Dear neurokin,
Another article inspired by a song. A song I’d heard before and sung the wrong lyrics to.
When I saw the lyric sheet in the last term of choir ‘I don’t know this one’ I told my Alto 1 buddy.
I did know the song, just not that it was called Pelican by the Maccabee’s.
As I sang it throughout the term it became more and more relevant to my life.
The song, if you don’t know it, follows the arc of life. It starts with the lyrics ‘So soon we, so soon we’re too old to carry’ (not ‘so sue me’ as I’d previously been singing!)
‘One thing’s for sure, we’re all getting older… before you know it, parent a parent’
At the end of last year both of my parents were undergoing treatment for cancer.
Neurokin, I officially became part of what’s known as The Sandwich Generation. It's All Relative with Dr Eliza Filby covers a lot about the distinction between generations. The bad news is that Gen X are being massively squeezed in our ‘sandwich years’ and millennials will find these things even more challenging:
Rising costs for care
parenting young adults , who are often unable to afford their own housing.
caring for elderly relatives with long term complex health conditions for longer periods of time
huge rising costs for education - in the UK university tuition fees have risen by 200%
residential care in the UK for elderly parents has risen 48% in the last 15 years
Our mid life is lasting longer - for 20 years between the ages of 40 - 60.
It’s not the financial cost that I’m here to write about today.
I’m here to share my observations, learnings and what I’m noticing about the shifting dynamic of my relationship with my family and their unrecognised neurodivergence.
For of course, neurodivergence is genetic.
Living in the phase beyond neurodivergent discovery means that we can see the patterns of neurodivergence far and wide. Often in our own families with relatives who do not want to be ‘labelled’ as neurodivergent for fear of how they will be perceived.
As this is an article that is much more personal in what I share, the rest of it is behind a paywall.
