“You have to make time for self care.”
How many times are we commanded this from caregiver resource pages, physicians, or well-meaning friends who have never done the work?
Sometimes the followup is explicit: ”or you wont be able to care for X”. Sometimes it dangles in the air like a deviled egg fart- it wasnt officially announced, but you know it entered the room. Either way, you kind of want to throw up and leave the space, in no particular order.
The truth is “self care” is weaponized advice in a lot of ways against caregivers, and here are a few of them.
One, of course they know their demographics. 59-62% of caregivers are women, according to this study. Caregiving is largely unpaid labor, which has always been performed by mostly women and people of color (Important aside here- the state of caregiving for people of color is unique, and it is not intended that I gloss over that. It is a topic that deserves its own post, or series of posts. However, I did feel it was important to mention here that these particular groups of people have for generations done this work without pay since I’m talking about labor) . Most of the advice for ”self care” that goes beyond the basics of ”get a full night’s sleep and eat your veggies“ is to give yourself a facial, get a massage, do yoga- all female dominated activities in the US, particularly by Caucasian female-identifying people. They implicitly leaves out advice for men, who are increasingly becoming caregivers as well and left absolutely floundering because marketing for caregivers and conversations around caregiving don’t take into account some things that male caregivers face at a higher rate than women, like their catastrophic loss of community because they relied on their wives to do all the community and relationship building for their whole lives and find themselves without the skillsets necessary to maintain those ties.
Two, there is a pretty bold assumption that somehow we would be revitalized by a 10 minute facial or a 15 minute walk while being on call or actively caregiving for 24 hours a day. The only thing I know of that can benefit from a 10 minute break is a computer. Caregivers are powehouses- we’re often working part or full time, taking care of our own homes, and providing 20+ hours of unpaid caregiving a week. Forget the ”second shift”- we’re working third shift too.
Three, and maybe most importantly-the assumption that self care is basically the necessary maintenance to keep serving someone else, not to be a thriving individual of our own accord. The fact is- we’d probably love to do anything at all for ourselves, just to feel like humans again. Our task lists and urgent events on any given day is longer than our arms, though, and any single one of those self care suggestions just becomes another item on that list that we can possibly ignore, maybe even resent. Its no longer care- its a task, a burden, a struggle. And its not even for us- its actually meant for someone else to reap the benefits. The understood agenda here, though, is that once again women are relegated to a place of service, to a place of otherness, and that she should be able and magically intuit an entire skillset that is so mundane to her that she needs little in the way of support or care because, as a woman, she falls naturally into the roll of service and self-sacrifice for others. This is a continuation of the toxic lie of patriarchal norms that women are meant for this work, that their value and strengths lie in it, and that them doing it is necessary but not valuable enough to be supported or paid for it.
We already have enough people reaping the benefits of our work. From the person or people that we’re caring for, to the family members that can just ignore whats going on and blissfully live their lives because they cant possibly find time to be inconvenienced, to the tenuous healthcare system that would collapse in a day without your unofficial, untrained labor, to the national economy that gets billions of dollars worth of work for free… that facial is for them, not you.
So here’s my advice: if you want to axtually recognize the clear suffering of a caregiver, do not tell them to engage in self care. Instead, ask what you can do to give them some time to feel like a person again and then consistently show up to do that.
That is the work of community and allyship for caregivers.
I owe the world to friends who showed up for me in this way in the first year of caregiving. One would actually just come stay with my mom so I could go home, sleep in my own bed, and love on my dogs. Another allowed me to escape to his nearby apartment to play video games and eat a Firehouse sub as needed, even when he was at work, and took me to the movies on Sunday. Another drove 6 hours roundtrip to take me to dinner and have a couple of drinks every Tuesday on her day off. Another drove down and helped me burn enormous amounts of termite-riddled wood my father had left behind the house for an entire week. Another helped me learn how to fix my lawnmower. Today, even more friends have shown up in a variety of gracious ways. They couldnt do it all, but they absolutely always have done what they could.
Be these people. Don’t support the machinations of society that wants to tell women what to do with themselves for the sake of her serving directly and by proxy another human but also the whole of the world.
The Dementia Diva 