Navigating Christian Caregiving

For almost a decade of her life, my mother served as my bedridden grandmother’s caregiver.

This was not strictly from necessity: my grandmother and her sons (my mother was her daughter-in-law) had the financial means for in-home caregiver.  But my dad and my uncle didn’t perceive that such a thing would be required: it was assumed and understood by all that my mother, as the stay-at-home mom, had the time, effort and energy required to perform “simple” caregiving tasks.

But even the most basic caregiving is not simple.

On paper, my mother’s job was basic: go and stay with my grandmother until noon, when her younger son got back home from work.  In practice, the labor was grueling.  She fed—at times had to hand-feed—my grandmother, washed her, changed her, rolled her to prevent bedsores.  She cleaned up messes and bodily fluids.  She endured verbal abuse and nonsensical diatribes when my grandmother’s dementia kicked in. 

The care left its marks both large and small.  I had the unpleasant privilege of watching my mother, at times, break down in tears over the endless, miserable chore.  Once, in a parking lot and after one such breakdown, my mom turned to me and said sadly, “I’m not going to receive any reward from the Lord for this, because my heart hates it and I know he knows. I wish I was better.”

But the caregiving also hurt her physically.  She tore a chest and arm muscle moving my grandmother’s dead-weight during one of the daily bedsore rolls; they never fully recovered.  The air in my grandmother’s house was so hot and so dry that my mother developed permanent dry eye and, upon the advice of her ophthalmologist, had to begin daily eyedrops and wear protective eyewear at night.  I watched her sit at the bedside of my grandmother for whole years of her life: an exercise in pain and tedium.

At times, I—a teenager, and blithely unaware of broader family complexities, and even of what my mother’s complementarian marriage demanded in this circumstance—begged her to stop.  I pointed out that my father and his brother had the money and means to provide in-home care and would have to do so, if she refused.  I pointed out that, while my grandmother often threw tantrums over the prospect of in-home care, she would also not be fully cognizant to recognize it had started.  No one would like it at first, but it would be so much better than the current state.

“No,” my mother said, every time.  “Jesus wants us to serve other people.  God wants me to do this.”

And yet I wondered.  I still wonder.  Do I believe God wanted my mother—and all of us—to show care and love and service to my grandmother?   Absolutely. But did God want my mother breaking down in quiet, sobbing resentment in parking lots?  Growing frustrated and snappish with me and with Dad because of her exhaustion with my grandmother?  Losing the opportunity to minister to children at the church because of what the caregiving cost her body?

Perhaps she would say yes. I don’t know what my answer would be. But like it or not, many Christian women my age and older—caught in a nightmare generational and cultural-religious gap—are asking the same sorts of questions.

This is because the act of caregiving falls largely to women.  In the past, this was predominately because, well, women were the ones staying at home. As mothers and wives, they had the perceived availability—as my mom did—to care for sick and aging relatives.  Yet this burden didn’t shift with a more egalitarian job market.  The responsibilities for women have changed—many of us work outside the home and care for our families—but some of the expectations have not.  Indeed, one of the arguments against remote work during the pandemic and after was that remote work has demonstrably disadvantaged women, who are often expected and assumed to pick up additional home labor and caregiving responsibilities even when they work full days.

And yet our parents and grandparents and in-laws need care, and the money (or the desire) to provide home health care or external support is not available.  Alternatively—for my generation at least—the kind of care our parents need is not what we planned for initially.  It is not, at least not fully, related to health at all – and it requires both substantively more and substantively less than we thought.

My friend L. lost her mother recently to a stroke.  Like my parents, L.’s parents shared a complementarian marriage: as a consequence, her father worked running a demanding business, and her mother took care of all the administrative tasks of running a home.  With his wife gone, L.’s father now faces a mighty struggle: he cannot balance his checkbook, or use the computer, or order a pizza or anything from Amazon. He doesn’t understand his insurance papers.  He cannot cook.  He doesn’t know how to clean. 

This is not unique to the area where I grew up or to where I live now; many women my age have fathers in similar circumstances.  Alternatively, some have mothers for whom the shelter of complementarian marriage created the same struggle in reverse.  Married to men who simply took care of everything, they find themselves faced with a mountain of administrative tasks that they never knew they ought to learn. My mother often recounted my grandmother’s haunting phone call: she rang her daughter from the parking lot of a gas station, sobbing, because she simply didn’t know how to pump her own gas.

What happens as a consequence of this seems inevitable.  And what happens looks much like what has happened to L.  In his wife’s absence, L.’s father does what he has always done: he goes to work.  The rest—the cooking, the cleaning, the computer-ordering and home maintenance and financial responsibilities—he expects his daughter to manage, though she is herself a widow and a business owner with two sons who serves as a secretary of her church and as president of several civic associations. 

Unable to manage the strain, L. at length coaxed her father into hiring a house cleaner/personal assistant to manage his affairs.  Her father was resistant – why couldn’t she do it? Isn’t this what daughters were supposed to do? The whole affair caused many arguments and much guilt; to this day, she suspects her father doesn’t understand why she can’t do everything her mother used to do for him.  She still visits him daily.  Often, despite the presence of his PA—of whom he is fond and who is working out swimmingly—she stays to make and eat dinner with him. 

And she wonders aloud if it is enough.  If she is handling it all the way God wishes she would.

My Christian friends and I, in our forties and fifties, find ourselves wishing that the church had taught us more about this, had prepared us for what was ahead.  At a caregiving support group housed by a local church congregation, weary caregivers are encouraged to “draw the boundaries you need so that you can be a good caregiver. Put on your own oxygen mask first.”  But what boundaries are acceptable?  What do love and selfless service look like in this context?  When and where is it acceptable—even an act of love—to draw the line?

We grew up as daughters of women who gave everything in service of the Lord.   I watched my mother care for my grandmother to the point of near self-annihilation, chiding me for suggesting she might do otherwise, regardless of what it cost her (or us).  To do anything less than she did feels like a failure. 

And yet my life is vastly different from the life she led.  I can’t do everything she did: I live five hours from home, and my job and my husband are here where I am.  I have a full-time job and responsibilities that require my presence, and a father geographically distant who, when she passed away, hadn’t the faintest clue of how to manage affairs the way she had managed them.   How do I balance it all?  Am I supposed to?  Should I be asking God for help shouldering it all or thanking Him for what I can release?

There are no easy answers.  But there are five questions I have decided to ask myself and discuss with God that keep a peace in my heart while I muddle through this territory with so many others.  I share these with you, if you are in need of them:

1. Am I doing what I can feasibly do in love and service to my parent?  This doesn’t look the same for everyone. For me, this looks like: providing resources, giving time daily, helping with finances and some bewildering administrative chores, giving encouragement, supporting my parent’s flourishing where I can. Where can you help and what can you give, even if it means a bit of rearranging?

• Am I letting go of what it is not my job or responsibility to manage?  For me, this means acknowledging that while I can encourage my parent to see the doctor or dentist I cannot make them do it. I cannot make spiritual choices for them, though I can encourage good ones.  I cannot make them grieve differently or make connections they don’t want to make.  I cannot control how grouchy or cranky they are with other people although I can try to gently guide if the topic comes up.

• Am I enabling independence or enabling codependency?  I acknowledge there are some things my dad is not equipped or able to do and we’re too late in the game to learn/teach. In those areas, I always step in where I can (he will never, ever order from Amazon).  But there are some things in his purview, and I expect that he will manage those (for me, the ‘independence list’ is: grocery shopping, keeping appointments and driving, checking and maintaining the mail, hygiene maintenance, house cleaning).

• Am I showing love?  This is more complex than it seems.  For some parents, “love” in the form of their marriage meant having everything taken care of for them.  But that might not work in the context of a parental relationship.  “Doing everything for someone else whenever they want no matter what” also does not constitute godly love and service.  When in doubt, I turn to 1 Corinthians 13.  Am I being patient?  Am I persevering?  Am I forgiving easily and sweeping aside the record of faults?  Am I exhibiting hopefulness and honoring my parent’s dignity and personhood?  Am I seeking their flourishing? If I’m being honest, the encouraging thing is that I do think parents know when they are loved and cherished, for all that they might wish things were different in their lives or that they weren’t having difficulties. 
  
•  Am I maintaining my godly priorities?   God has given me Himself, and a husband, and work to do.  He has also given me a father.  Keeping those things in their right places and honoring them has helped me in times of uncertainty.  For me, that looks like being flexible where I can…but also keeping boundaries in place.    Date night and evenings are primarily devoted to my husband.  But I carve out some time for me, and I carve out special time for a nice chat with Dad each night.  Sometimes this changes, if Dad needs something extra, or if I do, or my husband does.  But we all know what to expect each other, we all know we matter to each other, and we also know we all need time to recharge.  And this helps me be my best at church, and for my husband, and for my dad and for God.

But I repeat: there are no easy answers.  And even the questions above aren’t a one size fits all solution. Many nights I’ve found myself, as have my friends, in tears of frustration: wondering if what we do is enough, if we should be doing more or less or all of it all at once. This is a hard time and a hard stage. But I try to remind myself that no one has taught us how to live like this. This is something we – both parents and children – are learning together. Emerging from our history and our particular context, we’re trying to complete the work of love in situations we sometimes never expected. That’s a beautiful thing, to make something new from what came before. And God is especially merciful in endeavors like these.

Please, pray for all the caregivers in your life.