My consistent concern is that she's
gonna fall, and she's gonna fall and hurt herself, which has happened
before, and I'm not gonna know, or nobody's gonna
know. We were literally just calling because I needed somebody to help
me lift her up off the floor, but they sent 8 people.
And they're all very nice. They all have different roles. They're all responsible for different
things. I get that. And I guess they just want to be prepared,
but It is so many people. And also, don't
let old people run out of their artificial sweetener. They will get upset
and they will riot, and that gets dangerous.
Boop. Hi everybody, I'm Lauren Howard.
Welcome to Different Not Broken, which is our
podcast on exactly that, that there are a lot of people in this world walking
around feeling broken, and the reality is you're just different and that's fine.
I broke the sacred Pact of
Daughters of My Mother. Accidentally. She was back in the
hospital last week, and I let her run out of Equal.
And I didn't have any Equal at my house, so I
couldn't bring her any. So I had to go to the store to buy Equal,
which felt incorrect. Equal feels like the kind of thing that you
should never pay for. You should always get it free because you stole a
bunch from the coffee shop. Like, it doesn't feel like a thing you should ever
pay for. But I bought a box of Equal. Did you know that a
box of Equal costs $6 for carcinogens?
$6. So anyway, I went and bought a box of
Equal, and I checked out, and I brought it to her. And she
was like, why did you go shopping? I had some at my house. And I
was like, the store seemed less complicated than going to your house, even though
she lives 2 blocks from me and I have a key. And I know where
everything is. It just seemed like a lot. It seemed
a much more direct option to just go to the
sugar aisle, and it was pretty fast. Also, I've
apparently become that person who's like, in my day this was—
which is ironic. But also, as I was checking out at the store,
I looked up and I saw someone who
very much looked like a guy I went And so
while I was trying to figure out who he looked like, I
realized and then went, oh, that can't be him. That guy looks
like a 40-year-old man. And I thought about it and I realized
that is correct. That would be exactly— yeah, no, that's it. Yeah,
like, I'm almost 40. He didn't stay 18. That's not how it
works. And then I just was like, oh, beans. It's
like, what do you do with that? The people around you age while you do.
That seems incorrect. I don't know if that's what I signed up for. And so
that was just like a cosmic letdown. So I'm headed to the hospital
to see my mother who was in the hospital again, and
again faced with my own mortality while heading to the
hospital. And I was like, all of this feels very cruel.
I don't think I did anything to deserve any of this. So I got
myself a mango drink and I drank my sorrows. It didn't have alcohol in it,
it just had sugar. That's how I drink my sorrows. It's just through copious amounts
of sugar and syrup drinks. But yeah, I don't know if you know this, but
we're old. Somebody let us get old. And I don't know
when it happened because I am so sure, like super,
super sure that I was in college
like yesterday. I was even in high school
like yesterday. I still can't believe that they let me graduate high school.
I still have dreams almost every night that I
forgot to graduate high school or that I didn't take a class that I
needed to graduate college. Literally every night, the same
dream that I forgot to do whatever I needed to do to
graduate, and somebody's gonna find out
despite the fact that it has been a lot more years than I
care to admit. So there is a world where
That guy you know looks like a 40-year-old man because he's a 40-year-old man,
and that seems unfair to me. I do not appreciate that.
And also, don't let old people run out of their artificial sweetener. They will get
upset and they will riot, and that gets dangerous. So I'm in this
weird kind of suspended place. I don't even know— I
don't even know how to describe it. It's just a place, and it is
not a physical place. It's like a Mental, emotional
place that if you've been listening at
all, you know that I have been caretaking for my mom a lot, which
was never supposed to be my lot in life. I said it was
never going to be my lot in life. Not supposed to be, but I said
I was never going to do it. And then here I am doing it, which
is shocking to no one except me, by the way.
Shocking to exactly no one. But for the most
part, it's kind of her and I against the world, and that has all
sorts of implications. My husband is very instrumental and super helpful and takes
care of a bunch of stuff for us. And I do have a brother who's
nearby who will help out when he can, but he's not the
decision-making type. He is not the critical thinking type. He is the be at
this place at this time and do this thing type. And so I still have
to kind of run the show even when he's involved, which I again swore I
would never do. And yet here we are. Yay,
eldest daughter. I was one of the full-time caretakers for my dad. There were
4 of us, and we were basically at his
house taking care of him all the time except to sleep. And one of my
siblings lived there, so he was there all the time. And then I
came and went. I had literally just had a baby, so I would bring the
baby back and forth, and she was literally a couple of weeks
old. We're not talking about infant stage, like she was still a newborn, and I
was bringing her back and forth. The anxiety was constant
then. It was about his eventual
demise. It was not about his day-to-day wellbeing. I was
not concerned that while I was gone,
something was going to happen to him other than
the worst possible thing. Like, I was concerned that was gonna happen. That wasn't my
anxiety. My anxiety was this stage of life, the fact that he was so sick.
But there were things that, as much as I worried all the time and it
was stressful all the time, I didn't have to worry about. Because there were other
humans there. And that is just not the case this time.
It is so wildly different. And so my
stress level about her general wellbeing is not nearly as high as
it was when we were caretaking for my dad, because she is
not as sick as he was by any means. But my stress
level about her needs is 10 times higher
because it's just me. Again, my husband does help out and I do have a
brother who can help out, but nobody's jumping in and doing
things unless I ask them to. Unless I'm directing traffic, nothing's
getting done. She does do some things for herself. And so, went out of
town 2 weeks ago, and I didn't leave anybody instructions
on what to do with my kid, but I left instructions on what to do
with my mother. And like, here's the key to her house, and this is how
you get in, and if you need to do things, and you need to text
her this, and ask her to do this, and make sure she does— like, I
literally left instructions. On how to take care of my mother.
But my kids, I was like, they'll be fine. They can scrounge for Pop-Tarts.
It's fine. They're fine. Also, like, my husband is a competent
adult who parents and doesn't babysit, so he didn't need
instructions from me on how to take care of our children. He's fully capable of
doing that as a grown-ass man. I don't have that
for my mother because that guy died, which is rude.
So Like trying to figure out what the right level of
anything is for her because she is
ambulatory, she is able to get around, but she also falls
and she's had a couple of nasty falls. She's also had a couple of just
like innocuous falls. Like she was fine, she just needed help getting up.
She lives alone. There's nobody in her house with her. We considered having
somebody move in there, but we haven't been able to figure out what the right
balance is there. Like how much freedom does she need? I'm not letting her drive
right now. So anytime she has to go to a doctor, I have to take
her. Sometimes I can arrange with my I'd rather have him take her, but certainly
not letting her drive right now. And so it's just like
every day is, first off, like, are we doing any of this right? Are there
resources we should be using that I don't know about? Like, I wasn't paying
attention to her home health company and she's supposed to be getting PT
multiple times a week and they didn't show up for 10 days. And she
forgot to tell me that they hadn't been there and that they had canceled a
couple of times. And the home health company certainly didn't tell me. And I'm like,
my goal is to get this woman back up and functioning and you guys don't
show up for 10 days? Why do I have to manage the home health
company to make sure that they send somebody? Who is supposed to be
taking care of this? And so it's just stuff like that all the time.
But my biggest fear is that she's going to fall and she's gonna fall while
she's alone. There's little things that you just don't think about that in the
way we live currently become this like cascading issue.
So when she was in the hospital, she kept saying, this weird thing keeps
coming up on my phone about my voice services not being available.
And I reset something and the prompt went away and I figured I fixed it.
But she said, like she had said multiple times before that, and I had been
there when she had tried to use Siri to like unlock the front door or
turn off lights and it, it just hadn't worked and she just wasn't
responding. And so I went in and tried to reset Hey Siri and do all
the things, but like as soon as that's not an immediate problem in front of
you, you don't stop. think about the fact that your mom's voice activation is not
working. Like, there's 10,000 other really important things to be thinking about.
That's not the one you're thinking about. And so
I had known there was a problem. I didn't realize it was still a problem.
I didn't know we needed to test for it still, but I did know that
there was a problem or there had been a problem in the past.
And my consistent concern is that
she's gonna fall. And she's gonna fall and hurt herself, which has happened
before, and I'm not gonna know, or nobody's gonna know.
And so we're doing some things to take care of her and to take care
of that. I check in on her all the time because it's the right thing
to do, and I want to make sure she's okay. But like, mostly I want
to make sure that she's upright and that she hasn't slipped on something or whatever.
So 2 things happened over the weekend. One of them is funny, one of them
is less so. Saturday I wanted to make sure she had food because she had
just come home from the hospital the day before. And so I knew she didn't
have groceries in the house. We got her something she likes to drink, but I
didn't think she had food. And so I texted her. I said, do you need
lunch or groceries? And she didn't answer me. And I was like,
okay. And so I text again. I said, hello? No answer. Sometimes she misses the
first one. She usually responds to the second one. So I did something I never
do. I called her and she
sent me to voicemail. And I was like, excuse?
And I might have had the little Nancy Guthrie moment where I was like, did
somebody kidnap my mother because she just sent me to voicemail? But
went down that rabbit hole. Not that, like, if somebody kidnapped my mother,
they would bring her back in 2 seconds. I would not worry about them keeping
her out for long. So then she called me back probably like 5
minutes later because I sent her a text that said, IS EVERYTHING OK? In all
caps because she was not responding to me. And I needed to make sure that
she was not dead on her kitchen floor. And
I was grabbing my keys to her house. She lives close enough away that I
can walk there in about 3 minutes. So I was
grabbing my keys and literally just gonna walk over there and make sure that she
was not dead on the floor somewhere. And then she calls me back
and I was like, are you alive? And she goes,
yeah, I'm alive. Kind of hedged. And I was like,
are you sure? And she goes, I didn't want
you to get mad at me, but I went out with my friend. And I
was like, my, how the tables have turned.
How many times did I get yelled at for the completely
innocuous trips I took out with my friends, probably to do things similar
to what she did with her friend on Saturday?
That is the kind of trouble I got into as a teenager. And the number
of times I got yelled at for going out with friends. And I was like,
oh, oh, you went out with a friend and you didn't tell me? You didn't
think to check in before you left? You didn't send me a text or a
note? And she was like, well, I didn't want you to get upset. And I
was like, well, you know, here I am thinking that you're dead on the side
of the road. And she finally goes, I'm fine, Mom. And I was like,
mm-hmm, mm-hmm. See what that's like?
So anyway, she texted me a couple hours later and said she was home and
staying in for the night. It was like 5:30. It was not late. So she
was in for the night. I made sure she didn't need anything. I went to
bed kind of early, I think, feeling like, oh good, I was glad
she got out. She was out, she was walking around, she went to
HomeGoods and terrorized people with a shopping cart. Good for her,
good for her. I went to bed not thinking much about it,
and okay, we survived day 1 of whatever this
setup is, and I'm like Constantly thinking about, all right, we need to go to
the gastroenterologist. She needs— I need to find her a neurologist. We need to make
sure that the cardiologist has an appointment set up. She's not waiting for November
to see the cardiologist. We need to find a different cardiologist. Like, this is constantly
running through my brain. Do we need a caretaker? Do we need somebody to move
in with her? Does she need somebody who's physically there? It's nonstop.
I'm asleep, and if my phone rings at night, I
wake up. I leave my ringer on now, so like I would wake up.
But all of a sudden my husband is standing there and he goes,
your mom just called me. She fell in her bathroom
and she's on the floor and she can't get up. I look at the clock,
it's like 4 o'clock in the morning, and I'm like, what? What do you mean
she's on the floor? 'Cause the way he was saying it, he wasn't saying she
was hurt. He wasn't saying there was an emergency. He was
just saying she's on the bathroom floor. And I'm like, okay, but what
does that mean? What am I walking into? And he really didn't know. And I
was like, why did she call you? I looked at my phone like, oh my
God, I must have missed 7 calls from her. Nope. Nothing.
I'm like, why did she call you? What? That doesn't even make sense. And he's
like, I don't know. But she called me. She's like, I will go over there.
He said, I will go over there with you. If she's in her bathroom, I
don't want to walk in first because I don't know what I'm going to find.
And I was like, that's fair, but I have no idea what the hell is
going on. So we go over to her house and
She's in the bathroom and she's laying flat on the bathroom floor.
It was terrifying. There was nothing wrong, but it was just the way she was
laying. She was laying like basically like starfished on the bathroom floor.
And I didn't turn on the light before I got
to her. So I went over
to her and I guess she had put like a shirt behind her
head because she couldn't sit up and she didn't wanna have her head on the
hard floor. But the way it looked with the
shadows, it looked like there was a pool of blood behind her head. And so
I freaked the fuck out and then turned on the light and realized it was
like a navy blue t-shirt. And I was like, oh dear fucking God.
Oh my God. I think I got her sitting up. I don't
remember. I know that I texted her and she didn't open the front door, which
she can do from her phone, which told me she didn't have her phone with
her. So I had no idea how she called my husband. And so
then he brought me the key, 'cause I didn't even think to grab it, and
I let myself in, and that's when I found her on the bathroom floor. She
wasn't hurt, but she had slipped and she couldn't get back up, and then
eventually she got so exhausted from trying to get up that she just
basically laid down on the bathroom floor. And she said she'd been down there for
a really long time. Nobody knows how long a long time is. I have no
idea. So both my husband and I tried to get her up, and we were
not able to. We could have Literally lifted her, but she's
just in such a weird kind of body habitus that everything hurts her.
And she like screamed when we tried to get her up cuz it was hurting
her shoulder and whatever. And we finally got to the point where we're like, we
have to call somebody to help. So 4 o'clock, 4:30 in the morning
on a Sunday morning, I had to call 911
and they got there very quickly. And I don't, maybe this is just an Orlando
thing. I said this to someone today who insisted that this must just be a
Either an Orlando or a Florida thing. But when we call
for medical support via 911,
so anything that affects like EMT
paramedics, they send both the truck,
the fire truck, and the ambulance, and they're
both full. So anytime, like we were literally
just calling cuz I needed somebody to help me lift her up off the floor.
But they sent 8 people and they're all very nice. They all have different
roles. They're all responsible for different things. I get that. And I guess they just
wanna be prepared, but it is so many people.
And so these guys come in, they were able to very
quickly get her back up. They gave her some time. They checked her blood pressure
to make sure that her blood pressure was high, but her blood pressure's always high.
Also, she had just been lifted off the floor by several burly men, so that
could make your blood pressure a little high. The people who came were great.
She was fine. Anytime this happens, because
she's geriatric, they do what's called a mental status
exam where they ask certain questions that you have to answer
so that they can make sure that you're oriented to all 4 planes.
Time, place, person. I'm forgetting one anyway,
but alert and oriented times 4 is what they're looking for. So. So they ask
you where you are, they ask you what your name is, they ask a
couple of other things. And then the last one they always ask, or the second
to last one, is the one that they always give up on because every time
they ask her who the president is, she says something along the lines of, that
guy can go to hell. And then they go, okay, she's fine. She
knows. And so I was giving all of her information to one of
the paramedics and I hear them start doing the mental status exam. And
I was like, he asked me something about her medications and I went,
her medications are, hold on, she's about to yell. And then like clockwork, I
hear her go, that guy can go to hell. And I was like, yeah, that's
what I expected. And the guy goes, did they just ask her who the president
is? And I said, yep. And he goes, yeah, we get that a lot. So
anyway, they left her there because she's fine. They said, will you sign this form
to say that you did not wanna be taken to the hospital? She said,
absolutely. She got in bed. She promised me she would not get out of bed
without notifying me so that I could come over if she needed help. And then
she was able to get up and around on her own that day. And then
the next night I said, I'm probably gonna come sleep at your house tonight because
I don't want you getting up in the middle of the night by yourself. To
which, this is so unlike my mother. My mother is usually like, you want to
come spend time with me and dote over me and whatever?
Absolutely. And she was like, no, you absolutely will not. You are going to sleep
in your own bed. You do not need to come sleep here. I will be
fine. And I was like, that might be a sign of some neurologic
problem. Are you okay? Are you sure you're— this is the, this is what
other parents do. This is not what you do. What is happening here? But I
said, okay, then do not go to bed without your watch. 'Cause that was part
of the thing. So when she fell, and this is part of like
all of the things you just don't think about, when she fell, she
didn't have her watch on. She hadn't been wearing it because she'd been in the
hospital. And she has an Apple Watch that has done an excellent
job of notifying us when there are problems before, but also her
Hey Siri was not working. So the reason she ended up calling my husband
instead of me is because she just kept screaming for Siri to
call somebody. It finally listened when
she said Kyle's name the 10th or 12th time.
So it just wasn't being reliable, and that's
the one that it happened to catch. So it's like these little things, like who
would ever think to be concerned that Siri isn't working on your
septuagenarian mom's phone? And then it's like
the one time it's not working, we have an actual problem. And so
there's stuff we just have to consider all the time that I never would've even
thought to care about before. But she did do okay the next day.
She did okay the next night. She made all the appointments she's supposed to make.
She did all the things that she's supposed to do. She's not. Having issues cognitively.
It's all physical. But it's this weird suspended place to
be of, oh, that thing you were scared about that you
told yourself over and over you were probably overreacting about? Oh, that happened.
So now what do you do? I don't have space in my house to move
her in here. I don't. We are bursting at the seams.
I could move in with her, but I have kids.
My kids deserve as much of me as my mom does, probably more.
Actually, lots more. I do have this guy I'm married to who
I want to see like occasionally, not that often. He'd be obnoxious. But
like for the most part, I do enjoy having him around. And so just
like moving out isn't an option. Moving out to take care of my mom is
really not an option. But like the thing happened. The thing
that I have been telling myself over and over is not going to happen and
this is fine, it happened. And what do we do now? I'm
genuinely not sure what we do now. Are there old people night nurses? I
don't know. I think there actually are. But also, like,
hiring somebody to be in your house all the time kind of sucks.
It's terrifying. Like, she's given her passwords to
Russian hackers before. I don't know. So there are so
many things, so many decisions we have to make now that I did not anticipate
having to make at this point in my life. That I did not think I
would end up responsible for. And 3 or
4 days ago, I was worried about a thing that I had no proof was
going to happen. And now I am worried about a thing that actually very
much did happen. And that is so much
worse. It's so much worse. And so
am I just gonna have to bite the bullet and move in with her for
a little while? So while we figure this out, I don't know. Are we gonna
have to find a full-time person to live there? Can we find like a nursing
student who needs a place to live who might
wanna get paid to live there and help her out? Maybe. I don't know.
But like, there are ways to solve these problems and
none of them are good. Like my husband and I have talked for a
long time about the fact that eventually we are going to have to get a
house big enough for both my mom and his mom. We've known that
since we got married. It's a conversation we have every couple
of months. Are we getting to that point? And we started taking it seriously a
year or two ago, but it's not like something we can do. We can't
just build onto our house and end up with a house big enough.
It's not gonna happen. We're either gonna have to buy a new house or build
a new house that has a private space for one of them, a private space
for the other one. And then we've always assumed that it would be
like a separate unit where they would each have a separate space that's
disconnected from the house, but that's not
better than her living 2 blocks away. It's a 30-second commute
rather than a 3-minute commute, but it's the same thing. Like, she's still not in
the house. She's still by herself.
Anyway, so yeah, that's where we are, and that's what we're
doing and what we're trying to survive through. But it is a weird
suspended place to be in where Sandwiched
between our parents and our children, trying to do the best by
everybody. And I just wanna go on the record to say raising
parents is 1,000 times harder than raising children.
If my kids get extra mouthy, I can literally just pick them up and move
them. They are both very thin and very small
comparatively. One of them's tall and thin, the other one is just
thin. She has no tall in her body, but if she gets
Completely off the rails or something bad happens, I can literally just
pick them up regardless what the ramifications are to me
and my body and move them. And at the end of
the day, they are scared to do most things without me. These
adults, these, these old people think that they are
allowed to make decisions for themselves and that they have this like
misguided perception that they are fully functional
adults. Who can give their passwords away to strangers on the internet.
And that is a different experience. So anybody who tells you
that raising kids is the hardest thing you'll ever do has clearly not been a
full-time caretaker for their sassy, irreverent parents who have
all of these thoughts in their brains about what they
should and shouldn't do with their lives and like what they should be
allowed to do with their time and money and whatever. These
kids don't have money. They can't do anything without me.
These old people have money and they make bad decisions with it.
Anyway, so that's where we are. And if you have been a caretaker,
if you are a caretaker, if you've experienced any of this, I would love to
hear your stories too, because I know this is far more common than I think
we talk about. And yeah, the sandwich generation is
not for the faint of heart. This is the wildest
timeline yet, and I've had some pretty wild timelines. And now
we'll go to Allison, who has
this week's Small Talk. We have a question from Nada.
I raised my rates up 40% last month and every single client said
yes without blinking. Now I'm angry instead of
excited. What do I do with that? You're angry
instead of excited? I'm just trying to process
through why that would be the case. Is it
because you felt like you were undercharging before and you didn't realize it, and now
you could have been making that the whole time? I guess that's a
valid thing to feel, but if you didn't know that you could
charge more, or you weren't in a situation where you had to
charge more— everybody's financial situation has changed a ton in the
last year, especially the last 6 months, but Definitely the last year.
And so there's a world where the kind of
intense need to raise your rates has become a thing more
so in the last couple of months. Or maybe you
changed your services. Maybe you added things that are of higher value that
people need to pay more money for. I don't know, but you didn't do anything
wrong and your clients certainly didn't do anything wrong if they
paid what you charged them. And also, how awesome is it if every client
you have was just on board for you
charging a ton more for what you do. That means you're really good at what
you do and you have people who think you're worth it. It sounds like maybe
you're a little bit mad at your former self, and I understand
that, but I don't think you need to be. You make the best decisions that
you have available at the time, and sometimes those don't look
like the decisions that you would have made later. And sometimes you find out that
maybe that wasn't the best thing, but you didn't have the information to make a
different one. That's fine. There is somebody who I really
admire, Arlan Hamilton, and I was talking to her. She is the founder of a
VC fund and she runs a, a bunch of entrepreneur groups that I've really enjoyed
being part of. And I was talking to her a couple months ago 'cause I
was in this place where I just like had to figure out, I had to
figure out what to do next. I had to figure out where, what the right
move for business was. I was getting more heavily into consulting. It was
right around when we were selling the company. I wasn't getting the same kind of
consulting work that I got before, and it wasn't the same magnitude. And I just
kept saying, the last time I did consulting, I did this with 2023 and it
was such a different world. It didn't work like this. This is different and I
don't know if it's right. And finally, after like maybe the third time
I said that, she said, why does 2023 matter? That was 3 years ago.
Drop it. Stop worrying about 2023. What's in front of you in 2026?
That's what matters. You can use that as a roadmap or as a guideline, but
we can't make 2023 decisions in 2026. That's not gonna happen.
Stop worrying about 2023. And that sounds like the same thing. If you were
undercharging before because you didn't fully realize your worth, now you have,
and I'm proud of you for that. And you did an amazing thing, and I'm
so proud of you that all of your clients decided that they wanted to
stick with you despite the fact that their bill is going to change substantially.
Good work. Good work for doing good work. Good work for
figuring out how much you should be charging. Good work for doing the hard thing
and having the hard conversations about your rates changing. Good for you. You
did all the things. You have nothing to be mad about. I'm proud of you.
Thanks for being here, guys. Have a good day. Love you. Me— like,
I literally have to put cameras in my
mom's house to check for feet. Like, that's right.
Like, that's— this is bizarre. This is a weird timeline.