One of the strangest parts of the last few years of my life is realizing that soon I will enter a phase of my life where my parents no longer care for me, but I care for them. When I visited them recently, I asked why the rugs that they had always had in their front entryway were gone. They told me that my mom had tripped on one and fell and so they had decided to get rid of them. The news for me wasn’t that they had gotten rid of the rugs but that my mom had fallen, and they’d never told me about it! I admonished them that they needed to let me know about that kind of thing.
I live far from them so I don’t know what my caregiving will look like just yet, but I know that it’s coming. And if MI Benefits Guy knows one thing, it’s that many of you are not only caregivers in the work you do but are additionally caregivers in your personal life whether it’s for an adult sibling, your parents, an adult child, or some other family member or friend whose care falls to you.
One other thing MI Benefits Guy knows is that caring can be exhausting. We can never continue taking care of someone else if we aren’t also taking care of ourselves. This is especially true when we are not only caregivers in our work but when we never have a break from caregiving because we’re also a caregiver during our off hours.
One of the wonderful benefits we offer to folks in our health insurance program is an Employee Assistance Program. One piece of that program is regularly recorded seminars that are then available on demand. In November they released one called Caring for the Carer.
It’s worth your time to go watch it whether you’re a caregiver at work, at home or both. We simply have to take care of ourselves in order to take care of others or we will be trying to pour from an empty vessel.
You can access all the prerecorded seminars at our EAP website. If you don’t know how to access that website, reach out to [email protected] to get the login information. Once there, scroll down and select Online Seminars and you’ll see a list of all that they offer, including Caring for the Carer. Check it out.
Last Updated on December 1, 2023