Caregiving

Are you a caregiver who loves being able to take care of your elderly parent but is feeling overwhelmed by the scope of your role? Or perhaps your partner or close friend spends a significant amount of their time taking care of a loved one and you see the strain it is taking on them... From feelings of isolation and frustration to anxiety and lack of sleep, the caregiver struggle is real (and widespread).

Caregiving can be stressful. You take responsibility for another person and have less time for yourself. According to the Mayo Clinic, caregiving can lead to a host of stress-related health issues, such as sleep loss, headaches, alcohol abuse, and more. This is why caring for caregivers (that’s you!) is important.

Change comes in many guises. Sometimes, it’s drastic, taking our breath away. We find ourselves struggling to comprehend what just happened. Other times, it creeps up on us slowly -- gently nudging us down a path until we startlingly find ourselves in a somewhat foreign place. Becoming our loved one’s caregiver can fall into either category. And yet when it is the slow, incremental journey that leads us there, we often don’t recognize that we are officially wearing that hat. But we are!

I was a family caregiver in the sandwich generation for over six years. While raising two children, I was simultaneously caring for aging parents. At the time, my husband was also juggling caregiver responsibilities. He was the primary caregiver for his divorced mom, who had stage 4 lung cancer. I cared for my widowed mom with multiple chronic health conditions, including COPD, diabetes, and mobility issues. Our multiple competing roles made my husband and I feel squeezed. Layer on both of our full-time jobs, and we were barely hanging on to our messy lives.