Perks of the Job

There are a lot of shit moments in my new world as a caregiver. My career, as it was, is on hold. There are trying times doing emotional, psychological battle with a three-and-a-half-year-old. There are long, boring waits in medical centres and rehab facilities and drawn out, anxiety-inducing waits for test results at home while we’re trying to just get on with our lives. There is always an undercurrent of fear and frustration and anger at our family’s situation and what we all have to give up and work around in the reality in which we now, and forever, find ourselves.

But, and it’s a big but (cue the immature giggles at me saying “big butt”…I spend a lot of time with kids), there is also a new pace of life and a flavour of love that we would not have if our world had not been completely shaken up this time last year.

I’m going to be self-centred and zoom into my caregiver role in particular here. If this role had not been forced on me, I would be spending this afternoon fretting over a deadline, bitching about the client that was pushing for twice what they paid for, and then frantically packing my laptop into my bag, forgetting the critical power cord in the office as I crammed myself into my car to fight highway traffic to collect the kids from daycare and school. We’d jam food in their faces before rushing them to extra-curriculars, snipping at everyone along the way, sandwiching homework and home reading in just before bed to do it all again the next day.

While that is all relatively normal, and it’s not bad, it’s also a life that feels less relevant than it used to. Because someone needs to be here, and available, managing appointments, and therapy and chemo, someone is. That someone is me and after a year, that old life feels pretty distant. I’m home and the days have to be flexible with wiggle room and room to rest, so the rat race pace is less intense. Mornings and afterschool routines are more relaxed. We schedule less and roll with it more.

My work as a caregiver, and it is work, expands to fill all the time I can give it, but there are also moments and tasks that just have to be quiet and filled with something else. I may be on call all night, but I have an hour here and there, when my daughter is with a grandparent, or watching a movie waiting for chemo, when I can just sit and read. My day-to-day life is not spent at the computer, or on conference calls, so I enjoy sitting and writing and I relish actually talking to people again.

I’m always stressed and anxious, but I also have a therapist prescribing gym time and painting to preserve my mental health. Self care is no longer a luxury, but a requirement. If my body fails, I can’t do my job, so I’ve made getting in shape a priority for the first time in my life and am sticking to it. I can’t wrap my head around an actual piece of art, but I’m picking away at painting an old doll house because I need something, anything, to do that is not involved with my daughter’s care and medical needs or family administration.

I am not going to deny that our situation, while challenging, is a hell of a lot easier in all this than it could be. Another day, I’ll dig myself into the layers of privilege we have in dealing with this whole mess that make it possible for me to not work at anything but the care of my daughter right now. (Short version: Holy shit, we are lucky we live where we do and were born into a place of comfort and education.)

I’ve spent more time with my daughter in the last year than I spent with her in her first two years of life. My relationship with my partner and my son are deeper and more grounded than I ever thought possible, because we’ve had to build different connections and ways of communicating. We spend our weekends and time together so much differently than we did before because that’s the way it has to be. We don’t try to pack too much into that time. Our situation has slowed us down, and there are definite benefits to that.

As a caregiver, as any caregiver can attest, your time is not really your own. You’re never really off duty. You never really relax. You are the day shift, the night shift and the emergency room shift. You are the repository for all the important information and the shield that the shit hits on its way to the fan. I don’t drink any more because I don’t want to be half in the bag in the ER trying to coax my daughter through a CAT scan. My partner is absolutely willing and capable of doing this, but it’s my job and I’m stubborn and I’ve got the front-line experience. I don’t want to drop the ball.

This is not a “poor me” situation (though of course I wouldn’t choose it). What I am trying to accept and fight for (with myself), now that we are out of crisis mode (hopefully for a while, ideally forever), is to still be myself in amongst all the other things. I’m trying to maintain the parts of me that I like and that I have control over.

I don’t know if my career will ever be what it was. It certainly won’t be what it could have been. My family life, another aspect of myself, will never be what a lot of other people have or what we thought it would be. I can’t control what has driven those changes.

What I can control, and am learning to relish, is the time and space between the caregiver tasks. I don’t feel so guilty about time to read, or to doodle, or to write escapist garbage, or to savour a coffee and the odd cigarette on a sunny day. I’m learning, slowly, to not ask for or apologise for that time. I’m trying to just take it. There aren’t a lot of perks to this job and unpaid interns bring home more bacon. Might as well make the most of it.