"My caregiving journey is a family healing journey" By Viva Mogi

Spring Season Letters From A Caregiver

Hello! If you’re new to Carer Mentor, welcome! Thank you for being here.

I’m Victoria. You can read why I’m publishing Carer Mentor here: Who Started Carer Mentor and Why? 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. ❤️ Start exploring here.

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Letters from a Caregiver.

“Letters from a Caregiver” is a weekly article where a caregiver offers wisdom, compassion, and hope to their younger self. No one knows us as well as we know ourselves, and even then, we may second-guess ourselves. The choices, challenges and tragedies we’ve faced have forged us in more ways than anyone can understand; in ways we’re still trying to decipher!

There are two previous seasons of Twenty-One Letters.

This Spring Season so far

1. “Misunderstood, and everyone has an opinion,” By Victoria

2. “What It Takes To Embrace the Life He Has “ By Chris B. Writes

3. “The Long Road Home for a Different Kind of Future” By Haley Haddow

4. “Grace, belatedly..…Becoming the daughter she needed” By Sarah Bain

Today’s ‘Letter from a Caregiver’ is by Viva Mogi, MPA

I found this article by Viva last year and was inspired:

The Dream Wedding. On love, caregiving, and learning to choose joy without guilt.

“Our parents were loving and understanding when we told them we wanted to elope. That subtle distinction — making it about us, not all of us — meant everything. After years of caregiving for my mom, my dad told me, simply, to do what makes me happy. His blessing held a thousand unspoken lessons: he wanted us to live freely, joyfully, and without guilt. That’s also how I’ve learned to approach caregiving and it was time for me to live that way for myself.”

Viva has a beautiful way of articulating complex concepts about culture and caregiving, making them feel more accessible and relatable. While my view through the kaleidoscope of culture may not be exactly the same, the colours are very familiar.

Thank you for sharing your family’s story with us, Viva.

Author’s Bio: Viva Mogi is a policy strategist and community organizer based in California. Raised by Japanese immigrants, she is a caregiver to her mother living with Alzheimer’s — and writes about what that journey has taught her about culture, identity, and the systems we navigate along the way. She believes that better policy starts with stories like hers, and that the more honestly we share them, the more human our systems can become on her Substack, Care is a Strategy.

My caregiving journey is a family healing journey

Dear Viva,

It’s been a few years since Mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. You’re still figuring things out — living away from home but spending more and more time thinking about coming back. About what it would mean. What it would cost. What it might give you.

There is a moment that will make the weight of that choice land differently. Mom gets shingles, and her case is so severe — sores in her mouth, close to her eyes — that she has to be hospitalized. Then placed in a short-term nursing facility until she’s strong enough to come home. So you take a week off work. Because just days in the hospital, she can no longer walk on her own. If she can walk, she can go home. But the staff here speak only English, and she refuses to engage with the physical therapist. So you show up every single day for five days. You bring food she likes. You sit with her. You encourage her, gently, firmly, patiently. And slowly, she makes progress.

She gets so weak so quickly now, and it is heartbreaking. Dad is exhausted — rightfully so — but no one else is there for any real stretch of time. An hour here and there. Not enough. You feel it leaving every time, that pull in your chest. Even when you go back home, there is no rest — just the heaviness of distance. You are beginning to understand what it means to care from afar, and the choice of whether to move back is pressing on you in a way that no longer feels abstract.

That moment — those five days — is the one where you will see it clearly: this is what she needs. And this might be what you’re stepping into.

You and Mom have always had something rare. A closeness that doesn’t come easily — especially between an Asian American daughter and an immigrant mother carrying the weight of an entire culture’s expectations on her shoulders. And yours. You know what’s expected of a good Asian daughter. You’ve always known. The success, the marriage, the children. The caregiving, when that time comes. You are not the exception to any of it.

“Isn’t it so wonderful you had at least one daughter?”

You will hear this from parents’ friends — said casually, warmly even — throughout the caregiving years. And you will understand, in a way you never quite had words for before, that this was never just an obligation or an expectation. For some, it is the reason you were born. Hold that. Sit with it. Let yourself feel whatever it makes you feel.

Right now, you’re in your early thirties and trying to figure out how to date — in this impossible era of apps and algorithms — while knowing you might want to move home to care for mom. How do you explain that on a third date? You’ve started wondering if it’s even worth trying. The cultural and biological clock is still ticking, and unlike the men you meet, you feel every second of it.

I want you to know: those feelings are real. The exhaustion of carrying cultural expectation and grief and logistical complexity all at once — that is real. But there’s something you can’t see yet that I want to tell you.

You are about to learn things about yourself, your family, and your culture that you could never have learned any other way.

Caregiving in America means talking about money. It means sitting across from your parents — people who hid the will like a family secret — and asking them to be your teammates instead of just your parents. It means your father will say, “Just deal with it when I’m gone.” He will say this more than once. And it will frustrate you deeply, because you will know what “just deal with it” actually costs. Everything takes six months. The government systems take six months. Convincing your parents to share information takes six months. Plan for that. Give yourself grace inside that timeline.

With a family like ours, where money is never discussed, you will often feel like a bank account. It will weigh on you. It will make you deeply sad — that all the work you did to build financial freedom pulls you back into something familiar and painful. Two hardworking immigrant parents who had some retirement, but not enough for what caregiving truly asks. You will carry that too.

Respecting elders and setting boundaries are not opposites. You are about to live the proof of that.

Boundaries with Asian parents — yes, it will absolutely be a thing. Hard-won and worth every uncomfortable conversation. You will learn to hold both love and firmness in the same hands. Your relationship with your parents will become one of the most important and complex of your life. It will ask everything of you. It will also give back in ways you didn’t know you needed.

You are not alone in this. Many cultures carry this quietly. And there will be something unexpected in hiring Japanese-speaking caregivers — in surrounding your mother with familiar language and familiar things. It will bring you back to your own childhood. Saturday Japanese school. The strict rules and gruelling hours you resented then. But here, in these caregiving years, those lessons resurface as gifts. You will speak the language with her. You will feel the thread of responsibility that was placed on you even as a child — and you will begin to see it differently. Not as a burden you were handed, but as something that shaped you into the person who shows up. Who doesn’t run. Who stays.

Is it unfair? Yes. Did you ever run away? No. That is all you. Rather than flattening your experience into “caregiving is hard,” you’ll learn the full complexity of your story. And that story has a lot of value — for you, and for others who need to hear it.

The caregiving journey will crack open old wounds — generational ones, not just your own. You will find yourself in the middle of something bigger than you planned for. Trauma surfaces in unexpected moments. But each difficult incident will be a small act of healing, for your family line and for yourself.

There will be moments you want to walk away from all of it. And there will be moments when a friend says, "I could never do what you do," and instead of feeling seen, you feel the full weight of what you're carrying. It's a lot. It is a lot. But rather than disappearing into that weight or feeling sorry for yourself — and you could, and no one would blame you — you found something that helped you keep going. A network. People who understood. That's what sustains us. Not toughness. Not obligation alone. Community.

Keep the therapist — and you do. Keep going to the support groups. Keep sharing your story. That is how caregiving becomes something we can hold with care, rather than something that breaks us. Breaking cycles isn’t what you signed up for. But it will heal you.

My caregiving journey is a family healing journey.

And about the life you want — the partner, the family, the career — all of it: it doesn’t disappear. It doesn’t get canceled by caregiving. It happens alongside it, slowly and in pieces, shaped differently than you imagined.

Everything you are doing, you are doing amazingly. Be so proud of yourself. Give yourself so much love — because anxiety will take over, and love is how you ease its grip on the uncertainty. The only thing I wish I could reach back and say, the one real thing:

“Move home as soon as you can. Not because it will be easy. But because the life you want is already taking shape there, quietly, without your knowing.”

He is there. Minutes from mom and dad’s house. He will love you fully — all of you, including the parts that are tired and conflicted and fiercely, stubbornly devoted to your family. He will not see the caregiving as a complication. He will see you.

Life will not go as planned. It never does. But it will happen — the partner, the family, the work that matters — slowly enough that you can carry it all.

In the end, I just wanted to see you happier sooner. But it’s okay. The love and happiness that come will be cherished all the more for arriving when they did. More to be grateful for. It was all meant to be this way.

Thank you for showing up. For not hiding from what was expected — for embracing it, in your own way, in your own style. With commitment, love, and so much thought. You are still you through all of it. Through the chaos, the grief, the hard conversations, the long drives home.

You're not strong because you're a good Asian daughter. You're not strong because culture wrote that role for you before you could choose it. Every step you've taken, every hard thing you've walked through — that's the muscle you built. Slowly, without always knowing it. Not because you were born into a script, but because every day you decided to show up.

Care isn’t something we simply have. It’s something we build — quietly, daily, imperfectly. That is what caregiving taught you. And that belongs to you.

I am proud of you. Be proud of yourself.

With so much love and hard-earned patience,

Viva

1. Moving through fear or uncertainty

I remind myself that 80% of caregiving is unknown. We can’t truly predict what comes next — and even when we’ve done everything we can to prepare, it still might not be enough. So I take a breath. Literally. I believe deeply in calming the nervous system before engaging with the fear, and it starts there — with a deep breath. And more often than not, I come right back to that same truth: I’ve done what I can. That has to be enough for today.

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2. Three qualities I admire

Listening — really listening, not just waiting to respond. Being kind to yourself and to others, in equal measure. And starting the day by telling yourself, and the people around you, that today is going to be a good day. It sounds simple. It isn’t.

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3. Quote / book / film that’s inspired you

Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime. It’s genuinely funny — and underneath the humor is something that stays with you. He wasn’t born a criminal. He was told he was, by communities and systems designed to make him smaller. That distinction matters. When you can see how stories get assigned to people rather than chosen by them, it changes how you move through the world. It makes you more human to others — and, I think, to yourself. Perhaps then, we can truly see people shine the way they were always meant to.

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Prompt for discussion:

“What’s one thing caregiving has taught you about yourself that you couldn’t have learned any other way? Share in the comments — I’d love to hear your story.”

Please like ‘❤️’ the article to guide others here.