I'm 'Just' a Caregiver
Caregivers need to stop belittling their role and take pride in what they do.
"I'm just a Caregiver at the moment but…"
I was talking to an old university friend I hadn’t seen for several years when I spoke this familiar sentence. I then gave my friend a half-hearted excuse for my current occupation and a vague description of a “proper career” that I would be pursuing once I was finished doing this “caring thing”
I’ve been my older sister’s full-time Caregiver for nearly three years now (she has a Learning Disability, Epilepsy, and a whole host of mental health issues) and in that time, whenever someone asks me what I do for work I always find myself uttering the above sentence along with some kind of half-hearted excuse for my current job.
There’s no reason why being a Caregiver shouldn’t be considered a proper career, the amount of physical and emotional work that I, and other Caregivers like me, face daily is a testament to that.
Helping my sister to wash, get to appointments on time, cleaning her bedroom, cooking for her, laughing with her, trying to make her smile, hugging her when she’s crying, listening attentively to the countless different doctors that are trying to help her, filling in forms on her behalf, lying in bed at night, unable to…
