Over the past year many of you have asked how to keep both your spirit and body energized as you are taking care of aging parents or another family member who could not exist without your care. Care giving begins with an act of love and ends certainly with an act of love but the long middle is purely an act of will. Anyone who’s been responsible for care giving for long enough understands that last statement as more than a hypothetical musing. There are days in care giving when the sheer number of things to do makes dying looks relatively easy.
During the 5 years of taking care of my father prior to his death there were moments when it seemed that fate and time and circumstance had conspired to give me my own franchise on fatigue and misery. Somewhere each day I found the strength, wisdom, and just sheer willpower to do what needed to be done while running a business, raising a teenager, working on a relationship, and trying to keep a set of siblings from despising each other. Some days it worked better than others.
What I did during that time was to constantly look to numerous sources for inspiration and guidance. I found that care giving is an interdenominational, interracial, demographically disperse, equal opportunity employer that responds to numerous spiritual, intellectual, and emotional inspirational impulses. That’s a sophisticated way of saying that you need to look to every source of inspiration and guidance that you can find to help you meet the requirements of this part time/full time responsibility you have.
In order to help you as you go through this time in your lives I am going to share with you some of those thoughts and ideas that I came across as a caregiver. My hope is that they are as inspiring to you as they were to me. Each PARENT CARE THOUGHT will begin with a quote followed by a short comment and an action step to take. Over the course of the year my hope is that your confidence, stamina, and courage for your care giving activities increase through out the year.
Let me know if this works for you as well as it did for me at pcs@parentcaresolution.com
