Caregiver Stress

Your mother needs the pharmacy, your daughter needs the college forms, your job needs you back from lunch, and all of it is genuinely urgent. There is no slack in the system. The system is you.

The arithmetic does not work and everyone can see it except the people you are caring for, which produces a specific loneliness: you are surrounded by family all day and supported by no one.

We work on the actual load, what can be delegated, paid for, refused, or simply done worse, because a caregiver who collapses helps no one.

Here is the sentence caregivers are most afraid to say: sometimes you resent them. The parent you are bathing. The spouse you are managing medications for. The person whose illness has reorganized your entire life.

Resentment in caregiving is not a character flaw. It is the predictable result of an unreasonable amount of responsibility carried alone, and saying it out loud in therapy is often the first relief people feel in months.

Love and resentment are not opposites. You can be furious about the situation and devoted to the person in the same afternoon, and most caregivers are.

Caregiving does not just take your time. Over months and years it takes your friendships, your health appointments, your ambitions, your sense of being a person with a future rather than a function.

Many caregivers describe not knowing what they want anymore when asked, because wanting has been irrelevant for so long the muscle has gone quiet.

Part of our work is reoccupying your own life in small, defended ways, before the caregiving ends, so that when it does end there is someone left to live it.