You’ve got them. We’ve got you. Welcome to Club Sandwich | 0
Caring for ageing parents and quietly thinking “Something’s gotta give”? Welcome.
Because you’ve got them - and we’ve got you.
The Sandwich Generation is finally getting the conversation we deserve.
Club Sandwich is the community for those caring for ageing parents while juggling work, kids, relationships, and sanity. This is your tribe when family doesn't get it - or just isn't enough.
Hosted by veteran broadcaster Sarah Macdonald, Club Sandwich features clinical psychologists instead of life coaches, GPs instead of gratitude journals, and honest conversations about the relief-guilt paradox nobody else will touch.
Follow Club Sandwich on Apple and Spotify. Subscribe on YouTube. And send us your questions via email to hello@clubsandwich.community
Episodes include:
🔧 This Week's Hack - Actionable strategy you can use today
💌 Listener Letter - Real questions from Clubbers like you
🔥 Hot Mess Moments - Stories that make you feel less alone
🛠️ What We're Using - Resources and tools that actually help
Meet the regular Clubbers:
Melissa Reader - CEO of Vera aged care platform (vera.guide) and expert on Australia's ageing crisis and system failures.
Dr. Jo Lamble - Clinical psychologist specializing in guilt, family dynamics, and the impossible decisions when every option has a cost.
Dr. Ginny Mansberg - GP and women's health advocate who tells it straight about what caregiving does to your body.
Dr. Stephanie Ward - Geriatrician and consulting expert for ABC's Old People's Home for 4 Year Olds, helping you understand when "old" becomes a crisis—and when it doesn't.
Kerry Milligan - Gogglebox Australia star bringing humor, honesty, and hard-won perspective to impossible family situations.
No bubble baths. No bullshit. Just expert-led, community-first support for people who don't need another thing to feel bad about not doing.
Club Sandwich is more than a podcast - it's a movement. Join our private Facebook community, attend live events across Australia, and access free downloadable resources with every episode.
New episodes every Thursday.
Visit clubsandwich.community to join the tribe.
Topics covered: Caregiver guilt, sibling conflict, dementia care, financial planning, legal issues, family boundaries, burnout prevention, end-of-life decisions, self-care that actually works, navigating aged care systems, and the emotional toll of caring for ageing parents.
Credits
Club Sandwich is brought to you by Vera, helping families caring for ageing parents navigate this stage of life — so you don't have to do it alone.
Sarah Macdonald | Host + Executive Producer
Melissa Reader | Commissioning Editor, Executive Producer + Clubber
Rachel Fountain | Executive Producer
Audio + video edits by Fountain Media Group
Thanks and kudos to Sean Wayland for our awesome theme music Club Sandwich - hear more from Sean at seanwayland.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
1, 2, 3.
Hi, I'm Melissa Reeder. I am the host of Age Foot and I am so pleased to be back in front of the microphone again. It's been a few months. We reached a lot of people with Age Hood last year and we had really fabulous feedback. But we also learned a lot from, from a whole lot of midlifers, a whole lot of whom are women. And they want to feel seen and heard and they really want some help and some hearts and some smarts and some hacks as they juggle the sandwich of midlife, caring for aging parents and everything else in between. So it gave us a lot of food for thought, pardon the pun, but what we are launching is Club Sandwich, the podcast. And it's gonna be hosted by the Most fabulous Sarah McDonald, who's in the studio with me. Right.
Hello. Hi. Club Sandwich. I see it as the sort of crazed love child of Age Hood and the kind of ragehood and the crazehood that we're going through at this time of our life. Because it's a lot, all those sort of layers of caring and squishiness of life. And I kind of see this. I loved in agehood how you talked a lot about grief and loss and the end of life. But this, I suppose Club Sandwich is gonna be about how you live your life, how you do this, how you live this kind of crazy life. Being a.
We gotta find some joy in this. We've gotta find some things to laugh about and smile about. This, this is life, this is where we're at in life. And we wanna provide really practical help and hints along the way. So I'm in the sandwich. I know you're in the sandwich. You know, the clubbers that you'll be hearing from every week are also in the sandwich. So we're gonna talk to you about, you know, what we're dealing with, our own experiences, it's gonna be real, it's gonna get gritty, we will cry together. But we're here for you. And it's about helping midlifers feel seen and heard.
Yeah. And look, I haven't really talked about being in the sandwich generation the last 10 years of my life, but I have been and it's been so much. And I would have just loved a friend or a companion or someone in my ears talking me through it. Because one of the big things is that you just can't do it on your own. Cause my mum is 92 and she's amazing and my mother in law's 94, my dad died about seven years ago. But I'm also like, I've got a 21st at my house tonight and no stairs. And no stairs. And I'm gonna drop in on mum on the way.
Not that the kids are gonna mind.
No, they won't care. I don't know how they'll get in and out. But the thing is there's still so much going on in my life and if you've got, you may not have kids but you might have a parent you're caring for, you might have a really full on job.
You've got a bunch of ingredients in that midlife sandwich. It doesn't matter what the ingredients are, you've got a sandwich if you're in the Gen X. I mean I'm right there with you. You know, I've got my beautiful dad who's had some health issues and is going out to have some pretty significant surgery next month and is gonna have to come and live with us after that. But you know, my 19 year old is moving out today, my daughter's at uni, my third son's doing his hsc. There is a ton of stuff going on. It's a full time schedule before you even put yourself in the sandwich. So I think it just. We need to talk about it. We need to help each other.
We're like this little soldier ants at the picnic. Love it. Right? Because it's no picnic.
It is no picnic.
Exactly.
And as you have always said, Sarah, you know everyone in the sandwich who is looking after aging parents, they've got, they've got them, they've got their aging parents. We're going to have you. So we're going to become your tribe, place to turn and really kind of, you know, shoulder to cry on, ear to listen to as you go through it.
Yeah, we're going to recognise you because I think you've got so many jobs. Just as the carer you might be like you're the driver, you the social.
Calendar organiser or the medication dispenser and perhaps the nurse.
Yes, exactly. It might be the cleaner Meals on Wheels. Yeah, the cook.
And it kind of creeps up on you, the life coach. You don't just wake up one morning and take on all these jobs. You do it pretty incrementally. You might just need to help mum a little bit more with her shopping or you know, I found myself, I have to go to my dad's medical appointments with him because he gets pretty stressed going into those and he just doesn't absorb it and so he comes Out. And he's forgotten or hasn't held onto a lot of what he's been told. So all those extra appointments and demands and just worries are kind of creeping into the weekly schedule.
Yeah, exactly. And so it's sort of like you used to be in a club on a dance floor.
Oh, remember those days?
Yeah. And now you're just a part of this club that nobody pretends. Well, everybody pretends they're not going to join. Nobody thinks their parents are going to get older. No one thinks they're going to get older themselves. And gee, guess what? It happens. And here you are and you're like, I remember how to dance all night, but I kind of know how to dance with all these plates spinning and you're not getting out and kind of doing anything for you.
But ageing happens slowly and then it happens suddenly to us as Gen X's, but also to our parents because, you know, there are so many who are doing so well and living independently and then there might be a fall or there might be some kind of diagnosis or there might be the death of their partner or someone who's really important to them that can change things significantly. And really f. Yeah.
And we're often not ready for it or we're just really struggling to deal with it. So you need an ally, you need a friend. We want to be that friend and that helper. Give you some hacks, give you some help. And here's the other thing. We are doing this in a way that no one has done before because my mum cared for my granny and my grandmother lived with us. Beautiful Sadie, lovely Sadie. She was just so cool. And she lived with us until she fell over a lot and had to go into aged care. But my mum wasn't working full time, she was going back to uni, she was working part time. And we were a bit older because we had kids late.
That's right.
What do we do that for? We had kids late. Possibly because we were working.
Yeah.
And we're working and we've worked really hard. We're more likely to have a full time job and job and this often don't go aligned. So I think we should talk about that.
We will. We've got to talk a lot about what's happening in the workplaces and how employers need to be thinking about this earlier and more comprehensively than they're looking at it now. I mean, everything that we learned around parenting in the workplace now applies to parenting in the workplace. But there's something else, Sarah, like why do we need to talk about this now, when you think about what's happening demographically. So I had a great chat with Bernard Salt on age hood last year and we know that 2026 is a. It's an inflection point. It's the year the first baby boomer turns 80 and the first year in exa turns 60. This is quite big in demographic terms.
And those 60 year olds, or soon to be, are fire horses. So this is the year we need to gallop into because this is what they call in demographic terms a cluster.
We know, we know exactly what that is. We don't need to say it out loud, we know what that is. And Bernard said to me when we were talking last year, like, as the baby boomers came through, society had to really reshape around them. We had to build new universities. That's when Macquarie University was built and Flinders University, because there just weren't enough seats and rooms for the volume of baby boomers. So now we've got baby boomers aging, but they're also living a lot longer and we've never had volume and longevity in that same mix. So this is a really, am I going to say interesting in inverted commas, moment in time, but it's a lot for the baby boomers themselves and for their families. There's a lot. And we're just at the very beginning of that wave. So handing over the reins, handing over the feed to you, my lovely friend. This is going to be fabulous. Tell us about format, tell us how you're going to bring club sandwich to all of those ears.
Well, we've sort of got a club with regular clubbers. Right. So we're going to have different people each episode. And the first episode is Dr. Stephanie Ward, who was on. Yeah, she's fabulous. So she was the lovely, amazing woman with curly hair, geriatrician on Old People's Home for four Year Olds. And she is a powerhouse on this. And she doesn't just understand what's going on for your parents, she understands what's going on for you. So sometimes she will be my guest, sometimes Jo Lambe will be my guest. She is a psychologist and she and I went to uni together because I did psych at uni. But she is just great at kind of working out the psychology of what might be happening for you, someone in your family, your parent, all of the.
Kind of stuff around that, of emotion in that mix.
Exactly, exactly. So we'll chat to her about things like guilt, siblings and whatever you suggest. We've also got Dr. Ginny Mansberg, who is going to talk about your health because she is an. She actually has a practice that focuses on middle aged women.
So, so good.
She's got your body, she's got your.
Brain and we need a bit of that.
Yeah, we need a bit of that. And Keri Silbury, who is going to talk about what she's been through, what she's learned along the way, but also as one of the boomers who's aging into this age group, what she's going to do differently and how she's setting out on this journey to sort of reclaim the ageing process. Which should be really, really interesting because she's damn hilarious. She's very funny.
She will bring a laugh to that conversation.
But it's. Yeah, we don't want to just be talking about people as they're aging and who you might be caring for. This is for them as well.
I think that's really important, you know, to have the voice of those older people that we love and care for in this. So they're going to be part of the format too. So Sarah, your mum moved into residential care last year. That's a big year, right, for you and the family.
Huge year. And my mother in law both over the same time. And then look, we'll do a whole episode on aged care and moving in and the process and what happens. Cause there's so much psychologically to deal with and practically.
Practically, yeah, selling.
No one wants antiques. Right. By the way, also it's the emotional but it's also the practical stuff. And this is where I think you're going to be really good. Just the system. The system is I look, I have had times of just ripping my hair out. Like sometimes you feel it's against you. There's great people working in these places. Best of intentions, best of intentions. But the system is you need a PhD.
You need a PhD in tenacity and patience as well as just like figuring it out. I've been mystery shopping the system for my dad because I was hoping to get some services in place for when he comes out of hospital and kind of transitions from living with us. It's a nightmare. And again, best of intentions, like I know these things are not easy to resolve but what I want to bring to some of the conversations we have is just some of those hacks based on what we're doing and learning about and also all the work that I'm doing through Vera. So that's an aged care navigation platform. Everyone can have a look at that at Vera Guide. And we're going to be releasing an assessment, really, for any midlifer who has a parent aged 75 and over. It's not clinical, it's not particularly diagnostic. It's more to help you understand where your parent is on the ageing journey and what you can start to do about it. So I'll talk more about that in future episodes, but hopefully I can bring some practical help.
And then I want to do some stuff on like, guilt, your guilt, their denial, you know, stuff like that. And, but, but of course, we'll go where people need us to go.
We will. And we'll also bring in some really interesting international guests. There are some super interesting things happening in the dementia space. We've got some people in Europe we want to bring to the podcast. We're hoping to talk to some guests from the us. There's a lot happening around this. It's very much in the zeitgeist. So we'll probably have you three episodes a month with our clubbers and then maybe bring you a guest once a month. That's kind of gonna be the format. But we're not gonna sit here and talk to you about bubble baths and boundaries and candles.
Right.
That is not the language of club sandwich. We're gonna get very real with what we talk about and we're gonna help you in ways that are truly practical and hopefully can make a difference. And we wanna hear from our clubbers. We want you to jump into our close Facebook group, tell us your story, post some questions that Sarah can bring into the podcast and answer for you. And we've also got some events.
We've got some events as well. And you can also suggest episodes like I need an episode on this. Find someone on that. And you can also. Yeah, so Facebook, Instagram and also you.
Can email us@hellolubsandwich.community now, that's a little bit of a new age email address, so I didn't say it wrong. It's hello, clubsandwich.community and you can jump on the website, which is clubsandwich.community. heaps of information there. You'll get all the episodes of the pod and you'll get this information about these events we're running in March. We're coming to five capital cities.
Yeah, we're traveling around with a great film that's coming out, which is about exactly this as well.
And we're bringing club sandwiches.
And we're bringing club sandwiches and we're.
Bringing bubbles of both the Alcoholic and non alcoholic variety. And we're bringing great conversations and great panels and it's free because we've had incredibly generous philanthropists who have funded this. So we're going to talk more about that and we would love to see lots of clubbers at those events.
Yeah, come along, say hi. And here's the other thing. While we're not going to do bubble baths and while we're not going to do candles, although I love a candle.
Doesn'T fix anything, but it's not.
Which I do love both of those things. In fact, it's one of my favourite things to do, be in the bath. But we're recognizing it's more than that. But we are going to ask you every week, what have you done for yourself this week? Because you have to do something for yourself just once a week. It can be really little. Right. So there's a trigger warning. I'm gonna ask you that every week on the pod. What about you? What have you done this week?
I'm trying to walk 60 minutes a day. Like it does sound a lot, but actually it's not that much if you get organized. My dogs are the real winners in this. But I am just trying to put a podcast on or some music and either go early or maybe later in the afternoon and yeah, get, get. I don't get to those 10,000 steps necessarily, but I get a lot closer.
That's a lot. An hour. This podcast is gonna be probably about the length of a walk. Yeah. Or the drive to the aged care home, sort of about half an hour long. Well, I did something really radical for myself recently, which I have not travelled for the last 20 years much and it's always been one of my great passions because of everything going on. But now my mum, actually, we put her in aged care last year because we had to. And I got to go back to India.
Amazing.
And it was just. And it was like going back.
This is really recently, isn't it?
Yeah, this is really. And I got to go back to my, like the self I was before this. All, you know, life got all those layers and it was like, oh, hi, I remember you.
Hello.
Yeah, like this independent woman traveling on her own.
Like, back in your body.
Back in my body, back in my place, back in this sort of spiritual home. Back in this crazy, amazing, fabulous place. It's changed a lot. So have you. Have I? Yeah, it was really. It was like reclaiming that part of myself. Oh, good.
You gonna do more travel then for you?
Let's see what happens. You never know what's gonna happen this year but I'd like to and so yeah, that's why I'm wearing a caftan. Love it.
You're rocking a caftan. It's almost unconscious. You know, by the time you get to midlife. I think you're so used to parenting and parenting, it's kind of a default to a lot of situations. But you know, maybe that's something we've got to remind ourselves of a little bit more to.
So do something for yourself. Listen to this podcast when it comes out. It's called Club Sandwich and make it.
Yours along with us. Tell us what you need. Tell us what you want us to talk about.
Be a clubber. So you can find us wherever you get your podcast. You can find us on YouTube, you can find us on Facebook and can find us on Instagram and join the community. Shout out for help because while you've got them we've got you.