I’ve been working with Steadii for a couple of months now, and I highly recommend them as a resource for care partners. My Steadii advocate has been giving me writing prompts, which I’ll occasionally share here.
What is one thing you would have liked to know early on in your caregiving journey?
Years ago, a friend whose daughter was graduating from high school reached out to everyone she knew, asking, “What would you tell your 18-year-old self?” so she could pass along all of our words of wisdom to her own kid. I started and deleted my reply so many times before finally landing on basically the same thing that I’m coming up with to answer this question.
The one thing that would always be most valuable in a given moment is the one thing we cannot have in that moment: perspective.
Trying to impart the sage advice of an adult to an 18-year-old feels good, and the kid may logically understand what you’re saying, but there’s no way for them to take it on board without some kind of personal experience—without some kind of perspective. And that, of course, can only be had with time.
Everything we do is built on what we’ve already learned and done.
I suppose I could look back over the last year or so and wish I had asked for a cognitive test earlier, or made the Area Agency on Aging one of my first phone calls, or known that there was never going to be one perfect website that would answer all of my questions and meet all of my needs (so just stop looking for it already)… But I’m not sure I would have been able to do anything differently with what I knew at the time. And I’m not sure it’s good for me (or any care partner) to look back and “if-only” my actions and decisions.
Here, as the maps once said, be dragons.