Coping whilst caring

The job nobody applied for

One day you were getting on with your life. The next, you were on a 7am call with your mother’s GP. Then you were driving an hour each way to her flat. Then you were the one who knew the password to her bank account, the name of her consultant, the time the carer was due. Then you were getting up at five to do your own work before her day started.

Nobody applied for this. You were elected to it by being the daughter who answered the phone.

You did not sign up to be a carer. You are doing it because you love them, and because you would not forgive yourself if you didn’t. Both can be true at once.

What it actually looks like

Not the soft-focus version. The real one:

• Booking the GP appointments for your mum. Remembering the school photo day for your teenager. Holding a job.
• The 6am phone call from the care home that ruins the whole day.
• Two hours of admin (the bank, the council, the pension office, the GP receptionist), before 9am.
• Choosing, in the car park, whether to phone your sister back or eat a sandwich. There isn’t time for both.
• Hiding the fact that you cried in the supermarket before you came in.
• Walking into your own kitchen at 8pm and not being sure what you came in for.
• Going to bed too tired to read. Waking at 4am unable to sleep.
• Pretending, at work, that everything is fine, because the alternative feels worse than carrying it alone.

The grief inside the caring

If the person you’re caring for is fading, with dementia, with a long illness, with old age, you are grieving them while you are caring for them. They are still here. You are still losing them. Both are true.

This is anticipatory grief, and it is one of the most exhausting kinds. You do all the work of grief in slow motion, and then, when the death comes, you find yourself somehow not ready, because you cannot be ready in advance. You can only keep starting.

Please read Grief and loss alongside this page. They go together.

The thing we are not allowed to feel

Resentment.

You love them. You are still here, still showing up. And sometimes, in private, you are exhausted, and angry, and you wish for one whole weekend that did not have them in it. Sometimes you wish, in the worst hours, that it was over. About a parent you love.

That doesn’t make you a bad daughter. It makes you a tired one. The two are not the same.

These thoughts pass. They come back. They pass again. You don’t have to confess them. You don’t have to be ashamed of them. You just have to know they are normal, and that thinking them does not change the love.

Resentment and love are not opposites. They live in the same hour. Often in the same sentence. You are not a bad person for feeling both.

The siblings who don’t pull their weight

One sibling, almost always, does the most. It is, statistically, the daughter who lives nearest. Sometimes it is the daughter who lives furthest, and feels guilty in a different way. Often it is the daughter who works the least intense job, or the one who has the most patience, or the one who said yes first.

The others may help. They may not. They may help in ways that don’t feel like help. They may turn up at the funeral and have opinions about how you did it.

You may need to have hard conversations. You may not get the help you ask for. You may need to lower your expectations of family while you raise them of yourself.

Sometimes, the most loving thing is to let go of fairness inside the family, and to ask for help from outside it instead. Carers UK exists. Local authority assessments exist. Paid carers exist.

The cost nobody totals

• Financial. Lost hours, dropped promotions, the cost of a carer for two afternoons a week, the petrol to drive to your mum’s, the new bigger phone bill.
• Career. The role you turned down. The course you couldn’t take. The promotion that went to someone with a less busy life.
• Marriage. The bandwidth that has gone to the parent and not to the partner. The conversations you keep meaning to have, and don’t.
• Body. Sleep gone, alcohol up, exercise down, weight up, GP appointments deferred because you cannot be ill on top of everything else.
• Friendships. The friends you have not called in months. The lunches you cancel. The slow drift.
• Self. The hobbies, the rest, the books, the time-to-think. The you, somewhere under all of it.

You may be paying all six costs at once. None of them have been invoiced to you. All of them are real.

Practical first steps

• Register as a carer with your GP. It unlocks small but real things. Extra time at your own appointments. Access to local carer support.
• Contact Carers UK on 0808 808 7777. Free, knowledgeable, kind. They will tell you what benefits exist, what your rights are, and what to push for.
• Ask the local authority for a Carer’s Assessment. Free. You are entitled. It can unlock paid breaks, equipment, sometimes a carer for the cared-for. Don’t wait until you are on your knees.
• Talk to your employer. You may have rights to flexible working or unpaid carer’s leave you don’t know about. Our Letter Generator can help you start the conversation, in your tone, in writing.
• Find the right specialist charity for the condition you’re caring for. Dementia UK (0800 888 6678) has Admiral Nurses who specialise in dementia carers. Macmillan and Marie Curie do brilliant work with cancer. Stroke Association. Parkinson’s UK. Each one has people whose entire job is families like yours.
• Outsource one thing. Just one. Not all of it. One.

What helps emotionally, when the practical isn’t the problem

• Talking to one person who understands without you having to explain. A friend who has done this before, or is doing it now. A counsellor who specialises in carers. A peer group, in person or online.
• A small thing that is still yours. A weekly swim. A book club. Wednesday morning coffee with one friend. Something on the calendar that does not move, no matter what is happening with the cared-for.
• Permission to be angry, sad, scared, jealous of people whose parents are well. These are all reasonable feelings. None of them make you a bad daughter.
• Talk to SAM when there isn’t anyone awake, and you don’t want to wake anyone up.

When you simply cannot

Sometimes there is a day when you cannot do another thing. The carer hasn’t turned up. Your child is ill. Your boss has emailed about something at midnight. Your mother has had a fall.

On that day: do the one thing that cannot wait. Let the rest go. Apologise to anyone who needs an apology, briefly. Eat something. Sleep early. Start again tomorrow.

You do not have to be a hero. You have to keep going. Those are not the same thing, and only one of them is required.

Carrying everyone else doesn’t make you stronger. It makes you tired. Help isn’t weakness. Help is how you keep doing this.