I say it all the time and I mean it every single time. I did not choose this field. This field chose me. 

I wasn’t sitting somewhere mapping out a career in caregiving. This was not the plan. But when my mother got sick, there was never a question in my mind about what I was going to do. I was going to be by her side. Every step of the way. Because I was not going to let her go through any of it alone. 

And if I’m being honest, I think it started long before my mother got sick. I think it started when I was about nine or ten years old, sitting on the sidelines watching my grandmother. 

The Original 

My grandmother was a Superwoman. I don’t say that lightly. I say it because I genuinely could not understand how she kept going. She was taking care of my grandfather, who had suffered a stroke and was bedridden for most of my childhood. She was caring for my uncle who has Down syndrome. She was there for her godmother. Her sister. She had fifteen children and over forty grandchildren and she was still showing up for her church community and cooking for everybody. 

She never told anyone who needed her no. Not once. She had enough energy for the whole world and she poured every drop of it into the people she loved. She never ran out of gas. She never complained. She had more love to give than most people could imagine. 

She used to say that nobody took care of my grandfather like her. That he didn’t look right unless she was the one taking care of him. And she meant it, not as a complaint, but as a statement of devotion. That was simply her truth. 

But I also remember her saying something else. She used to say, here I am taking care of him and I’m going to end up going before him. And that is exactly what happened. She never ran out of gas. She never complained. She had more love to give than most people could imagine. And still she went before him. About three months before. That is just what happened. And I have never forgotten it. 

I watched all of that as a child. I absorbed it without knowing I was absorbing it. And I believe with everything in me that caregiving was born in me on those sidelines, watching a woman love her family so completely and so abundantly that it became the standard I would carry with me for the rest of my life. 

Learning on the Floor 

When my mother was hospitalized I did something that I think surprised the nurses at first. I sat back and watched everything they did. Every transfer, every position change, every time they moved her from side to side to change the sheets without removing her from the bed. I watched how they did it. And then I got up and asked them to show me how to do it myself. 

I learned how to change bed linens with my mother still in the bed. I learned how to transfer her to a wheelchair. I learned how to give a bed bath. I learned everything I could from the nursing staff while we were still in that hospital, because I knew when we got home it was going to be on me. 

Most people sit in a hospital room and feel helpless. I turned it into a classroom. Not because I was extraordinary. But because I knew what was coming and I refused to be unprepared for her. 

If You’re in the Hospital I’m in the Hospital 

My mother used to tell me I didn’t have to stay. She would look at me and say go home, get some rest, you don’t have to be here. And I would look right back at her and say, if you’re in the hospital I’m in the hospital. We’re a team. We’re in this together. If you’re in a nursing facility I’m here too. 

I couldn’t rest at home knowing she was in that hospital bed without me. It sounds counterintuitive because caregiving at home is exhausting, but I rested better by her side than I ever did in my own bed while she was away. Being there was not a burden to me. It was where I needed to be. 

What I didn’t fully understand at the time was that my mother was doing the same thing for me that I was doing for her. She was lying in that hospital bed still worrying about me. Still trying to protect me. Still trying to give me a break even when she was the one who needed everything. 

That love ran in both directions. And I didn’t fully understand the weight of that until she was gone. 

She Was Still My Mother 

There was a time when I wasn’t feeling my best and I had to go to the emergency room in the middle of the night. And my mother, sick as she was, would not let me go alone. 

She was determined. I had to put her in her wheelchair so she could come with me. She sat with me in that emergency room because she was not going to let her baby girl go by herself. Not in the middle of the night. Not alone. Not ever. 

In the middle of everything she was going through, everything her body was putting her through, she was still my mother. Still showing up for me the same way I had been showing up for her. Still making sure I wasn’t alone. 

I spent years making sure she was never by herself through any of it. And the one night I needed someone, she made sure I wasn’t alone either. 

I miss that more than I have words for. I don’t just miss my mother. I miss being someone’s baby girl. I miss being taken care of. I miss the one person who loved me so completely that she got in her wheelchair in the middle of the night because she refused to let me face anything alone. 

That love never stopped. Not once. Not even at the end. 

In Part 2, I’ll share the weight of what caregiving actually looks like day to day, the fine line of becoming your parents’ parent, and the moment I realized I had hit a wall. Come back for it. It’s the part most people are too afraid to say out loud.