The particular loneliness of being the family caregiver, when everyone in your life is concerned about the same person and it isn’t you.
Everybody asks how your mother is doing. Nobody asks how you are, and if they did, you’d say fine, so it wouldn’t matter anyway.
That’s the strange loneliness of this. You’re surrounded by people who are all concerned about the same person, and you’re the one carrying it, and you have become invisible inside your own family’s crisis. Your aunt calls for an update. Your neighbor asks about her. Even her doctor talks to you about her.
You’ve turned into staff.
And the friends who used to check on you mostly stopped, not out of unkindness. You canceled three times in a row and they ran out of ways to ask. You don’t have anything to talk about that isn’t caregiving, and you’re tired of hearing yourself say it, so you stopped picking up.
Two things help more than they should.
Find one person who asks about you and not about her, and keep them. A sibling, a friend, a coworker who went through this last year. One person is enough. You don’t need a support group, though those exist around here through the county and the hospital systems and they’re free.
And put something on the calendar that has nothing to do with any of this. Not self care in the way magazines mean it. Something on a specific day at a specific time with another human being who will notice if you don’t show up. The obligation is the point, because you’ll show up for an obligation when you won’t show up for yourself.
That’s usually when families start using respite hours, by the way. Not for an emergency. For a standing Thursday morning that belongs to them.
You’re allowed to still be a person in this.
How are you doing.
Seniors Helping Seniors® Jersey Shore North Home care, respite, personal care, and transportation in Monmouth, Middlesex, and Ocean Counties, NJ. www.JSNorthSHS.com | info@JSNorthSHS.com | 732-385-8805