November happens to be when we officially recognize caregivers, but this masks something important: caregiving isn't really about recognition. It's about the quiet, daily work of helping someone who needs help.
I've noticed something odd about how we treat caregiving. We treat it as either a burden or a calling. But it's usually neither. For most people who help aging parents or ill relatives, it's simply what had to be done.
The reality of caregiving is surprisingly mundane. It's driving someone to doctor's appointments. It's sorting medications into little plastic boxes. It's making sure there's food in the refrigerator. None of these tasks is heroic. But they're essential.
What makes caregiving hard isn't the individual tasks. It's that they never end. When you write software, you can take breaks. When you're responsible for another person's well-being, you're always on call. The mental load is constant, even when you're not actively doing anything.
This points to something interesting about how we organize society. We've gotten very good at building systems to handle discrete tasks. But we're still struggling with how to handle ongoing human needs. Companies can optimize supply chains down to the minute, but we haven't figured out how to optimize care.
The best caregivers I've known share a particular quality. It's not patience, though that helps. It's not organization, though that's useful too. It's the ability to stay calm in the face of constant uncertainty. They've learned to be comfortable with not knowing what will happen next.
This is actually quite rare. Most of us prefer to feel in control. We like to think we can plan things out and then execute those plans. Caregiving destroys that illusion. You can make all the plans you want, but the person you're caring for may have other ideas.
The strange thing is that this loss of control often leads to a kind of freedom. Once you accept that you can't control everything, you stop trying to. You learn to focus on what you can do right now, in this moment.
There's a name for this approach in emergency medicine: "next indicated action." Instead of getting overwhelmed by everything that could go wrong, you just focus on the next thing that needs to be done. I've noticed the best caregivers naturally adopt this same mindset.
This points to something deeper about how humans handle difficult situations. We often make things harder by trying to solve everything at once. The more overwhelming a situation feels, the more we need to break it down into smaller pieces.
Most caregivers figure this out eventually, but it would help if we talked about it more openly. Instead of pretending caregiving is either a crushing burden or a noble calling, we could acknowledge it's mostly about showing up and doing what needs to be done.
This wouldn't just help caregivers. It would help everyone. Because most of us will either be caregivers or need care at some point. The better we understand what that really means, the better prepared we'll be.
The time to think about this isn't when you're in the middle of it. It's before you need to know. Just like you wouldn't want to learn about retirement planning the day you retire, you don't want to learn about caregiving the day someone needs your help.
We may not be able to make caregiving easy. But we could make it less isolating by talking about it more honestly, not with platitudes about heroes, but with practical knowledge about what works and what doesn't.
The best way to honor caregivers isn't with a designated month. It's by making their accumulated wisdom more accessible to others who will need it. Because that's the thing about caregiving: the need for it never really goes away. It just moves from one person to another.
Fritzi Gros-Daillon MS, CSA, CAPS, UDCP, SHSS
Household Guardians, Owner
2019 NAHB Instructor of the Year
Published author of "Grace and Grit: Insights to Real Life Challenges of Aging"
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