I never saw Mum as a full-time job… but it is
A 24/7 Job which doesn’t pay
Caring changes you — quietly, completely, and often without applause.
You don’t clock in or out. You don’t get appraisals or promotions. Some days, you barely get to finish your tea while it’s still warm. But you do it — not because you have endless patience, but because you’ve adapted to a life that revolves around someone else’s needs.
And over time, that adaptation becomes so ingrained that you stop noticing it. You stop calling it care. It’s just life.
Until one day, you realise you’re tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix.
At a glance
- Caring for others is real work — emotional, physical, and invisible labour that deserves recognition, not minimisation.
- You can love someone deeply and still feel drained by the weight of care; both can be true.
- Therapy offers space to explore the exhaustion, guilt, and identity shifts that come with long-term caring roles.
- Normalising constant care isn’t resilience — it’s survival mode. Healing starts when you name what it’s costing you.
- You’re allowed to rest, ask for help, and stop carrying everything alone. Care shared is care that lasts.
When caring becomes your baseline
Many carers describe the same slow slide: what began as helping turns into organising medication, managing appointments, monitoring moods, juggling finances, cooking, cleaning, reassuring — and all of it quietly absorbing more space until there’s little left for you.
You stop thinking, “I’m doing extra.”
You start thinking, “This is just what needs to be done.”
That’s the paradox. The better you get at caring, the less visible your work becomes — even to yourself.
The world calls it love, duty, family. And yes, it is all those things. But it’s also labour. Emotional, physical, logistical labour that costs energy, attention, and sometimes identity.
You can love someone deeply and still feel drained by the work of caring for them. Those truths can coexist.
The myth of “coping”
Carers are often praised for their strength. But that same praise can trap you. Once people believe you’re coping, they stop checking.
You might hear: “You’re amazing, I don’t know how you do it.” Or worse: “You’re so strong — I couldn’t.”
It sounds like admiration, but it can also mean isolation. Because once you’ve built the image of being capable, it’s hard to admit when you’re not.
So you keep going — until the cracks show in subtler ways. Irritability. Numbness. Forgetting simple things. Feeling detached from friends or your own needs.
None of that means you’re failing. It means you’ve been holding more than any one person should have to.
Love isn’t an infinite resource
We’re taught that love can carry everything. But even love needs oxygen.
When you spend every day tending to another’s wellbeing, it’s easy to forget your own. And if you’ve grown up around responsibility — if care has always been part of your identity — it can feel unnatural to stop. Rest becomes guilt. Asking for help feels indulgent.
You might think, “But I’m not the one who’s unwell.”
Yet emotionally, you’re running the same marathon — just in a different lane.
Care doesn’t just happen in the tasks you do. It happens in the vigilance. The watching. The “just in case.” The split-second awareness of every sound in the house. That’s work too — invisible, relentless work that lives in your nervous system.
The double bind of invisibility
Society often divides people into “carers” and “everyone else.” But real life isn’t that simple. Many carers also work, parent, study, or manage their own health. Some do all of it at once.
And yet, because the work happens behind closed doors, it’s rarely recognised as labour. You might not even recognise it yourself.
That invisibility carries a cost. It skews your sense of worth. It blurs the line between who you are and what you do. And it can make it harder to reach for help — because on paper, you’re “just looking after someone.”
But the truth is: you’re running a household, a care plan, an emotional regulation system, and often, your own life — simultaneously.
That’s not “just.” That’s extraordinary.
Normalisation isn’t resilience
Normalising care helps you survive. But it can also numb you to your own limits. When something becomes your default, you stop noticing its weight — until you can’t lift it anymore.
You might find yourself saying things like:
- “It’s not that bad.”
- “Others have it worse.”
- “I chose this.”
All true, maybe — but also ways to soften the truth that it is that hard. That your exhaustion is valid. That what you carry matters.
In therapy, this often surfaces not as “carer burnout” but as quiet depletion — low mood, anxiety, guilt, or a sense of disconnection from your own life. You may not even name yourself as a carer at first. You’re just doing what you’ve always done.
But care doesn’t stop being labour just because you’ve built muscle for it.
The importance of recognition
You don’t need pity. You need recognition.
- Recognition that this is work — unpaid, unacknowledged, but real.
- Recognition that even the most loving carer needs care too.
- Recognition that your wellbeing isn’t a luxury; it’s part of the system staying upright.
Therapy can be a place for that recognition — somewhere you’re not just someone’s carer, but you.
Where your feelings aren’t filtered through guilt or comparison.
Where you can say, “I’m tired,” without needing to justify it.
And in that space, you might finally see how much you’ve been carrying. Not to drop it all, but to learn how to set it down safely, even for a moment.
Reframing care as shared, not solitary
Caring alone isn’t sustainable. It never was. But when you’ve normalised it, it can feel almost impossible to let others in.
Support doesn’t always mean someone else takes over. Sometimes it means being witnessed — having someone see what you do without you having to explain it. Sometimes it means accepting help in small, practical ways. Sometimes it means permission to not be strong all the time.
That’s not weakness. That’s sustainability.
Just Helping Out?
If you’ve spent years downplaying your role — calling it “just helping out,” “just managing,” “just doing what anyone would” — pause.
- Care is work.
- Emotional labour is labour.
- And being good at it doesn’t make it lighter.
You don’t have to stop caring to start caring for yourself.
Recognising the weight isn’t complaining. It’s clarity. And from that clarity, change can finally begin.
I care for a family member — I have for many years. Imagine if I were paid for all the hours I spend caring or doing things for them. Some weeks it’s 24/7, other times it’s just the daily tasks — but it easily adds up to 21 hours or more a week. Then I think about it: who else would do this?
How much do you really take on? How much do people see? How much does it cost — in time, energy, or yourself? We call it ‘just helping out’ — but is it?
