💬 Eldercare/Caring for Parents: "Doesn’t caregiving get easier over time?"

The July Discussion/"Ask us Anything"

Hello, dear Friends, I’m Victoria. I created Carer Mentor to offer heartfelt empathy for Caregivers. It’s a hub of practical tools, resources, and insights. A community support network for all of us human-ing hard. ❤️

You can read about why I started Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration here. I recommend using the quick-start navigation guide to explore the website.

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The Premise for these monthly discussions: different relational dynamics within caregiving.

At its core, Carer Mentor offers heartfelt empathy for caregivers. On the one hand, our individual circumstances, struggles, cultures, values, and backgrounds make our caregiving experiences unique. On the other hand, we’re united by universal life experiences: birth, death, feelings, and vulnerabilities; our humanity unites us.

Another dimension we don’t often discuss is the relational dynamics of caregiving. I focus on eldercare/caring for my parents, but many friends care for their spouse, child, or sibling. In addition, these days we recognise that caregiving stretches beyond blood ties. Various forms of kinship care, care communities, or caring among chosen family are emerging. While we may share experiences of caregiving as a whole, I’m curious to explore these caregiving relationships and offer caregiver-friends a space to connect.

This is why I started a new collaboration project to facilitate more community connections and discussion. The Carer Mentor Community Network involves 3 monthly discussion groups:

1. 💬 Caregivers Who Are Parents

2. 💬 Eldercare/Caring for Parents

3. 💬 Caregiving as a Spouse/Partner

The Eldercare/Caring For Parents Collaboration Team

These are our team members. Each person has a publication in which they share their thoughts on caregiving for an older family member, friend, or parent(s). Click each name to find out more about them.

1. Adrian Chung

2. Anna De La Cruz

3. Janine De Tillio Cammarata

4. Jodi Sh.Doff

5. Kirbie Earley

6. Kirsten Mau

7. Sally Cave

8. Sarah Bain

9. Sarah Coomber

10. Sue Montgomery

11. Tina Matras

12. Viva Mogi

13. Kerri Forrest

Important details

• Mark your calendars: The “Eldercare/caring for a parent” discussions will be on the second Friday of every month.

• The discussion will start on a Friday but won’t close. Join on Friday or over the weekend, or whenever you can. No pressure, we know how precious and unpredictable our time can be.

• Explore previous discussions, indexed in the first discussion article

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Distracted by a question

I was recently caught off guard, challenged by what seemed like a fairly simple, innocuous question: “Doesn’t caregiving get easier over time?” It pushed me into a swirl of thoughts.

The question came a few moments into a short introductory conversation and felt somewhat loaded. Maybe because it wasn’t a caregiver asking me, and the context was more work-related.

It feels like a provocative question to me because it implies caregiving ‘should’ get easier. (Swear word, red flag alert - ‘should’?)

In this instance, the person asking seemed genuinely curious to hear my answer. So, instead of protecting my energy and time with “No, it doesn’t get any easier.” and changing the subject, I spent a few minutes trying to explain my thoughts:

“I can’t speak for everyone, only about my experience. But after several years caregiving for my father and now my mother, I can’t say caregiving gets ‘easier’, because…’

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The important sidebar I wanted to share with you is that I was surprised by how much the question irritated me. I didn’t want to flatten my caregiving into a question of easy or hard.

Sure, some aspects are easier because we’ve built our routine and system - the essentials (e.g. go bags and medication checklists) - but this scaffolding doesn’t capture the whole experience. I’m in my second rollercoaster of caring, so I have more experience, but caring for my mother is different to caring for my dad. How do I qualify ‘easier’?

Over the years, journaling through my curiosity to arrive at personal insights has helped me learn from my experiences. It’s how I’ve made sense of and found meaning in what my parents and I have been through.

While I feel the need to share my caregiving experiences and advocate for others, it’s hard to translate complex, paradoxical and expansive thoughts to others. It’s part of why I wanted to start these monthly discussions. Enable exchanges with people who ‘get it.’

Explanations are already difficult to navigate if the person asking is less aware of the delays in social reforms and the overburdened, under-resourced healthcare systems.

So, I tend to hold back from explaining the details of my bespoke version of thriving: the more expansive, meaningful, yet very quiet days, rich in love; being mindful so I struggle less with feeling all the feelings. I don’t openly share the anticipatory grief that I have to contend with for a second time or other challenges. We need more open conversations to raise public awareness, and yet it’s hard to open up to people who haven’t experienced caregiving.

Besides, it feels like explaining too much would sap the joy out of our meaning-FULL time. Sometimes, precious moments defy the need for explanations. Music taught me that.

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Coming back to the question…‘Doesn’t caregiving get easier over time’

What’s driving this question? Is this person thinking that we can optimise our caregiving, like some sort of productivity push? Or are carers expected to reach some kind of expert level where caregiving becomes ‘easy’?

Societal constructs, productivity culture and an over-focus on self-actualisation¹ can push this caregiver’s buttons!

Personally, I gravitate to Viktor Frankl’s thinking (Man’s Search for Meaning).

“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
― Viktor E. Frankl

A word of advice: The best approach to take if you feel challenged by a question: pause and ask “Can you tell me more, expand on the question?”

“Help me understand why you’re asking, so I can answer your question better”.

Answering the question

“I can’t speak for everyone, only about my experience. But after several years caregiving for my father and now my mother, I can’t say caregiving gets ‘easier’, because…’

Caregiving is relational. I mean that when humans are involved, and one of them is ill, personalities and relationships make everything complex. It involves recalibrating, adapting, and a special kind of agility to respond with care.

Health issues are unpredictable, especially if our parent is becoming more frail. We have to have difficult conversations about risk-benefit trade-offs with our parents. Time and experience can’t remove the complexity or make those talks easier. Imagine the emotions involved.

Caregiving is fluid and changeable, not an iterative process that can be optimised for productivity. The only constant we have in life is change. As Heraclitus said:

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” ―Heraclitus, 5th century BC

Because caregiving is human-ing. So, caregiving requires situational solutions, bespoke tailoring stitched with empathy and fashioned with a deft can-do attitude and creativity.

I can do some things to make things easier, but other variables and new challenges still arise. It’s impossible to prepare for every eventuality.

Distracted by the wrong question

You can see the swirl and how I was distracted by the question.² It felt wrong to me because I don’t think about caregiving in terms of how easy or hard it is.

For me, caregiving means something much richer and more complex than trying to flatten it into something to be measured as easy or hard. My priority is to enable my mother's wishes and ensure she is as comfortable, well, and independent as possible, for as long as possible. I prefer to frame our time together around meaning and quality, not how easy it is for me.

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Today’s discussion is co-hosted with Kirbie Earley

Kirbie publishes The Dementia Chronicles

I was interested to hear a few of Kirbie’s thoughts on how caring for her mother today contrasts with how she cared for her father before. I asked Kirbie to briefly describe caregiving for each parent and then compare her experiences. “When you compare and contrast these caregiving experiences, can you share

• one thing in your caregiving that has been the same?

• One thing that’s surprisingly different?

• One thing you’ve learnt about yourself?

Kirbie’s experience and learning

My caregiving journey has had two chapters, and they couldn’t be more different.

My father had an unknown type of dementia and spent the last several years of his life in a slow, steady decline. I moved in to help care for six years before he passed in late 2024 in memory care. He was gentle in his dementia — confused, yes, and increasingly dependent, but still recognizably himself in the ways that mattered most.

Now I’m the primary caregiver for my mother, who is sliding into what I believe is early stage dementia, though we don’t have a formal diagnosis yet. Her issues are medical than dementia-related at this point. She and I have a complicated history, which adds a layer to this caregiving experience that wasn’t present with my dad.

The same: The invisible nature of the work. With both of my parents, the caregiving happened in the background — quietly, without announcement, and without much acknowledgment. You just do what needs to be done and the day moves on.

Surprisingly different: With my dad, the hard part was watching him change. With my mother, the hard part is that she hasn’t. She has always been a difficult person to be around, and dementia hasn’t softened that, the way it did with my dad. My reaction to her is what surprises me most — the hypervigilance, and if I’m being honest, a much stronger desire to escape.

What I’ve learned about myself: With Dad’s caregiving, I learned that I can be a patient person, something I wasn’t when I was younger. With Mom, what I’ve learned is that much like when I was a child, I still fear her. It’s causing me to grind my teeth, I’m sick more often, my blood pressure can run high if I don’t do some deep breathing, and I hate waking up and going downstairs in the morning – I never know which version of her will be waiting. While this was my childhood. I no longer want to live this way, but I’m not sure leaving is in the cards either.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Kirbie.

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For our discussion

1. Briefly introduce yourself: where you live, who you care for and how long you’ve been caring.

2. Ask us anything, share your thoughts on our reflections or answer this prompt:

Today’s prompt for discussion:

Have you been ‘swirled’ by a question?

Can you share something you’ve learnt about yourself over the course of your caregiving so far?

3. Reply to other comments or questions, share empathy and strengthen your connection with others who ‘get it’.

Let’s remember that what works for one person may not work for someone else. Let’s lead with empathy.

Please remember to ‘❤️’ LIKE the article to signpost this discussion for others to join

1. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: self-actualisation is the highest personal aspirational human need in the hierarchy. It represents where one's potential is fully realised after more basic needs, such as for the body and the ego, have been fulfilled, and is recognised in psychological teaching as the peak of human needs.

2. I realised that these kinds of questions had pushed me to write a previous article. I recommend reading it to see if it resonates with you: Caregiving Misperceptions and Realities.What are our socially conditioned assumptions about caregiving, caregivers and respite? What can we do to support one another in our communities?