heart," she says. "Even so, this is a phase of your marriage that you hear about, you read about, but you're never really ready for."

The Robertses are one of a fast-increasing number of boomer couples who are feeling the strain of dealing with elderly parents no longer able to manage on their own. The challenges range from running errands locally a few hours a week to making arrangements from a distance or, in the most difficult cases, providing long-term live-in care for an Alzheimer's patient.

"This now affects many more families," reports Donna Wagner, a professor of gerontology at Towson University in Maryland. "Being a caregiver is becoming normative in the work force." It is also becoming even more common among nonworking spouses, who have traditionally taken this role. Sandra Timmermann, a gerontologist at MetLife's Mature Market Institute, notes that 75% of caregivers are women: "Often just as women are ready to break out with their own careers, an elderly parent's needs intervene. It leaves the marriage in the lurch."

Among the most squeezed by this problem are couples in the "sandwich generation," who must balance the needs of parents and young children. Nancy and Tony Milecki, 35 and 37, of Palatine, Ill., have been helping out her parents for the past five years while taking care of their kids, 6 and 3. Nancy's dad is in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and her mom has dementia. Since Nancy, a homemaker, and her sister each live about 15 minutes from their parents, they do all their laundry, cleaning and shopping. Tony, a construction-industry sales rep, helps too. "There are days when I've been at my parents' all day, and I'm on a short fuse, and my husband and I don't get along," says Nancy. "We're angry at all the stuff not done at home." Says Tony: "We both work on having empathy. But I feel like we're not running our lives; our lives are running us."

Compounding such strains are pressures that discourage couples from expressing how they feel. "They're afraid to say the parent is the source of stress in a marriage," says Pauline Boss, a family psychologist at the University of Minnesota, "because their culture has taught them it's their duty to take care of family." Doris Roberts agrees: "You feel selfish saying 'I'd like to be out playing golf today.' You think, Good children do this."

The stresses impinge on all couples, but the effects can vary. In some cases the marriage can actually be strengthened. "It either brings you together or pushes you apart," says gerontology professor Wagner. Charlene Lowry, 48, a corporate trainer in Centennial, Colo., views her husband Jim, also 48, as her "anchor," practically and emotionally. While she works, her husband runs an Internet consulting firm from home and watches her dad, who's in the late stages of Alzheimer's and lives with them. Jim also greets their 14-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter after school. "He's always philosophical about my dad," says Charlene. "When Dad lets the toilet overflow for the 10th time, I get emotional. But Jim never gets upset."

Even though they get out together only for short intervals now--"A fun time is going together to Wal-Mart at 10 at night," she says--their joint effort has enhanced their marriage. "It's given us more common ground," she says. "There are more disagreements about how to raise teens, but we can agree about Dad and be part of a team working toward the common good. Also you see the glue families are made of and what families are for."

What spells the difference between couples like the Lowrys and those who feel torn apart by the burden? One factor is a couple's goals at the start of their marriage, suggests David Leckey, 53, a writer and the husband of Margaret Neal, 49, a gerontologist who studies caregiving. "If you go into a marriage thinking, 'This is about me and my wife,' family is a drag on that. We're into the idea of the extended family, that it's all part of the package," he says of his marriage of 13 years. Three years ago, Leckey supported a move by Neal's parents from Indianapolis, Ind., to a retirement community near them in Portland, Ore., where Neal can stop by frequently to help with medicine and financial details and Leckey can help as well. "I feel what I'm asking is fair," she says, "because I helped raise my stepdaughters. But sometimes I feel torn between doing things with my husband and taking care of my parents." Leckey admits that sometimes "you have days you just hate it, and you go through some ugly stuff." But he says, "Overall, I consider it an enriching experience."

Leckey and Neal's children are grown, but couples like the Lowrys and the Mileckis, who work and take care of kids as well as parents, are surveyed in a new study by Margaret B. Neal and her colleague Leslie B. Hammer of Portland State University. In Dual-Earner Couples in the Sandwiched Generation: How They Manage Their Work and Family Demands, the authors identify strategies that couples adopt to handle their stress. They either increase their emotional resources or decrease the demands on themselves.

One move is to seek emotional support--from family, friends and co-workers. This includes talking on the phone with friends, taking time to be alone with your spouse, joining a support group, going to church and finding humor wherever possible. Jim and Charlene Lowry instituted a 30-day check-in; each month they ask each other, "Are you still O.K. with this?", about continuing to care for her dad at home. So far, both have said yes. "It's not crushing us," she says, "because we're looking at 30-day chunks, a month-to-month lease." Another key strategy is to prioritize. Some spouses--primarily wives--choose to work fewer hours or put their careers on hold. Others opt to ignore certain household chores. On the positive side, they make schedules for family life and couple time, and they make backup plans for child or elder care.

One common strategy, however, makes couples feel worse: cutting back on their favorite activities or their social lives. "People who decreased their social involvement," Neal reports, "were more depressed and had less general well-being. It's likely that they also had less satisfaction with their marriage."

Doris and Jeff Roberts gave up a lot of their social life--and missed it terribly--but they found other ways to make their marriage stronger. They would go for long walks and talk, talk, talk. "By the time you get home," says Doris, "you've kind of worked through it." When Jeff's dad was still alive, they left him and Jeff's mother in a respite-care home several times so they could get away for a weekend and once for a whole week. Now that his mom is alone, in an assisted-living facility, which she enjoys, Jeff still attends to her frequently. But at his wife's urging, he asks for help. For example, he suggested that his mother ask one of her friends to drive her to church on Sundays so that he could spend that time with Doris.

To get through the hard times, all these couples tell themselves their trials won't last forever. Take the long view, they counsel. For the Lowrys, that view is represented by their grandson Ethan, 2. "We'll say, 'It's been so hard, but we'll see Ethan on Saturday night,' and we have that common thing to look forward to," says Charlene. "Seeing him reminds us that life is not all about old; it's also about the promise of youth."