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.

Roll Away the Stone

Big stuff today. Talking to my therapist about this relationship and about John’s cancer. Trying to sort out what is my over-the-top fear and what is diagnostic and statistically probable in colon cancer. We were talking about that and my sense of urgency to make some peace with all of this when I felt an idea or a realization move from the center of my body to my mouth and become words.

This is what I said to her: “I am afraid that if the cancer comes back, and if he dies, it is because I allowed this relationship to be, and I’m afraid that if the cancer comes back and he dies that it is my punishment; I will lose him and I will be humiliated.”

Even as I said those words I was amazed that it was coming out of me and I knew that was the true fear. Fear not just of cancer --that will hurt him or kill him—awful all by itself—but that in some way it is a punishment of me—and that the punishment takes the form of abandonment and humiliation.

Yes, of course these are my “issues” fear of abandonment and pervasive shame. But Holy Cow---the way the fear was coming to me was absolutely Biblical.

I could see her reaction as I spoke and we both got it that this is not just a psychological issue but a spiritual and even theological issue.

But here is what is both troubling and baffling me. I did not grow up in a fire and brimstone family; no one taught me to fear a punishing God; all of my spiritual practice and professed belief is in a loving God. But these fears belong to another belief system that I have not had any awareness was operating inside me.

Have I channeled my father’s early Catholic God? Is this cultural? Past life echoes? The collective unconscious? Really, it makes me wonder and it makes me pray.

This deeply held and silently operating belief is in my way. I knew it and my therapist knew it. I said to her, “This is in the way; this is why I cannot decide and why I cannot think clearly.” She had the exact image as I spoke this fear: There is a large boulder in my path.

I knew at once that even the image was Biblical. There is a stone blocking awareness, clarity and peace. The stone is blocking my belief in a loving God and in God’s will.

Who will roll away the stone?

The Scarlet Letter

This morning I ran into my friend T. who is in a similar relationship situation: married, married man, separated, cohabiting. They are like us in everything but the cancer. She does have two small children and was once in The Perfect Marriage so she gets extra points for stigma and logistics.

We talk fast and in a kind of shorthand. We talk about the days that we don’t give a dam what people think. We talk about the days when we care too much and the shame is overwhelming. We talk about the husbands and the wives and being The Other Woman.

We talk about the day to day, the legal and the financial, the social and the psycho-social. Collectively –because of our relationships--we have lost spouses, children, in-laws, parents, friends, colleagues. So many people have judgments and opinions. On a good day I know I am a mirror, on a bad day I think I am dammed.

T. and I agree we need our Scarlet Letters. We need to buy and wear beautiful, embroidered, sequined, gleaming, seductive Big Red A’s.