The person who always manages cannot be managed
You know exactly how to take someone's temperature at 2 a.m., how to book the specialist, how to sit in the waiting room without showing fear. You have done it for your mother, your children, your husband, sometimes all three at once. Caregiving is not something you do, it is the shape your days have taken for so long that you cannot see where you end and it begins. So when someone pulls a chair out for you, when someone asks what you need, when someone insists on driving you to the appointment, something in you recoils. You say you are fine. You mean it.
