My mom has a word for what I am to her. She calls me her person. As in: “You’re my person.” She says it matter-of-factly, the way you’d say “this is my house” or “this is my coffee.” It’s a statement of orientation. You’re the one I call. You’re the one who knows. You’re the one I count on.
I’ve been my mother Susan’s primary caregiver for several years now, and I want to write about it honestly — which means writing about both the love and the difficulty, because they’re not separate things. They’re the same thing.
Here’s what they don’t tell you in the abstract about caregiving: it reshapes the architecture of your days in ways that are impossible to fully anticipate. My schedule bends around hers in ways that have become so habitual I sometimes forget they’re unusual — the calls, the appointments, the logistics of making sure she has what she needs, that the small and large emergencies that arrive without warning have someone to absorb them. Some weeks this is manageable, even joyful. Some weeks the weight of constant availability is genuinely exhausting in ways that are hard to describe without sounding like you’re complaining about love.
I’m not. But the exhaustion is real, and pretending otherwise doesn’t serve anyone.
Caregiving at this level is its own kind of full-time job layered on top of whatever else constitutes your life — and unlike most jobs, there’s no clocking out, no clear performance review, no tidy metrics for success. You’re navigating someone else’s decline while trying to preserve their dignity and your relationship with them. These goals sometimes align perfectly and sometimes create impossible tensions, and you’re making judgment calls with imperfect information on a continuous basis.
The unexpected moments are what I think about most. My mom still surprises me constantly. Her humor, which is dry and occasionally devastating. Her opinions, which are strong and frequently right. The stories she tells about her life before I existed as a person who knew her — who she was at twenty-five, the things she chose, the things she survived. These windows open up in the middle of ordinary afternoons, and I’ve learned to slow down for them, to put everything else down and be fully there, because they’re gifts.
Taking care of someone you love rearranges your understanding of what actually matters. I’ve become a better judge of what’s urgent versus what just feels urgent. I’ve become less tolerant of certain kinds of drama and more tolerant of uncertainty. I’ve become clearer about who I want to spend time with and why.
The guilt is constant and mostly irrational. Did I call enough this week? Was I present enough during the last visit? Should I be doing more? I’ve made my peace with the fact that the guilt doesn’t mean I’m doing it wrong — it’s actually a symptom of caring, of taking the role seriously. The trick is not letting it curdle into self-punishment or, worse, resentment.
Loneliness is part of it too, though that sounds strange from the outside. But there’s a specific aloneness in being someone’s primary support — a sense of carrying something that can’t be fully shared or delegated. Friends and family help where they can, and that help matters enormously. But the overall weight lives with one person, and that person is me, and some nights that’s just true.
What keeps me going — genuinely, not in the inspirational-poster sense — is this: I would rather be her person than not be. I would rather be the one who knows her medications and her moods and her favorite television shows and which worries keep her up at night. I would rather be present for this chapter of her life than look back and know I wasn’t. The difficulty doesn’t cancel the privilege. It’s just part of it.
She called me last Tuesday to tell me about a bird she’d seen at the window. A cardinal, very red, sitting there for a while. She wanted to tell someone, and she called me.
I’m her person. I know.