There is a particular quality to the middle of a long caregiving stretch that is hard to explain to people who have not been in it.
The early years had the adrenaline of crisis. Something was wrong with my mother; I needed to fix it; I needed to be here; I moved here. The decisions felt clear and the reasons felt obvious. I was in problem-solving mode, and problem-solving mode has its own momentum.
The late years had the urgency of the end. She was declining visibly, in ways that broke my heart in specific measurable ways, and that urgency kept the days organized around something larger than routine.
The middle is where you just live.
Years four through nine were the middle. My mother’s condition was stable — not good, but stable. She had good days and bad days. She could do a lot of things and couldn’t do some others, and the list of things she couldn’t do grew slowly enough that the growth was hard to see in real time. I got used to each new limitation a little at a time and then it didn’t feel like a limitation anymore, it just felt like how we lived.
There was a period in year five when she started going to a chair yoga class on Tuesday afternoons at the senior center. Volunteer transport picked her up and brought her back. This meant that Tuesday afternoons were mine, completely mine, for two hours.
I don’t know how to explain what two unscheduled hours felt like by year five.