The Weight of Caregiving: Holding On Without Losing Myself

For the past two years, I have found myself in a role I never expected—sole caregiver to my mother.

She is 81. For most of her life, she was remarkably healthy. Strong. Independent. Until, little by little, things began to unravel. Aches that never quite went away. A mind that didn’t seem as sharp. A slow, creeping parade of chronic conditions—pain, neuropathy, cognitive decline, relentless UTIs, thyroid complications. There are no easy fixes, no true solutions. Only management. Only watching. Only waiting.

I could tell you what I’ve learned about the healthcare system, elder care, and geriatric medicine in this country, but I won’t. Not because I don’t have thoughts—I have a lifetime’s worth of anger, disbelief, and exhaustion wrapped up in my observations. But because it is too defeating, too disheartening, too much.

Instead, I want to talk about something else. Something harder, in some ways. What it means to be a sole caregiver to a parent. To carry the weight of their entire existence on your back. It's overwhelming. Completely, utterly overwhelming.

Because yes, my mother has doctors. Yes, she has staff at her assisted living facility who check in on her, who manage medications and meals. She also has friends, and while some still check in, their visits naturally become less frequent over time. And I understand. They have their own lives, their own responsibilities, their own challenges to navigate. It’s no one’s fault—it’s just the way life moves. But still, the absence is felt. The shrinking of her world, and by extension, mine.

There are so many layers to this experience. The bureaucratic nightmare of navigating healthcare, of advocating when no one seems to listen. The slow-motion grief of watching someone you love decline before your eyes. The exhaustion that settles into your bones, the resentment you don’t want to admit, the guilt that whispers, You should be doing more.

And then there is the anxiety. A kind of anxiety I never knew before. The kind that hums beneath everything, that makes me jump when the phone rings, that keeps my mind running in the background even when I’m doing something else. It’s in the way I hesitate before making plans, in the way I scan a room for exits, in the way I brace myself—always—for the next crisis, the next decline, the next impossible decision.

I can feel it changing me. The way I move through the world, the way I interact with people. I catch myself being shorter, more impatient. I feel myself withdrawing. It’s hard to admit—really hard—but I know that this experience has reshaped me in ways I don’t always like. And I don’t want to wake up one day and realize I’ve lost not just time, not just energy, but parts of myself that I may never get back.

But caregiving has also given me something unexpected. It has forced me to confront my own boundaries—to build them, enforce them, and respect them, even when guilt tells me I shouldn’t. It has taught me resilience in ways I never imagined, the kind of strength that isn’t about pushing through, but about knowing when to step back, when to ask for help, when to say, this is enough for today.

And perhaps most surprisingly, it has opened the door to a different kind of love. The kind that exists beyond old resentments, beyond childhood wounds, beyond the stories I once told myself about my mother and our past. I have had to learn how to love her as she is now, not as I wished she had been then. I have had to let go of expectations, of unresolved hurts, of the version of her I carried in my mind for so long.

No one tells you how all-consuming caregiving is until you are in it. Until you wake up one day and realize your own life has become smaller, narrower, more fragile under the weight of someone else’s needs.

And if you’re not careful, if you’re not vigilant, it will consume you.

But now, I recognize it. I see the toll it has taken—the way it has seeped into every corner of my life, the way it has asked more of me than I ever thought I could give. And yet, I am still here. Still standing. Still capable of reclaiming what is mine.

So I am choosing—deliberately, daily—to shift. To carve out space for myself within this experience rather than being swallowed by it. To set boundaries that protect both her dignity and my own. To loosen my grip on guilt and allow in small, necessary joys. To remind myself that my well-being is not secondary, not an afterthought, not something to be sacrificed in service of someone else’s needs.