His was a job perfectly suited to his temperament. Rock steady and meticulous, he gently prodded teeth into place, always trying to make the world a little more linear.

Dad retired several years ago, and he loved retirement. His only regret, he said, was that he had not retired sooner. The fun lasted until March when we learned that the cough that had nagged him for months was not a lingering cold but a stampeding tumor.

Since then his job has been anything but gentle or linear - a vertiginous whirl of exhaustion, determination and despair.

The cancer also became my mother's job. But because she already had a job, as a professor at the College of Mount St. Vincent, she became one of countless care providers who are needed in two places at once.

"Just make sure I get to class so I don't get fired," she told me when all this started. "Work is what will keep me sane."

She does get to work, whenever she can, through the endless tests that led to a diagnosis (though she never made it the day we waited in a surgeon's waiting room for six interminable hours); through the first brutal round of inpatient chemotherapy (though she was late the night Dad needed a transfusion); through the weeks when he has been too frail to be left alone at home.

As she tries to do both jobs, she feels blessed to work where she does, at a workplace steeped in kindness. The administration has told her to come in when she can; faculty colleagues have told her they will fill in when she can't. Their interpretation of the Family Medical Leave Act seems to be, "We'll keep paying you and praying for you."

I was at the oncologist that day, and on other days, because we Belkin children are the support staff for my parents' new job. Demographers talk of the "sandwich generation" - baby boomers who care for their parents while caring for their children - but I don't presume to put myself in that category. Yet. At the moment, Mom takes care of Dad, while the rest of us take care of Mom. (Our spouses, in turn, take care of our children, and the children, bless them, have done a grown-up job of taking care of us adults.)

On appointment days, I am the chauffeur. (For 46 years, Dad wouldn't let my mother drive; why should he start now?) As a result I have conducted a number of interviews on cellphones in parked cars and a lot of writing (including some of this column) on laptops in hospital hallways. My brother, who started a new and demanding job on the day Dad's cancer was diagnosed, takes the evening shift when he can, then heads back to his office and works past midnight. My sister makes the 75-minute trip to my parents' twice a week, leaving her two daughters with a baby sitter; a freelance worker, she hasn't taken on many new projects lately.

I'm ashamed to admit that only now do I realize how often Dad stepped out of his working life for us over the years, and how I simply assumed he would. Not just the calls from the school nurse to come take us home (again). But, most memorably, the time I was rushed to the hospital with pneumonia when I was 7. I was placed in an oxygen tent. Dad held my hand. Why didn't it ever cross my mind that no teeth were straightened during those feverish days?

I never thought about it, of course, because it was his job as my father, just as it is Mom's job as his wife and mine as his daughter. If life unfurls in its logical order we all get a turn. Right now it is ours.

This column about the intersection of jobs and personal lives appears every other week. E-mail: [email protected].

A. Most bad performance reviews are not about technical skills but more subjective issues like communication style and personality "fit" with the company. Your differences with your boss over those less tangible issues may be too big to surmount.

Susan Trainer, 38, found herself in that situation 10 years ago when she landed a job as a public relations executive with a boutique firm in the Bay Area. Ms. Trainer, who earned her master's in industrial organizational psychology by age 20, had spent her career in corporate public relations. She had worked almost eight years at Telex Communications, a $2 billion organization with 10,000 employees, where she had reported to the chief financial officer. She had never had a bad review before. Now, the founder of the small agency she had joined found fault with everything Ms. Trainer did, even asking to see Ms. Trainer's daily "to-do" lists.

"In no time at all, she took this very confident person who was performing at the top level of a multibillion-dollar organization and turned me into someone who couldn't make a decision on the appropriate time to go to the bathroom," Ms. Trainer says.

Q. Is it ever possible to recover when your boss truly has it in for you?

A. For Ms. Trainer, it wasn't. After nine contentious months, Ms. Trainer and the founder agreed it would be best for her to resign. But several of her clients tracked down her home phone number and begged her to work with them. Ms. Trainer founded her own company, Trainer Communications, now a 10-person agency in Danville, Calif. that recently won an industry award.

As a supervisor, Ms. Trainer tries to avoid the mistakes she thinks her old boss made, namely, the that-isn't-how-I-would-do-it syndrome. "While I still don't think her specific claims were right, she was right about the fact that I wasn't a good fit," Ms. Trainer says. "Believe me, I'm much happier where I am today."