A house that won’t hold
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from lifting heavy things, but from bracing for them on the daily.
Caretaking sounds noble when described in theory. In practice, it’s a series of high stakes negotiations with reality. You bring water. You adjust pillows. You make food. You lower your voice. You narrate your movements like a cautious intern in a courtroom. Every action has to be defensible.
I wake up most mornings not to an alarm, but to the hum of tension in the walls. The house I inhabit has its own ecosystem now part hospital ward for my ailing mother, barnyard for a surplus of pets my folks struggle to care for, part emotional weather system where aggressive storms break often in the form of heated arguments and disputes over nothing. My mother cycles between kindness and fury like a faulty traffic light. Green, red, green, red. Step forward, stop immediately. Smile. Duck.
Caretaking, as it turns out, is less Florence Nightingale and more war-time doctor & insane asylum orderly with a grocery list.
I make food multiple times per day, I give wash downs, I bring water. I adjust pillows carefully, narrating my movements like a cautious museum docent: “I’m moving your arm now.” “I’m lifting you slightly.” Anything to avoid being falsely accused of violence or viciously torn apart by insults.
Some days my mother asks why I care, why I bother, or why I can’t give her more? Other days she tells me I’m a dummy, evil like my father, too broke to give her relief or care long-term the way a good daughter should.
Because in a house where emotions swing without warning, even lifting someone upright can be recast as aggression and even acts of kindness & care can be distorted which wrecks me inside.
What wears on me most right now isn’t just the tasks involved in caring for my mom but it’s the pressures. stresses, frustrations, and fact that my old man has completely checked out of his responsibilities as a husband since our eviction. The end result of all of this is that the responsibilities of caring for my mother falls on me & there’s a limit on how much I’m able to do, arrange, and coordinate for her while still working on joining the military and juggling that with a new job search for the year.
Truthfully, there’s a specific stinging sadness that comes with watching a parent decline. Not just physically, but emotionally & mentally. You see flashes of who they were & more importantly who they could have been if they had married differently, chose themselves over societal expectation, & explored healthier alternative paths in their prime. Then everything slips. You try to help and are told you don’t care in the process. You step back and are told you’re abandoning them all in the span of minutes.
In all the havoc and confusion ive begun to understand something brutal
I can’t cure my mom.
I can’t correct decades of choices.
I can’t undo the financial strain she and my old man are experiencing.
I can’t repair a marriage that existed long before I was even born.
I can’t remodel a house into a handicap accessible sanctuary.
I cannot be an around-the-clock nurse armed with decades of professional medical experience while also being a person with a future of my own to build.
And yet some part of me feels like it should be able to.
It’s the unnerving & sometimes desperate belief I have that if I just worked harder to be the caretaker she needs, spoke softer, gave up more then maybe the volatility in her life would stabilize & the anger, crying, screaming, throwing things, and insults would stop but I know that nothing I do can ever really repair what has been broken for the last several decades.
Some wounds are bigger than one person’s effort at the end of the day.
All the while, Job searching from inside a minefield is a strange sport. I’ve toggled between various online job listings and while my mother screams my name from the other room after hearing a noise that didn’t sound quite right to her. I’ve been walking around searching for local opportunities that would give me the ability to still care for her while giving me a steady part-time income that’ll help me through my enlistment process. But in reality, it’s hard to sound “team-oriented and enthusiastic” when you’ve just been called disgusting for not making pancakes in a specific way or adjusting a quilt to the same standard a nurse would.
But I send out the resumes anyway, shake hands, introduce myself, & continue to check around door to door at different shops and restaurants.
Which is how I ended up at the opening night of a Middle Eastern pizza restaurant & Bar this week. It’s an overly swanky establishment in the middle of a junkyard type of neighborhood with warm lights and clean floors and people who mixed cocktails, served tiramisu, & smiled joyfully until closing time.
I felt lighter there & soothing.
The manager let’s just call her Miss J. invited me to opening night at around 7PM after a previous in person chat, Invited. That word felt alien to me but I took the opportunity and got ready.
I showed up slightly stunned, like I’d wandered into a simulation of normal life. People were dressed well. Plates arrived steaming. a WNBA game played on the big screen, & Neo Soul Music hummed in the background.
They fed me for free & gave me dessert that night.
That sort of kindness alone nearly broke me.
Not because of the food though it was very good, but it was because the environment was stress free. No one called me selfish. No one suggested I was abusing the pita bread.
I felt freer over there. Not transformed. Not healed. Just… temporarily unburdened.
And also, out of place.
It’s a strange thing to sit among functioning people when my own baseline for life was hostile unpredictability. Happiness can look suspicious when you’re used to scanning for dangers. I caught myself watching people laugh & enjoy themselves like it was a language I used to speak fluently but had since forgotten.
I sat there last night eating spiced bread and thinking about how impossible it is to be everything at once.
Daughter
Caretaker
Shock absorber
Financial stabilizer
household repair technician.
Future army service member
Job applicant
Emotional punching bag
I cannot hold all of those roles indefinitely without cracking.
The guilt I feel on the daily comes from knowing that leaving will feel like relief.
The sadness comes from knowing that staying won’t fix anything & that things will most likely remain the same long after ive removed myself.
If I stay, I cannot reverse the impending decline my mother is experiencing of the collapse of her marriage nor the financial hardships.
If I leave, I cannot prevent any of it from happening anyway.
That’s the cruel geometry of this situation.
This coming week I have my first check in for my weight & BMI at the Army recruiting station & I’ll be checking back with the pizza joint later this week too. Until then let’s list the best-case scenario.
I fit within the weight range of 245–235 pounds which is closer to my goal of 220–221 pounds / 38–39% body fat
I secure a part-time job at the pizza restaurant
I’ve always believed in showing up with heart when the chips are down, even when the odds are stacked. Right now, I’m navigating food insecurity and housing instability while building toward a new and brighter future for myself. If my work, my words, or my story have resonated with you, I’d be deeply grateful for any support you can offer. Every donation helps me stay fed, cover transportation fees, and buy much-needed resources while I finish out my Army enlistment and stay focused on the path ahead. Even $1 makes a difference.