Losing Myself and Finding Me Again: The Caregiver’s Cycle

Do you ever feel as if you’re looping loop in and out? Losing yourself and finding yourself in an infinity loop?

When I was caring for my mom and so much of my days were spent in repetition of pills, food trays, baths, doctor visits, physical therapy appointments, interspersed with more pills and more trays–it’s easy to get caught up in all the doing. I had to make myself stop and think. Be present. Hold my mother’s hand. Enjoy the icecream with her. Whistle.

But then I’d get busy again and would lose my way.

Being busy is the quickest way to lose myself that I know of.

Losing me is like misplacing your glasses and knowing they’re missing, you squint, hold things to the light, or avoid reading at all. Then it dawns on you–your glasses are missing–and you start the hunt. You search and search, and it takes a while.

You find your glasses. You can read, function, see the veins in leaves.

Weeks later, you’re back to squinting and you don’t even know it yet…

A friend asked me recently what it meant to live in joy.

She has diabetes and was contemplating the connection with her body’s love/hate relationship with sweets.

I told her joy wasn’t a constant, but it was more like her blood vessels constantly picking up the sweet, moving it around her body, and then dropping off the extra. That’s what the pancreas is supposed to do–handle and regulate the lack and the excess.

Joy is a regulator. It’s not that life is always sweet. It’s that joy allows you to pick up and drop off as you need to.

Pick up a song on days you’re low. Pick up an extra mile on your walk.

Drop off a hurt word, let out a little scream while you’re alone in the car. Take an extra bath.

 Caregiver’sare forgetful creatures. They’ve proven multi-tasking doesn’t work nearly as well as most people think it does.

Oprah’s new book selection, The New Earth by Eckhart Tolle is all about being in the present. Why is this needed now? Perhaps because we are more splintered, more triple-stacked with life than ever before.

I remember just days after 9/11 when all of us were so stunned, I ran into grocery shop, fuddled around for about 10 minutes putting maybe 2 things in my cart–and then I just left. I left the cart in the aisle and found myself sitting at a red light barely remembering how I got there.

Stress does that to you. It makes you forget where your heart is, where you last left it.

Joy reminds you.

Ironically, caring for our elders is a lot like caring for our babies. If you’re focusing on what really matters, and not all the doing, then you’ll find your heart.

I don’t know if you’re in the state of loss, or the numb state of not realizing you’re lost,

or back in a state of focus and purpose, all I can say is that this is the cycle of life: the ebb and flow.

May we flow more than we ebb.

~Carol D. O’Dell

Author of Mothering Mother: A Daughter’s Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir

available on Amazon

www.mothering-mother.com