My dad and I were at a Target on Long Island, shopping for things like toilet paper and Kleenex, when I spotted my ex-boyfriend’s sister. “I think we have everything we need,” I told my father, gently encouraging him to move along. He’d stopped to push the “try me” buttons on some animatronic Halloween merch—a real master of timing, that man—and I had about 30 seconds to avoid a run-in. Maybe she won’t recognize me with my mask on, I thought. Stay cool.
I have nothing against my ex-boyfriend’s sister. Or my ex-boyfriend, for that matter. They’re wonderful people. But my hair was frizzy. My sweatpants were stained with bleach. And I didn’t want to explain what I was doing in the town of Bay Shore on a Wednesday afternoon when I could still so vividly remember telling my ex that I would never move back to Long Island under any circumstances.
“A fate worse than death,” I said when he casually mentioned the possibility. We grew up in the same town and lived together in NYC for the better part of our twenties. Now I was running into his sister at a Target three miles from our old high-school—and, last I heard, he was living with his wife in Queens.
When my current boyfriend and I moved to Long Island in October 2021, it was meant to be a temporary relocation. Our landlords had decided to sell the Bed Stuy condo we’d been renting—our home for the first year-and-a-half of the pandemic—and we didn’t have it in us to scramble for another city apartment. Our reasons were logical: We were unsure of what the upcoming winter would look like, Covid-wise. We worked remotely and weren’t going out to restaurants, bars, or Broadway shows, which made city rents less justifiable to us than ever. And we were tired of being cooped up in a mostly windowless box.
We fantasized about moving to places like Austin or Silver Lake or Jackson Hole, and in another life, maybe we would have taken that sort of leap. But in this life, my dad was on Long Island—and I was managing his care in the middle of a pandemic. We booked a long-term Airbnb in Hampton Bays, on the east end of Suffolk County.
“We’ll return to the city when the six months are up—or move somewhere totally different!” we told ourselves. That still hasn’t happened.
People tend to think of caregivers as being in their fifties or sixties. But in reality, one in four is now a Millennial. Some are even younger. In a 2021 survey by Embracing Carers, 20% of respondents said they were new to caregiving, and of that subset, 60% were Millennial and Gen Z.
Younger caregivers deal with similar challenges as their older counterparts (professional disruption, financial strain, chronic stress, social isolation), but in a time of life that’s ordinarily reserved for forging one’s own path. While many of their friends are getting married, having babies, accepting promotions, or buying homes, they’re taking care of parents, grandparents, or siblings—and falling behind on retirement while they’re at it.
At a recent Age Boom panel, Susan Reinhard, a senior vice president at AARP and director of its Public Policy Institute, recalled an informational dinner she had with a group of Millennial caretakers. “It was a different story than you usually hear,” she said. “They were asking questions like, ‘Can I take this job far from my mother?’ ‘How do I explain the gap in my resume?’ …Can I have a baby now? I don’t know if I can handle both.’” I could relate.
I became a caretaker at 35 (the more I read about young caretakers, the older that seems, but still). I’d just made a major career move, one I’d hoped would change the course of my professional life, and my boyfriend and I were beginning to talk, however tentatively, about starting a family. Maybe we’d even move to California. It felt like I was on the verge of a new chapter, and I was—only it wasn’t the chapter I’d been expecting to write. After a while, it wasn’t even the same book.
“We’re wintering in a summer home,” I told my friends when we moved to Hampton Bays. My positive spin was mostly genuine. We’d managed to find a 2,000-square-foot house with a newly renovated kitchen that cost less than most of the two-bedrooms (and some of the one-bedrooms) we were seeing in Brooklyn. Deer roamed freely around the property. I no longer had to travel by train—exhausting, stressful, risky—to see my dad.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had somehow failed. I’d sworn I would never return to Long Island, and yet there I was. How far had I really come if I was right back where I started?
Reinhard referred to the young caregiver’s predicament as “life interrupted.” It’s a common enough saying, but I hadn’t heard it applied to the caregiving experience until then, which is probably why it appears in ALL CAPS (and underlined) in my notebook. I turned the phrase over in my head for days, relieved to have a neat way of capturing my frustration. Then, one afternoon, I ruined it. Can life really be interrupted, I wondered? Isn’t that just … life?
I don’t mean to split hairs. We need policies that address the challenges young caretakers face, and if a phrase helps animate the cause, I’m all for it. But I also find it useful to remember that setbacks, big and small, are part of life—not peripheral to it. Loss can be unfathomable. It can be manageable. But it’s rarely predictable, and it comes for all of us.
My boyfriend and I are now leasing an apartment in Amityville (yes, that Amityville). We have lot to be grateful for, like the fact that we have a place to live at all, but Long Island is not where we’d be were it not for my role as a caregiver, and sometimes that gets to me. That’s okay. It’s not forever. Another move—and other interruptions—are on our horizon. Until then, I’ll just have to keep dodging the ghosts of my past at Target.
I feel this deeply. I am a carer in my 30s for my mom, who is recovering from a major stroke this summer. My brother is traveling and falling in love and hosting Halloween parties; I’m crying in the car and trying to deal with insurance, rehab, meds, and scheduling. Sometimes I’m angry. Mostly I’m deeply sad that accidents of birth order + geography + gender mean that the world feels open for him and closed for me. I love my parents - it’s an honor to be of service to them. But I didn’t think that their care would take over my life yet.
"Loss can be unfathomable. It can be manageable. But it’s rarely predictable, and it comes for all of us." -- this is incredibly well-put, Patti.