Notes for the Caregivers

We’re allowed to need help too.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month.

Most of the conversation this month will focus on people in crisis. Rightfully so. The data is sobering, the stigma is real, and the call to keep talking about mental health out loud has not gotten less urgent.

But there is another group whose mental health quietly erodes alongside the people in crisis. A group that is rarely the subject of the campaigns, the resources, or the headlines.

The caregivers.

The mom who hasn’t slept through the night in three years. The dad who can’t tell his coworkers what is actually happening at home. The grandparent who became a parent again, overnight. The sibling who learned to read the room before they learned to read. The spouse holding the household together while their partner holds the bedside vigil.

If you are one of them, you already know what I am about to say. You have been carrying it for a long time.

You are allowed to need help too.

I spent years not knowing this. Or knowing it intellectually but not letting myself live it. The job in front of me, the one that mattered most, was making sure my child got what they needed. Everything else, including my own well-being, got moved to a list that never quite came around.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with caregiving. It is not just physical, though it is that too. It is the exhaustion of constant vigilance. Of scanning every room before you enter it. Of learning to read silence and interpret it correctly. Of being the person who holds the information, manages the appointments, translates the diagnoses, and still has to show up somewhere else looking like everything is fine.

I was good at looking like everything was fine. I got better at it every year.

What I did not understand then is that the performance of being fine was costing me something I could not get back. And that the people around me, the ones I most wanted to protect, could feel the distance it created even when they could not name it.

The moment I started asking for help was not dramatic. There was no single breaking point. It was quieter than that. It was the slow recognition that I could not pour from a container that had been empty for years. That my child needed me present, not just functional. That showing up fully required me to be honest about what I actually needed.

Therapy. A trusted friend who knew the whole story. A community of people who were navigating something similar. These things did not fix what was hard. But they made me someone who could keep going without disappearing in the process.

If you are in the middle of it right now: you do not have to have it figured out to ask for help. You just have to be willing to say out loud that you need it.

That is enough to start.

Throughout May, I will be sharing more of what I learned in the Notes for the Caregivers series. If you want these essays delivered directly to your inbox, you can subscribe below.

My memoir, Fighting for Their Lives, publishes June 16.

It is for every family who has ever felt alone in a system that was supposed to help them.

💚 Jenn