Shame and Caregiving

I’ve just read Brene Brown’s book, “I Thought It Was Just Me” about women and shame. She writes about bodies and money and parenting and work and weight and –surprise—caregiving. Though I’ve read --and now written-- a lot about caregiving I hadn’t seen this coming.

What Brown writes about is the delusion of caregiving. It’s the place where perfectionism and imposter syndrome collide. She writes about how we often compare the hard realities of day-to-day life as a caregiver with the idealized notions of being someone who is responsible, compassionate, dutiful and kind as a caregiver. Brown says, “Any image of stress-free, dutiful and rewarding caregiving is only available to those who have not yet fully engaged in this process.”

She goes on to write about the mistake we make when we talk about role reversal as part of the caregiver experience—and we often talk about role reversal, “parenting our parents”. We imagine that the child becomes the parent and vice versa. I thought that too. But no. As Brown points out there are crucial differences:

• We don’t have the same relationship with our partner or parent that we do with our children. When we bathe our child we don’t have to try to not cry.

• The energy we use to care for a child—even the exhausting care of a baby --is fueled by promise: it will get better and easier and rewards will follow. Not the case with a seriously ill partner or an aging parent. That will get harder and sadder and the experience is steeped in fear and grief not promise.

• Our culture and society has systems and mechanisms that support parents and children. Restaurants have children’s menus and booster seats and special areas for kids but they don’t have the logistics or practices to accommodate customers with Alzheimer’s or feeding tubes.

What caregiving and parenting do have in common though is that everyone’s a critic. There is endless critique and advice and suggestions that we could be doing either one better.