Caregiving and Caregivers: No Easy Task

Josie and I hired a full-time live-in caregiver for Mom and Dad because we needed to find a way to support them as well as ourselves. We have a business to run,  and we had to do what we could even though it is an expensive investment.  We used to have our other sister there on the weekends, while we alternated during the week but given that she had some personal issues she had to deal with, we decided that hiring another one to cover the weekends would help us concentrate on providing for our parents in a more efficient and stress-free way.

We’re not rich by any means and in fact, we had to enlist the financial help from one of our brothers to make things work. But just because you hire people to care for your parents doesn’t mean that its fine and dandy from that point forward.

You would think that once you have two caregivers help Mom and Dad, voila! Easy money. Nope.

It’s nice to think that you can hire people, train them, treat them like family and trust that they will reciprocate. But sometimes, it’s not always the way you want things to be. Unfortunately, the past couple of weeks have been very frustrating. Our main caregiver  had some issues with our part-time caregiver and there was a dispute over some things she didn’t think he was doing and of course, he didn’t agree. We had to hold two meetings once with both of them and once with her to iron out any problems. Hopefully, after a long time of pacifying our main caregiver and assuring our part-time caregiver that we are fair, we both feel drained.

Just because our role now is mostly overseeing things and not so much getting down the dirty work, it is still a difficult task. Your role is to still run the ship. I can’t speak for Josie but I’m always worried about what’s going on in the house. I wonder if they are ok, if the caregivers are paying attention to them. I even worry about the caregivers themselves and wondering if they are going to take off because they’re burned out. I pay surprise visits at least twice a week. I don’t know. Hopefully there is no more “drama” from this point forward. We don’t want to have to let anyone go, but we do want our parents to live in peace without any squabbles.

Again, the task of caregiving spreads across all spectrums….so, I’m crossing my fingers that things run smoothly at least for another couple of weeks!