The Essential and the Nonessential
When I was in high school, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden was required reading. It was the late 1960s and everybody seemed to embrace his two word mantra-command: “simplify, simplify.” The concept is aspirational to caregivers because any wasted effort is energy taken away from our caregiving duties, and our general well-being. There may be some folks who have minds that run like computers and may not relate to feeling time-pressed and overwhelmed. But for the rest of us, the worry and demands that are part and parcel of caregiving can easily lead to having an perpetually unhealthy state of mind.
When I first became Mom’s caregiver, things that needed to be done hung on my brain like Dr. Seuss’ Ooblick (remember that, Boomers?) until they were done and then the worry recommenced about having to do them again. And then there were the new to-do’s and an assortment of health care crises. This led to a free-form anxiety that floated and befogged my brain a good deal of the time, especially at the beginning. I sometimes felt I was fortunate to be working at a fast-paced demanding full time job because working supplanted some of that worry time.
One day, I asked myself, what could I do to get some of those racing thoughts to clear out of my mind to make room for some positive (or even just neutral) thoughts? Meditation didn’t seem like an activity that would work for me—I was never a big one for stillness. (Okay. So call it Adult A-D-D) Writing poetry quieted my mind, and it still does, but that alone didn’t cut it.
Another activity that might have helped would have been going to the gym but, unfortunately one of the first things to fall out of my daily routine after becoming a caregiver was my gym routine and I missed it. There’s nothing like a vigorous stationary bicycling session to change my mood from morose to happy in record time. But I knew that creating and sticking to at least one or two “me” routines was key to sometimes attaining relative peace of mind (for a few moments, anyway!)
I had one routine I had added prior to beginning my caregiving period and I didn’t want to give it up. I had a once-monthly book group. Each member had written at least one book or was in the process of having their book launch, and it provided me with a built-in support group of sorts. It was wonderful when they showed up at each others' book launches and lectures. We met in people’s homes and everyone except me seemed to be an award-winningly good cook.
I also belonged to a fiction-writing group. I hadn’t written any fiction for quite some time but I had an unfinished novel that I wanted to work on and get feedback. Some of the feedback was useful, some, not-so-much. I was in that limbo state of being between writing projects and I felt I didn’t have the time or enough emotional juice to start something new. These two routines served as social substitutes of sorts. As I write in my book (semi-humorously), when I moved in with Mom, I became a “socially stalled adult.” But my choice to limit social activities provided me with one benefit: I developed a new great at-home routine: when I was too tired to do anything except zombie-like plop down on my bed in the early evening, I’d read a book. Between that reading routine and listening to books while I drove to work, I felt I was filling in some reading gaps I'd wanted to fill but had been too rush-rush do-do to fill. And what better preparation was that for setting my next goal, which was to start formulating and writing my new book and getting it published? Which is my new next-goal after launching and promoting my two recently-published books, Why is Grandma Naked? Caring for Your Aging Parent and my poetry book, He is Walking Wider.
In short, in my case, caregiving required taking care of myself and my needs in some way. It fortified my resolve to forge on when the going got tough. It wasn’t selfishness but self-ness and emotional self-preservation that made me carve out some little “me” blocks of time. A relatively happy caregiver is a better caregiver than a grumpy, emotionally-sapped one. Right?