The Sandwiched Generation: Born in 1980, Raised by Resilience

I was born in 1980—a time the world calls modern history, but for those of us who lived it, it was anything but ordinary. My generation grew up between wars, regimes, and revolutions. We were raised by headlines and air raids, by resilience and uncertainty.

As a child in Kuwait during the Iran-Iraq war, I still remember the distant, thunder-like sound of bombs. Kuwait may not have been the battlefield, but we were certainly in the blast radius—emotionally and psychologically. That fear of the unknown, of sounds in the sky, became part of my earliest memories. We didn’t fully understand what war meant, but we learned early how it felt.

Then came the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. I often refer to it as the first betrayal of my life. We were vacationing in Switzerland when it happened. Safe, but only physically. Emotionally, we were far from it. Watching our country fall from afar was disorienting. Six months after liberation, we returned home—but the Kuwait we knew was gone. The skies were black from the burning oil fields. The air was thick with silence and loss. Family members were grieving. Friends had changed. Students had lost an entire academic year. We were young, but not too young to know that something in us had shifted forever.

Then, in 2003, another war. The fall of Saddam Hussein. Another cycle of fear, tension, and media frenzy. Another moment where the past threatened to repeat itself. For our generation, war was not a chapter—it was the background noise to our coming of age.

Growing up in this region wasn’t easy. The Middle East rarely gave us a break. But despite it all, life went on. People married, worked, laughed. We smiled through instability and celebrated through uncertainty. It looked normal from the outside—but on the inside, we were layered with emotional armor we didn’t know we had.

I studied in Cairo during my university years—a city that showed me how history breathes in every corner. It taught me strength and survival in its own chaotic, beautiful way. After graduation, I returned to Kuwait, got married in 2004, and started a new chapter of my life.

Today, I look at my children—growing up in what feels like a more stable generation, one blessed with security, opportunities, and the luxury of dreaming. They don’t know the sound of sirens interrupting dinner. They haven’t had to leave school because of political upheaval. And while I know stability is never promised in this part of the world, I hold on to hope that their reality will be softer than ours.

Sometimes I wonder if they’ll ever truly understand the weight of what we lived through. But maybe they don’t need to. Maybe it’s enough that we lived it, so they don’t have to.

This is the story of my generation—sandwiched between wars and wired for survival. A generation that learned to stand tall even when the ground was shaking. A generation that knows peace is not a given, but a gift.