Hey there caregiver, (or special needs parent, medical mom, disability dad, human being, etc),
It wasn’t too hard to admit that becoming a caregiver to my medically complex child had transformed me, almost overnight.
But I was afraid to say the same thing, out loud, about my relationship.
It wasn’t gradual. It wasn’t subtle. But it wasn’t as obvious…
Maybe I should have seen it happening the moment we knew something was wrong with our child. The way my husband shrunk back into silent, stoic despair while I jumped into action. As I dove headfirst into the role of protector and advocate, he retreated into the shadows, struggling to find his voice amidst the chaos.
Looking back, the first night home without our child was the SOS blast from a flare gun shooting through the sky. The shake in his voice when he called his brother over to join him on his escape into video games as I anxiously packed away my entire “new mom” life into a suitcase, preparing to live three hours away at the hospital while he stayed back to work.
The cracks in our relationship began to surface, amplified by the weight of our shared grief.
The seismic shift of our relationship happened just days later as I struggled, ahem, scream-cried my way through, desperately trying to understand the ways in which we were coping so differently with this colossal life change.
During the first year of caregiving, we would tell you how much closer this experience had brought us. As our grief ebbed and flowed in yin-yang fashion, we would proudly boast about our ability to balance each other through the hard times.
And we weren’t lying. Every bit of that was true. But the moments when grief struck us at the same time—well, those were the moments we weren’t keen on boasting about.
In the most painful and enduring ways that two humans can grow together through unexpected trauma and grief, we were doing our very best to keep our roots tangled up close to one another. We were fearful of this new normal and terrified of what the future held. Holding on to each other tightly seemed like the thing that people do in these situations. In hindsight, perhaps that was the problem. We needed a repotting… a reframing of sorts.
We needed more space and time to grow.
Let’s face it: Our lives, both independently and together, were vastly different from the way they had been before we became caregivers.
We were not the same two people in this relationship as we had been just moments before our child was born, the moment we were thrown into medical parenthood. We didn’t even recognize ourselves, let alone each other.
We still felt bonded. We were in this together. But in order for that to be sustainable, we would have to figure out how to nurture our relationship in new ways.
Somehow, somewhere, in between moments spent keeping our child alive, we had fractions of time to think about ourselves and our future. We realized that in order to thrive, we needed to break free from the confines of our old selves, much like a house plant outgrowing its pot.
In time, we learned that for us to thrive together, we would have to learn to do so without the comfort of living like all the other potted house plants we knew.
Together, we had to learn to embrace our transformation and get comfortable with learning how to grow and bloom wildly amidst the uncertainty.
Together, we became wildflowers.
Not always pretty, not always picture-perfect. Not exactly the flowers you find at the grocery stores. Perhaps a bit more weathered, but a lot more resilient than the house plants we were before.
I still get insecure when I scroll through IG and see perfection displayed in the photos of other caregiver relationships. Perhaps it is the skeptic in me, but I have to wonder if it really is as perfect as it seems?
And I wonder even more that if we made space for more honesty about caregiver relationship challenges, would it help us all feel a lot less lonely?
Until next time, caregivers <3
