Balancing Work & Caregiving

Balance? You are kidding me, right?

Between the demands of career, kids, and aging parents, who in their right mind can achieve balance?  

You can.

How do I know?  I have been a single mom, a single child, and a solopreneur through many of the storms life can throw at you.  There have been some very low patches, usually because of sacrificing my own health and peace of mind to make it all happen.  I was the one and only lighthouse in everyone’s storm, and took the brunt of the vicious power of the surges that struck.  I leaned into every single one.  Until I couldn’t.  I ended up in the ER twice, broke out in hives, and got COVID all within 3 months.  My light went out and I remembered that the lighthouse is only strong if it is maintained and not expected to shine full blast in every direction 24/7. My bulb went dead and my power was extinguished when I failed to ride that line between pushing my limits and filling my gas tank.

I knew better.  I had learned the hard way to self care in order to maintain resilience through 20 years of single parenting of an autistic and gifted child despite 5 custody lawsuits. I can tell you there is no worse feeling in the world to sit in a court of law with the threat of losing your children.  We were in rural Appalachia and had exhausted the school system’s ability to provide the support needed.  I had been on the educator side of too many IEP’s (Individualized Education Plans) to settle for suggestions that would not work. I knew early intervention was key and they simply didn’t have the resources needed.  It was not their fault for the lack of funding, but I also was not going to settle for that.

My biggest fear was that I would cry in court and lose the ability to advocate for these innocent children.  So I found exercise, I found mindfulness practices, and I found all sorts of techniques to self care in the small moments I had free.  It saved me, but not completely.  The court consistently found in the kids’ favor, but it took a toll.

Everytime we won a battle, I was exhausted, traumatized, and in fear of the next lawsuit almost every moment.  And they came with a vicious frequency that brought ever escalating tactics.   We were stalked by a private investigator who should be in jail…except that he was a cop at the time of his crimes, so he walked free.   It was such a gross injustice of the law that he became part of a research study at Cambridge in the abuse of power by the police.  He was given a slap on the wrist, fired from the force, and went on to harass people like us… for a lot more money from people like my ex-husband.  To try and break me.  He almost did.

And yet in the still moments, I found more ways to stay physically and mentally fit, while launching a new version of my business.  I delved into all my training about neuroscience and found four more crucial components to optimize my strength and my mind.  I found the key ingredients, but I needed to find a way to incorporate them solidly into my life.  So I went to science once again and researched how to create neurological habit formation techniques to implement them.  I created a system to make it work based on the laws of human behavior that dictate that.  And I grew in strength.  

And, thank goodness… because I would need every resource I had in the coming days.

In November 2021 both of my parents caught the Delta variant of COVID in a remote area of Wyoming.  They went from riding motorcycles and cutting down trees with chainsaws to fighting for their lives in the hospital.  Then, mother nature roared and cut me off from them.  Winds of up to 118 miles per hour downed the radar at the closest airport and shut down the highways for 3 states wide stranding 56,000 trucks.

And I was helpless to care for them.  So I pulled on that strong foundation and burned my light bright, seeking the sun in the dark hours as we waited. And when the road opened, we traveled through the still wailing winds to arrive in Wyoming.  My mother was desperately weak and on oxygen, having spent 14 days in the hospital.  Dad had toughed it out and went directly into ICU after driving himself to the hospital when his oxygen levels were so low he should not have been conscious.  He was still there and the morning after we arrived he coded twice, with little hope he would ever regain consciousness.  It was December 14, 2021.

We surrounded his bed and prayed, telling him we loved him.  And he woke up.

Miraculously, he opened his eyes and responded to us with clarity when he should have been brain dead.  They found a bed at a higher level of care hospital, and when I told him they were life-flighting him there he gave me two thumbs up.  He was a born pilot and loved to fly, even if he had to do it on a ventilator. 

I got a call the same night telling me that the ceiling at my home in Denver had sprung a leak.  When it rains it pours, sometimes.  So we returned to Colorado through still howling winds and watched a semi truck blow off the highway in front of us.  I think my fingerprints are etched firmly in the steering wheel of my Nissan Armada to this day.

We were not allowed to visit Dad in the hospital where he was flown, so we waited for more news while I fixed the sagging ceiling and cleaned up the water damage. Merely a week later, we got another emergent call.  Dad’s organs could not withstand the cytokine storm and we needed to gather to say goodbye.  

I called my aunt and uncle to meet us in Casper, Wyoming and both of my children and I drove north again to gather my mother through black ice, wind, and snow.  She was still weak, but like many strong Wyoming women, had a strength that steeled her backbone.   We got to the ICU and by then my father was bleeding from his ears.  But Mom had brought his clothes and their matching jackets with the staunch belief he would be coming home for Christmas anyway.  So on Christmas Eve I sat with her in his room for 6 hours until she could finally bring herself to let him go in peace.  It was brutal to watch him take his last breath and see the carnage of what this virus had done to his body over the last 20 days.  We rejoined the rest of our family to share stories that made us laugh and had final moments with him on Christmas Day 2021 at the mortuary.

We took Mom home, as she insisted, and spent the next few days setting up care for her and the horses before I needed to get my children back for classes starting soon .  We crossed the border to a ringing phone warning us that Boulder was on fire.  It was December 30, 2021.  As we drove we saw the flames as 1,084 homes were destroyed in a fire that consumed 6,026 acres.  It felt like the apocalypse.

And we made it home, grateful to have one, unlike all of those people in the Marshall Fire area. And the next challenge began.

All the arrangements, the legal changes, the pension transfer, the insurance, all the things that follow a death with a still very compromised survivor.  A survivor who did not know the passwords, the technology, or the financial details that were set up to sustain her now.  All hitting along with the numbness of grief and loss.

It took months to figure out the crucial things, and it is still a work in progress. There was a mortgage, but we did not know who to pay or how much and they could not legally tell us. In Dad’s defense, he had a will and was trying to teach Mom the technology.  I am sure he did not foresee the complications that would occur at his sudden death.  But, there it was.

And I was the only caregiver now.

I dug deep and pulled upon all the resilience I had built up to keep going through this aftermath and new set of challenges.  And for 6 months I bounced back and forth between Colorado, Wyoming, and Hawaii to manage all of the demands.  And throughout, I had to stay committed to those 8 components of a healthy brain lifestyle.

Because as the Zen saying goes, 

“You should sit in nature for 20 minutes a day…unless you’re busy.  Then you should sit for an hour.”  

Never has that been more true or more difficult to do.  I had been in regular practice for a solid year.  I had found more productivity, focus, self-discovery, joy, and health.  I had lost 20 pounds in menopause with hot flashes all the while, and felt better than I had in my 30’s and 40’s.

I persisted.  I was damn grateful I had committed to this journey when I did, because I fully recognized that if I hadn’t established these practices already, when the storm hit I would have blown to pieces right when I needed it most.

And yet the storm went on.  Mom’s memory had been affected by COVID.  Her hair fell out and she was frail and unsteady on her feet.  She was at a loss for how to deal with all of the arrangements, bills, and paperwork, so I was her caregiver, advocate, and extra brain for the foreseeable future.  I motored through and I tried to approach it one step at a time.

The hurricane’s eye had passed and we were in the second spin of this particular storm.  

We planned the celebration for life in the summer to give her time to recover and people time in far flung places to plan to attend.  We were having part 1 during our family reunion weekend on the Fourth of July in Wyoming, and Part 2 in Hawaii the weekend following.  Dad had many who loved him on the islands after a career as a Hawaiian pilot for 26 years.

I was the celebration planner, caregiver, and (fill-in-the-blank) through it all.

It was all coming together until the Sunday prior to the celebration when Mom got food poisoning and ended up in the hospital again for IV fluids. 

By the time I got to Wyoming she had a full blown eye infection as well and looked like someone had beat her a baseball bat.  Her eye was the size of a grapefruit that was purple and black.  And because it was a holiday, the eye doctors were all on vacation.

We got help at Urgent Care and were gaining on the preparations for our gathering when I got a call that 4 tons of hay for the year would be delivered the next day to a barn that was not ready to receive it, because Mom forgot.  For those of you who may not know, hay arrives within a several week window that is determined by lots of factors and not a specific day, so it comes when it comes and you have to be ready for it.  Mom has always been on top of that, so I did not have it on my radar.

Unfortunately,  I am allergic to every grass there is, but “ what the hay”, I am the solo child and I pulled on my baseball cap, hitched up my jeans and rallied my kids, family, and friends, and made it happen.  I have never let my hay allergy stop me from riding, and I certainly wasn’t going to drop the ball for these horses now.

And then the well went dry.  Literally.

One of the base camps for our family gathering was a friend’s house that was on a well.  And someone (probably me) left the hose running after rinsing out the cooler for our fireside gathering.  So we were without water.  And the celebration was the next day.  We rallied again, and made it happen anyway.  The celebration happened even though the caterer got the order wrong.

We managed to find an eye doctor that was 2 hours out of the way on our route back to Denver and got Mom’s eye checked to ensure she was able to fly the next day.  We arrived in Denver at 10 PM only to discover a 2 liter bottle of red wine had uncorked itself and was all over our luggage and marinating the back cargo area.  It was midnight before I got it cleaned up.

We had to leave for our flight at 9Am sharp the next morning, and I was soon to learn another important lesson of learning balance.

At 2 AM, I woke up with intense chest pain and was certain I was having a heart attack.  I drove myself to the ER, got a chest x ray, EKG and blood work and was promptly diagnosed with a panic attack.  This was the first one I have ever had.  I never realized how excruciating they are physically!  I had hit my wall, even with all my resilience buffers.  

I had brutally learned that even Superwoman has limits.  

I got home at 4 AM and caught a few hours of sleep with a strong dose of humility forced down my throat.

My brief respite was now a full blown storm again and we had a flight to catch, but I needed to remember I was a simple human. Despite my son sleeping through his alarm and almost missing that flight, I had remembered to breathe slowly and pace myself.

Balancing work and caregiving comes first with the understanding that you don't have to be perfect, and even with a super healthy lifestyle, everyone has limits to their endurance. 

Whatever apocalyptic hurricane faces you, that is the most important principle to remember.  We are not meant to save our world by ourselves, and whatever self sustaining steps you take to find that balance, they are ultimately finite.  

Anyone who tells you differently is selling you swampland.

So while I wholeheartedly encourage you to find a lifestyle approach, whether it is my healthy brain lifestyle or another one that works for you, remember the overarching principle for its success.

Remember that your endurance is finite. 

Not everything is entirely your responsibility, nor should it be to save everyone in your sphere.  Balance is spreading the weight carefully on strong foundations that are maintained on a daily basis.

Balance is keeping your center while the hurricanes blow around you in a mind and body that has been valued highly and maintained regularly.

We can be the bridge for our company to fortune, our children to the future, and our parents to peace and comfort, but if our infrastructure is not rock solid, inspected regularly, and maintained, we will not withstand the storm surge.  

We have all learned wisdom and fought battles in our journey as strong women, but we are only unstoppable when we find our own balance and stop sacrificing our wellbeing to support everyone else's.  We are our own working capital and our balance needs to be great enough to weather storms from every direction at this stage in our life. 

Resilience is something that we can build every day, and in today’s world, it needs to be a priority.  I have learned to follow my own advice in that regard, and hope you commit to the same.  

Storms will come.  How you withstand them is up to you.  Are you ready?