career and caregiving -

There’s no balance. Let’s start there.

If you’re reading this looking for the system that lets you do an excellent job at work AND an excellent job caring for your aging parent AND show up fully for your spouse and kids and friends and self — that system doesn’t exist. The people selling it are lying.

What’s real is a different question: how do you do both well enough, for long enough, to come out the other side without losing yourself, your job, or your relationship with your parent?

That’s the honest version of “balance.” It’s not about doing it all perfectly. It’s about doing it sustainably for the years this is going to take. Here’s how that actually works.

Acknowledge the math.

The average caregiver provides about 24 hours of care per week (NAC/AARP, Caregiving in the United States 2020). For working adult children, even a fraction of that landing in work hours — appointments, phone calls, sibling coordination, paperwork, emotional decompression — adds up. Over a year, that’s hundreds of hours redirected from career to caregiving. Those are real hours. They have to come from somewhere.

If you’re not actively choosing where they come from, they come from the wrong places — your sleep, your spouse, your health, your sanity. The first step in “balancing” is acknowledging the math is real and being intentional about which buckets the time comes out of.

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