The Seasons of Caregiving

When I was very little my mother introduced me as her little nurse. Did that have anything to do with my choice of professions? I’ve focused my last 32 years in the mental health field. I thought about this question “Why that population; the mentally ill and now the cognitively impaired and their caregivers?”.

I grew up hearing about my uncle Harold who was hospitalized when he was 27 for acting in a bizarre harmful way towards his mother. He spent the next 50 years in mental institutions. I visited him once when I was a student nurse on rotation at Medfield State Hospital and talked with a mild mannered pleasant man who looked just like his sister,my mother. I started to think how terrible for him to have had a psychotic break before the advent of psychotropic drugs. He missed out on 50 years of family life and perhaps years of pursuing and enjoying his dream of teaching. Today he would be treated with medications and probably released within a week or two….if his insurance company allowed that long.

The helper’s journey goes through seasons as I see it. First comes the spring; an awakening of a need of a person or population. There is the gathering of tools; information, education, and skill building.

As the skills needed to help are developed and refined, the summer brings confidence in oneself as helper. There may be a broadening or narrowing of the area in which we see we can best be effective. This may be grant writing, lobbying, directing, speaking,or teaching for the professional or hands on care. We find out what brings us satisfaction.

When I asked an audience in an assisted living residence to look at the satisfaction factor, we found some realized it in bringing comfort to the elder, others in teaching them easier ways of caring for themselves, others in advocating for services. The helper sees “This is how I can make a difference and feel satisfied doing it”

As caregiving continues there is a fall season in which there is ‘more of the same’, or little improvement in spite of our best efforts. There is a danger here of despair or burnout. This is the time when affirmation of what has been accomplished by our efforts becomes important. New ideas get generated as one reaches out to others for help in continuing.

Winter is a season of endings; perhaps that of a career, a program or an area of compassionate work. I underestimated the grief I felt 3 years ago when a program I developed and worked at for seven years waned as budget crunches emerged and finally ended for me when I was laid off. This is a time of new beginnings as well as endings.

And so we continue our individual journeys, learning about ourselves along the way, learning more about how to work with others in a team, and perhaps learning to let go when a caregiving area ends.

During all these seasons, the gift of appreciation and validation of work a person does cannot be overstated. We can each care for our team members who are helpers in their own unique way. An attitude of gratitude and appreciation among workers spreads like wildfire the same as an attitude of complaining and blaming can. We can choose the attitude of gratitude and carry on with our journey and support others in theirs.