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The Caregiver Never Cared For

 "All my life I had to fight" lol. But honestly, those words resonate with me so much these days. All my life I have been a caregiver. I cared for my parents, cousin, and grandmother. I never really sat back to realize how much these experiences have shaped me to become the person I am, was, and am evolving to. I don’t know where I am in this life journey. But what I do know is that the journey has not been easy, and it has forced me to unlearn and reevaluate my life choices and the things I can and cannot tolerate.

From a little girl, my parents have always been sickly. They had me going into their 40s after living a very rough and wild life. My parents were in the streets, for lack of better words, and they did not take care of their health. My father had a kidney removed and was on dialysis from around the time I was 9-ish, I believe, until his death when I was 22. That is an extremely long time to be on dialysis, and it created so many other health problems. So through all those years, I was helping him. My mother was extremely overweight, and that comes with an ample amount of health issues as well. If you’ve seen the movie What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, that will give you an idea of my mom. She went a long time undiagnosed with diabetes and suffered from depression.

In 7th grade, just a year after my mom and dad split up after being together for nearly three decades on and off, my mom took on the responsibility of caring for my cousin’s new baby. My older cousin and his girlfriend were convicted of some crimes, and he was sentenced to about a decade, give or take. His baby momma was sentenced to a few months. My mother was in no position to take care of a baby! She was depressed, and we had a house full of people who were all down on their luck living with us. Surprisingly, this baby brought her out of her darkness, but it was a lot on me.

I was only in 7th grade, and it was just a few months, but I was left with the responsibility of taking care of a baby that couldn’t even walk. He cried so much, he was always hungry, and he was heavy. Formula was not enough for him. My mom made a formula recipe with Karo syrup and Carnation cream to keep him full. During that short time, I missed days of school to help my mom with this baby. Staying up all night, changing diapers. It made me want to never have kids and become the rich aunty. But that was the beginning of me making sacrifices for others, and it wasn’t the end.

Just three years later, in 10th grade, I was leaving traditional high school to care for my mother and grandmother. My mom’s mobility and health were declining as her weight increased. I left during the second semester of 10th grade. I gave up cheerleading, basketball season, friends, and the dreams I had of living out my high school years as a character on Bring It On. I enrolled in home studies, where delinquent kids and child stars and entertainers attended a one-on-one session with an educator once a week. I was missing out on the best years because I had to help my mom and grandma attend doctor’s appointments, grocery shop, and clean up. Every week my grandma would pay me 50 dollars to clean up her house. This was probably the highlight of my week. Getting paid!

I sacrificed those years because my mom was making me miss school to assist her with tasks. She traumatized me by telling me that I was going to come home from school one day and find her dead. The funny thing is, she didn’t die until 13 years later! Like, what the HELLY!!! Lol. During this time, I was so depressed I gained so much weight from being in the house. I was always angry. I just wanted to end it all. I made up my mind that when I graduated, I was getting the hell out of dodge. I applied to colleges far away from California. I needed to live my life. I didn’t care who was sick. Surprisingly, my dad wholeheartedly supported me moving away. He wanted me to live my life. I went to Georgia.

I didn’t last long in Georgia because guilt and my mom influenced me to stay in LA after her mom, my grandma, died. Leaving behind life-changing scholarships, a quality education, and the opportunity to rub elbows with future lawyers, doctors, educators, and philanthropists. I was thriving in Georgia, in an honors society, and I had a write-up in Macon Magazine through a nonprofit I was volunteering with while in school. I just knew I was going to be an educated, fierce young woman with a rich Black husband who is an athlete and community worker while being a cast member on The Real Housewives of Atlanta. I specifically chose the college I went to because Phaedra Parks went there. Welp, that didn’t go as planned. In fact, it went the opposite.

After returning to LA and helping my mom mourn and grieve her mother, I badly wanted to go. The plan was to go back to Georgia, but I ended up in North Carolina working at a friend of the family’s (my aunt’s) business. I was still going through depression because my mom called daily telling me how sick my dad and granny were and all the drama that was going on. She was struggling with taking care of yet another young cousin, and she desperately needed me to come back. I had it easy in North Carolina. No bills, but I was working from sunup to sundown while also living in a completely different environment that I wasn’t used to. I won’t get into details, but it made me thankful for the dysfunctional family I have. I didn’t last long before I returned back to my mom after my granny and dad were both in the hospital on life support. Damn!

They didn’t die though.

I came back to help raise a child with severe trauma and issues, and to support my parents who needed me to get around. I left money, education, a better environment, a career, and an opportunity to be a homeowner before 25. The opportunity to be the first one in my family to go and graduate from a 4-year college. I hated life. My everyday life was taking care of my parents, taking a child to school and picking him up, and going back and forth to hospitals and nursing homes. My high school years? Gone. My college years? Gone. My early 20s? Full-time caregiver to the elderly and a child that’s not even mine.

All I knew was to put the needs of everyone else before mine. All my life. Missing out to take care of people and not taking care of myself. I just wanted for anyone to see me and to understand me. I didn’t want to have all this responsibility. But being needed was my identity. It was embedded in me.

Now, this is not the mentality to have while going into your early twenties because this can be detrimental to anyone who is weak-minded or misguided. It almost got me. I have never been in a relationship with someone who didn’t need me, needed my support, my resources, needed what I had, and I thought this was normal. Being with a man who didn’t have diddly squat but words, and me thinking it was alright because I had my own. My own apartment, car, job, things. Even though I was still caring for everyone else daily, I had my needs met. This mentality had me settling for less than what I deserved all because someone who wasn’t sick needed me. I thought this was how it was supposed to be. It caused me to stay in places much longer than I needed to be. It also made me hyper independent, I mean who else could I call on? I had to be Superman and Lois Lane.

I thought love was someone needing me, and me always being there was how it was supposed to be. Yet my needs were never met. I was abused with this mindset, I was taken advantage of with this learned behavior. I’m not afraid to say it, it is still something that I am working on, but I have gotten extremely better with it. I am learning to choose myself over everyone else. Self-preservation. I still yearn to be wanted and not needed in my life. But I just chalk it up to something big brewing for me. It’s hard. Naturally, being in a situation I was in, you can either become selfish or become an empath. I’m an empath struggling with seeing people and things for what they are and not what they could be. But deep down, I feel like seeing the world this way is the reason why I am so blessed. Blessed. BLESSED! You hear me?

It’s still hard too, because if I could tell someone about the sacrifices I am struggling to make now, although it is not regarding a romantic relationship, I’m still making sacrifices for family who will not appreciate or understand the things I am going through. This is the effect of being a caregiver and never being cared for. One day I will be wholeheartedly wanted and not needed. This is only temporary. This too shall pass.

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