It’s impossible to be good at everything at the same time, says author – 05/14/2023 – Equilíbrio

Liz O’Donnell is an American of Irish origin who knew from an early age that she could rely on her own talent and hard work to earn a living. She reached the peak of her career at a young age, as marketing manager for the American company Double Forte, which specializes in public relations.

When she got married, it was clear to her and her husband that, whatever it was, her career was non-negotiable. She had two children, who are now adults, and the challenges posed by motherhood as a woman in a competitive market made her think that she could help others like her.

She created, with a co-worker, SheStarts, a digital platform with the purpose of uniting women entrepreneurs in the area of ​​Boston, capital of the state of Massachussetts (USA), where she lived.

He wrote a bestseller called “Mogul, Mom & Maid: The Balancing Act of the Modern Woman”, released in 2013. The title in English is a play on words that, translated into Portuguese, sounds quite unsympathetic, something like “Tycoon , Mother & Housekeeper: The Modern Woman’s Balancing Act”.

While giving interviews about this balance, Liz learned the same day that both her father and mother were terminally ill. Suddenly, everything she had learned, and that she traveled the country teaching, was no longer enough.

“At first they just needed me to help with things around the house, I went to the supermarket for them on the weekends, cut the grass in the backyard, fixed things that broke around the house”, she said, in a conversation with the Sheet by video call.

As their illness progressed, Liz’s presence became more important and frequent. “My dad stopped driving because he was losing his hearing and my mom because she took a tumble,” she recalls.

“This is the phase when many still don’t realize that they have become caregivers for their parents and are not just being a good daughter. It comes just before another, tougher phase, when you realize that your parents are not taking proper care of them because you’re too busy to pay attention to them”.

In the midst of this emotional storm, Liz realized that other people in her age group, between 40 and 50 years old, mostly women, were experiencing similar family situations and nobody talked about it.

She created a community on Facebook called Working Daughter (Daughter worker, in Portuguese) to exchange information, tips from doctors and how to deal with old parents, in addition to talking and even laughing about unusual situations.

In 2020, he released the book “Working Daughter”, unpublished in Brazil, and was so successful that he started to work only part-time in his original profession. Today half of her time is dedicated to the topic. The community broke away from Facebook and, last year, celebrated the first National Day of Working Daughters in the US, which takes place on the third Wednesday of November.

In a two-hour Zoom conversation, Liz gave a message to women who became caregivers for their parents: “It’s almost impossible to be a good mother, a good companion, a good professional and a good daughter at the same time. Nobody was trained for that.”

I was very surprised when I realized that your book was not released in Brazil, because, in our culture, it is very common for families to take care of their elderly until the end. It is not very socially accepted to put old people in nursing homes, as in the United States and Europe. I should have looked up the statistics for Brazil, I regret not having done so, but from what I know of your culture, the numbers must be very similar to those of the United States. Here, between 60 and 70% of people who care for older relatives are women.

There are a significant number of men who take on this role, but I decided to focus on women because we have a thousand other social pressures that interfere with our professional lives just because we are women. And our societies are aging very quickly. With recent advances in science and medicine, diseases that used to kill very quickly have become chronic, manageable diseases, so we’re all going to end up taking care of sick old people.

At what point in your personal journey as a caregiver for your parents did you realize that this was a topic that needed to be further explored? In general, there is a very specific moment in the lives of everyone who takes care of old or sick relatives that I have christened the “caregiving creep”. Nobody plans this in life, it ends up happening, and at some point you realize you’ve become that person and you’re terribly scared.

At first you think you’re just helping out, like any good son would, but that help starts to take up more and more time and space in your life and everything else starts to collapse around you. You miss days of work, stop doing the things you like or are good for you, miss family commitments, leave your husband in second, third, fourth place and you get irritated and exhausted, and you have nothing to lean on.

I reached this point on a day I will never forget. That’s when I found myself completely alone and unprepared and felt like a fraud because I was simultaneously giving talks and writing articles about balancing work and family.

What happened on this day? My mother had a doctor’s appointment, and she lived about an hour away from my house. So I took a day out of my vacation to accompany her. I woke up at 6am to answer work emails, because you take the day off, but nobody else does, so there’s demand. Then I prepared breakfast, my children left for school, I took the car to go to my mother. O [site noticioso] Huffington Post called me asking for an article, which I thought was wonderful and I accepted right away, I could write it back home, but I already started recording some things on my cell phone that needed to be in the article while driving.

When I got to my mom’s house, she was getting in the shower, but she should have been ready by now. We were running out of time, and I, distressed, but trying to be kind, asked her what had happened, and she told me “I didn’t have the strength to get ready this morning”.

We finally got to the doctor and he said my mom was losing weight and asked me what she ate every day. I asked, “Mom, what have you been eating?”, but she was distracted by something and didn’t answer. So the doctor said to me: “How do you not know what she eats? Don’t you talk to her every day? You should have taken her to live with you by now”.

I said I had a job and I traveled a lot for work and I felt really ashamed of that. Afterwards, I was very angry at having felt ashamed of being professionally successful. That night I had a lecture scheduled to talk about my first book together with another author, much better known, who had written a book with a similar theme, mothers who work a lot. And by the end of the event, which I’d gone to without even changing my clothes, I thought there were enough people talking about balancing work and motherhood, and no one to help me work through the problem of being a working daughter.

Are you an only child? No, I have two older sisters. I spent a lot of time complaining about the fact that this care was mostly on my shoulders, that even before becoming my parents’ main caregiver, I already had the most troubled life, with the most demanding job – and that produced the most money – between the three of us .

But at the end of the day, I am the person in the family who manages things best, I am very good with logistics and I interact well with doctors and nurses. The same characteristics that made me successful professionally were the ones that made me become my parents’ main caregiver.

What is the main advice you give to someone who suddenly becomes the main caregiver of old or sick parents? Well, I wrote a whole book about it. The key is learning to accept that your life has turned into something you didn’t plan on, but it’s still your life. Don’t wait for this phase to pass to do this or that.

Another important thing to remember is that perfection is an overrated and unattainable concept, so don’t judge yourself too hard. This caregiving job is essential, remember that at all times, and accept help. It is almost impossible to be a good mother, a good companion, a good professional and a good daughter at the same time. No one was trained for this. So, screw it if you didn’t have time to dye your hair, make your bed, or exercise. And if for a moment in your life you feel like you’re not being good company, then screw your friends too. Do what matters most. It’s already great.

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Liz O’Donnell is a public relations executive and author of “Working Daughter: A Guide to Caring for Your Aging Parents While Earning A Living.” Portuguese), 2020, and the bestseller “Mogul, Mom & Maid: The Balancing Act of the Modern Woman” (Tycoon, mother & maid: the balancing act of the modern woman, in Portuguese), 2013, both unpublished in Brazil. She is also a digital community creator for women who became caregivers for their parents and, in 2022, launched National Working Daughter Day in the USA.