Your parents need you, your kids need you, nobody asks what you need.
There's a specific kind of tired that doesn't show up on a blood test. It's not the tired from staying up too late or working a long day. It's the tired of being needed in two directions at once, your mother in the next room and your kids down the hall, both of them counting on you to have your act together at the exact same time.
Welcome to the sandwich generation, Malaysia edition, population: more of us than you'd think.
The generation nobody warned us about
I care for my mother, who lives with me, and I have kids who aren't even at SPM age yet, which means the exam-season stress that's supposedly still years away is already sitting in the back of my mind like a bill I know is coming.
Some days it's her medication schedule and the kids' homework in the same hour. Other days it's a doctor's appointment clashing with a school event, and I'm doing the math on which one I can actually be present for without letting the other one down.
I'm not alone in this, not even close. Around 70 percent of elderly Malaysians live with their children or extended family, which sounds like a nice, warm, filial statistic until you're the one juggling a parent's chronic condition alongside a full household of younger dependents. It's not that we don't want to do it. It's that nobody quite tells you how much mental bandwidth it eats until you're already three years deep into it.
Living with a parent in Malaysia isn't usually a decision you sit down and debate. It's assumed. You grew up watching your own parents take in a grandparent, so when it's your turn, there's rarely a conversation about "should we," it's just "when."
What doesn't get inherited along with that tradition is any real playbook for managing it. Nobody sits you down and explains how to track medication schedules while also signing a permission slip, or how to keep your patience intact when both your mother and your child need your attention in the same five minutes.
Losing the job didn't remove the sandwich, it just removed the bread
These days I'm self-employed, which sounds flexible on paper and mostly is, until you realise flexible also means there's no HR department, no medical leave that gets approved by someone else, and no colleague quietly covering your desk while you rush your mother to a clinic appointment.
When you're on a fixed salary, at least the caregiving squeeze has a predictable shape around it. Once you're running things solo, every hour you spend on family is an hour you didn't spend earning, full stop.
This isn't just my personal gripe either. Malaysia now has close to 3 million self-employed workers, a jump of 25 percent from 2021, and most of them aren't contributing to EPF the way salaried employees automatically do.
That's a lot of people quietly building a caregiving life on top of a retirement plan that barely exists. It's one thing to sandwich your time between two generations. It's another to do it while your own safety net has more holes than a roti canai fresh off the pan.
The MCO left a mark that hasn't faded
If you lived through the movement control order years as a business owner, a freelancer, or anyone whose income depended on people leaving their houses, you probably remember exactly how fast "stable" turned into "surviving." That period didn't just cost money, it rewired how a lot of us think about risk. I still catch myself keeping a bigger buffer than I probably need, saying no to expenses I could technically afford, because some part of me is still bracing for the next thing that shuts everything down without warning.
That instinct doesn't fully switch off just because the economy's moving again. When you're already stretched thin caring for two generations, that leftover caution adds another layer of tension to every financial decision, even the small ones.
It shows up in odd, small ways. I'll hesitate over a purchase that's objectively fine for the budget, because some part of my brain is still running MCO-era math where every ringgit needed a backup plan. My mother needing a specialist visit and my kid needing new school shoes in the same week used to just be a scheduling headache. Now it's also a quiet financial calculation happening in the background, one I never used to run before 2020.
What I'd actually tell a friend going through this
Lower the bar on your own guilt, not on your care. That's the whole trick, and it took me longer to learn than I'd like to admit. You will not get every appointment, every school event, every deadline perfectly balanced, and treating each small miss as proof you're failing someone is a fast route to burning out for real.
Your mother doesn't need a perfect caregiver. Your kids don't need a parent who's stretched to breaking point trying to be everywhere at once. They need you functioning, which sometimes means the school event gets a video call instead of your physical presence, or a chore gets done a day later than planned.
Nobody's handing sandwich generation caregivers a manual, a stipend, or a break, so we end up writing our own rules as we go. Mine is simple: care fiercely, forgive yourself generously, and stop mistaking exhaustion for evidence that you're doing it wrong. Most of us in this position are doing better than we think we are. We're just too tired to notice.
Kamarul Azwan (k.azwan@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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