China’s sandwich generation?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

China’s sandwich generation?

1. One-time real estate agent Evelyn Rehg was showing a house to a prospective buyer four years ago when an alarming phone call came from the retirement facility where her mother lived.

“They told me I either had to get my mother immediately into a mental hospital or she would be evicted,” said Rehg, 48, of Crestwood, Missouri.

“I panicked,” she added. “I didn’t know how to handle it insurance-wise, what hospital to take her to or anything like that.”

Rehg is a member of the so-called sandwich generation, generally defined as those in their 40s and 50s who are squeezed between caring for both their own children and their aging parents. The financial and emotional cost of care can be overwhelming.

Rehg’s mother, 80, suffers from mild dementia, severe anxiety and manic behaviors that now are treated properly. But prior to the phone call, her mom’s anxiety had become so debilitating that she began calling Rehg’s cell phone upward of 200 times a day.

In desperation, Rehg, then still working in real estate, changed her number because she needed her phone for work. So instead, her mother started incessantly calling the front desk at the retirement facility.

“They put up with it for about a day and a half,” Rehg said. “Then they called me.”

Rehg also has two children, who were then 12 and 9 and needed supervision and care. That meant that her husband, Jon, had to adjust his work schedule to tend to their needs.