Caring for Someone With Dementia Is Not Like Caring for A Child
It is so much harder
I never really understood what it meant to be a caregiver.
This is odd, because for many years my primary job was to take care of my kids. If you’d asked me then if caregiving for a baby or a toddler or two was much different than caring for an elderly person who needed help, I probably would have shrugged and said, “Well, caregiving is caregiving, how different could it be?”
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Providing any level of caregiving for my elderly mother with advancing macular degeneration and dementia is much, much harder than I ever thought it would be.
If my mother had ever been the type to believe in “love languages” (she’s not — she’d snort and say something about them like, “Love languages? Is that something some educated person came up with to waste time?”) her main love language might have been “independence.” All her life she was a hard-working, proud, mostly healthy person who strongly believed that God helps those who help themselves.
To the extent you couldn’t help yourself, she would have believed that your family are the ones who should help you. She came from a large family and she had six kids herself, and she has clearly always believed that that’s…
