Quotes & Sayings About Caregiving

A St. Louis oncology nurse quoted Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl to States News Service in 2012: " 'What is to give light must endure burning.' I think people who care for others understand. Caregiving is painful. — Alexandra Robbins

Many of us follow the commandment 'Love One Another.' When it relates to caregiving, we must love one another with boundaries. We must acknowledge that we are included in the 'Love One Another. — Peggi Speers

The feminine political voice is personal. It's intimate. It's caregiving and life enhancing. It's about bringing more love, caring and justice into the world. It's also fierce and determined. — Tabby Biddle

Embracing a healing presence requires you to just be in the moment together. — Nancy L. Kriseman

Never give up hope. If you do, you'll be dead already.
Dementia Patient, Rose from The Inspired Caregiver — Peggi Speers

The number of Canadians providing or expecting to provide eldercare in need is already a staggering statistic. Baby boomers are aging and this figure is likely to grow substantially.The Caregiver's Guide for Canadians will provide you with valuable advice to help you provide good eldercare while balancing all the demands on your time. It provides practical, realistic guidance; encouragement and insights to help you care for elders in need. — Rick Lauber

Family caregiving has become a predictable crisis. Americans are living longer and longer but dying slower and slower. — Gail Sheehy

Perspective is an incredibly powerful tool. It tempers how we receive information, and guides what we choose do with it. — T.A. Sorensen

Any insistence on equal pay is crucial and any redefinition of work to include caregiving work so that it also has an economic value, at least at replacement level, that's crucial. So change does come from the bottom up, and it will come from girls and women and men who understand that for us all to be human beings instead of being grouped by gender is good for them, too. — Gloria Steinem

When our expectations match our companion's capabilities, there is less stress for both parties. This is the secret to improving the dementia caregiving experience. — Judy Cornish

When I started caregiving, I was not on very firm ground. My first marriage had dissolved. I was working at an ice-cream stand in my thirties. I learned that when you don't have anything to give, that's when you really give, and then you get back so much more. — Jonathan Evison

Initially, after David's diagnosis, I would cringe when I read
books or articles by cancer survivors who stated that cancer had
been a gift in their lives. How could all that David endured be
viewed as a gift? The invasive surgery, the weeks of chemotherapy
and radiation: a gift?
Yet, after the cancer, David would often reach for my hand and
say, "If it is cancer that is responsible for our new relationship, then
it was all worth it." And I'd reluctantly agree that cancer had been a
gift in our lives. We'd both seen the other alternative: patients and
survivors who had become bitter and angry, and neither one of us
wanted to become that. — Mary Potter Kenyon

Bonding through caregiving..I don't think I'd ever realized until then that so much affection, so much heart connect, happens when we take care of someone. — Lindsey O'Connor

...above all, let your focus be on remaining a full person. Take time for yourself. Nurture your own needs.
Please do not think of it as 'doing it all'.
Our culture celebrates the idea of women who are able to 'do it all' but does not question the premise of that praise. I have no interest in the debate about women doing it all because it is a debate that assumes that caregiving and domestic work are singularly female domains, and idea that I strongly reject. Domestic work and caregiving should be gender-neutral, and we should be asking not whether a woman can 'do it all' but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Black girls are likened more to adults than to children and are treated as if they are willfully engaging in behaviors typically expected of Black women - sexual involvement, parenting or primary caregiving, workforce participation, and other adult behaviors and responsibilities. This compression is both a reflection of deeply entrenched biases that have stripped Black girls of their childhood freedoms and a function of an opportunity-starved social landscape that makes Black girlhood interchangeable with Black womanhood. It gives credence to a widely held perception and a message that there is little difference between the two. — Monique Morris

So you're getting squeezed at both sides. You're taking care of your mom and dad and you're still doing caregiving with your kids, which is not easy. But I think overall, there's a level of satisfaction that might be unparalleled. — Anna Quindlen

Caregiving offers many fringe benefits, including the sheer sensory delight of nourishing and grooming, sharing, and playing. But caregiving does buttonhole you; you're stitched in one place ... Paul wasn't on a learning curve but seemed trapped in a circle. He's swoop forward only to loop back again and fall to earth. — Diane Ackerman

In most families, care-giving becomes the woman's responsibility. While care-giving can enrich you, it can also deplete you if you don't have support or make time for self care. — Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett

Caregiving often calls us to lean into love we didn't know possible. — Tia Walker

The day the roles reverse is foreign. It's a clumsy dance of love and responsibility, not wanting to cross any lines of respect. It's honoring this person who gave their life to you - not to mention literally gave you life - and taking their fragile body in your hands like a newborn, tending to their every need. — Lisa Goich

By loving you more, you love the person you are caring for more. — Peggi Speers

During the last week of her father's life, Blanca stayed home with him. 'I didn't bathe. I didn't sleep. I sat in the bed with him in the living room. And we were communicating all the time. I kept thinking, and it's more beautiful in Spanish, but I wanted to bottle his breathing. — Kevin Renner

As your care recipient's advocate, be involved, don't accept the status quo, and don't be afraid to voice your concerns. — Nancy L. Kriseman

During the 24/7 grind of being a carer, it's all to easy to forget the fact that the person you're doing so much for is, and is obliged to be, more resourceful than you in many respects. — Naoki Higashida

It seems like it has been forever.
But i getbthe feeling that forever hasn't even started yet. — JohnA Passaro

You will never experience personal growth, if you fear taking chances. And, you will never become successful, if you operate without integrity. — T.A. Sorensen

The deepest change begins with men raising children as much as women do and women being equal actors in the world outside the home. There are many ways of supporting that, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all caregiving and making that amount tax deductible. — Gloria Steinem

The traumatic stress field has adopted the term "Complex Trauma" to describe the experience of multiple and/or chronic and prolonged, developmentally adverse traumatic events, most often of an interpersonal nature (e.g., sexual or physical abuse, war, community violence) and early-life onset. These exposures often occur within the child's caregiving system and include physical, emotional, and educational neglect and child maltreatment beginning in early childhood

- Developmental Trauma Disorder — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Caregiving has no second agendas or hidden motives. The care is given from love for the joy of giving without expectation, no strings attached. — Gary Zukav

Home was where others had to gather grace. Home was what I wanted to flee. — Jerry Pinto

Like many liberal men in the age of feminism, he believed women should have equal access to jobs and be given equal pay, but when it came to matters of home and heart he still believed caregiving was the female role. Like many men, he wanted a woman to be 'just like his mama' so that he did not have to do the work of growing up. — Bell Hooks

Caregiving requires the intention of love, caretaking requires the intention of fear. Not acting in anger when you are angry requires the intention of love. — Gary Zukav

In 1975, stay-at-home mothers spent an average of about eleven hours per week on primary child care (defined as routine caregiving and activities that foster a child's well-being, such as reading and fully focused play). Mothers employed outside the home in 1975 spent six hours doing these activities. Today, stay-at-home mothers spend about seventeen hours per week on primary child care, on average, while mothers who work outside the home spend about eleven hours. This means that an employed mother today spends about the same amount of time on primary child care activities as a nonemployed mother did in 1975. — Sheryl Sandberg

To care for those who once cared for us is one of the highest honors. — Tia Walker

I am an unlikely guardian. A month ago I thought the Medicare doughnut hole was a breakfast special for seniors. I am a care inflictor. — George Hodgman

My original fear that my daughter was going to die before BettyJane and myself has now been replaced with the fear that she is going to outlive us. — JohnA Passaro

Thus, just as animals of many species, including man, are disposed to respond with fear to sudden movement or a marked change in level of sound or light because to do so has a survival value, so are many species, including man, disposed to respond to separation from a potentially caregiving figure and for the same reasons. — John Bowlby

In the United States, the typical caregiver in the family suffers from depression, is usually stressed out and exhausted, physically and mentally. The emotional toll on members of the family who take care of husbands or wives, mothers or fathers, or grandparents is always high. Taking for instance in Washington, it was once reported that more than half of the caregivers in that state were found to be extremely depressed. A caregiving expert has opined that family caregivers are possibly the most depressed individuals in the United States. — Sophia A. Beren

I could worry about his health but somehow not about my own. We throw ourselves away a little each day. — Padma Lakshmi

The bride's getting ready to toss her bouquet, so get me up there! Mom said the day after she turned 96. — June Shaw

It is at this moment that I realize the best thing I ever did in my life was to marry this woman.
She is willing to give up her life for her child. I know most parents would do the same. But how many mothers would give up everything that they love, everything that they will ever be able to do in the future for the "possibility and not the guarantee" of getting their child better.
Now reduce the odds of success to less than 1%.
How many mothers are still standing?
She is. — JohnA Passaro

So much in a relationship changes when a partner is seriously ill, helpless yet blameless, and indefatigably needy. I felt old. [p. 99]
The animal part of him in pain accepted my caring. But the part of himself watching himself in that pain didn't believe I could ever respect him again. None of this crossed my mind. I couldn't risk knowing it. No one could and continue caregiving. They'd feel so unappreciated and wronged that it would drive them away. [p. 100] — Diane Ackerman

The author "nails it" in terms of how to deal with a parent's dementia. Rather than browbeating the subject, the author "plays along" and tries to enter the subject's own dementia-challenged "reality." The book contains excellent coping strategies and methodology for dealing with someone suffering with and enduring the pain of dementia or Alzheimer's. It does so with sensitivity, candor and laugh-provoking humor. — Joel Kriofske

My caregiver mantra is to remember: the only control you have is over the changes you choose to make. — Nancy L. Kriseman

Much popular self-help literature normalizes sexism. Rather than linking habits of being, usually considered innate, to learned behavior that helps maintain and support male domination, they act as those these difference are not value laden or political but are rather inherent and mystical. In these books male inability and/or refusal to honestly express feelings is often talked about as a positive masculine virtue women should learn to accept rather than a learned habit of behavior that creates emotional isolation and alienation ... Self-help books that are anti-gender equality often present women's overinvestment in nurturance as a 'natural,' inherent quality rather than a learned approach to caregiving. Much fancy footwork takes place to make it seem that New Age mystical evocations of yin and yang, masculine and feminine androgyny, and so on, are not just the same old sexist stereotypes wrapped in more alluring and seductive packaging. — Bell Hooks

One goal of the mindful caregiver is to find ways to not feel 'dis-eased' in the caregiving process. — Nancy L. Kriseman

But, Mike, I don't want to wear a brace."
"You'll give it a chance, won't you?"
"Well, if I can wear it under my clothes."
"Sure and you can. I've made it that soft it won't chafe."
I took off my shirt and undid the top buttons of my underwear. "You'll have to put it on me, Mike. I'll never figure out how it works."
"Lift up your arms, then, and I'll slip it on."
I did. But instead of slipping it over my arms, it was himself he slipped between them. He kissed me in the hollow of my throat, and it was a long time before we got those braces on. — Benedict Freedman

In 2009, I served as AARP's Ambassador of Caregiving. With a producer and cameraman, I traveled the country for months, interviewing hundreds of caregivers. — Gail Sheehy