Becoming a Caregiver at 25 Changed Everything I Had Planned

My mother's diagnosis came in the spring when I was 25, in the same month that I had accepted a job offer in another city and was preparing to move.

The diagnosis was serious - a condition requiring intensive management and regular hospital visits - and my father, who worked long hours and was managing the practical dimensions of the situation with characteristic quiet efficiency, was not equipped for the emotional and daily care dimension of what she now needed.

I understood without it being said directly that the move would have to wait. I deferred the offer. The company was not able to hold it and I understood. I told myself I could find another one and I was right and it took longer than I had expected.

The two years that followed were the least planned of my adult life and the most formative. I was a 25-year-old in Kuala Lumpur who had expected to be building an independent life in a new city and who was instead spending four evenings a week with my parents, navigating the medical system, managing my mother's appointments and medications and the particular emotional labour of being the person she called when she was frightened.

There is a specific kind of loss in watching a parent be vulnerable in ways that reverse the direction of care you have always taken for granted. I grieved it and I also, gradually, found something in it.

My mother and I talked during those two years in ways we had not talked in the previous five. The circumstance removed the social maintenance of our relationship and replaced it with something more honest.

She told me things about her life, her marriage, her own twenties, that she would not have shared in the ordinary architecture of our pre-diagnosis relationship. I told her things in return.

By the time she had stabilised enough that my life could resume some of its intended shape, I was a different person than the one who had deferred the job offer - more patient, more present, less convinced that any individual plan was as important as I had previously believed.

The career I built after was built on a different foundation. I will not pretend the two years were not hard. I will also say that they gave me things I did not know I was missing.