You are caring for your kids, your parents, your work, and your own grief — and somewhere in that pile, you forgot you were a person too.
This episode is for the women in their forties, fifties, and sixties who are holding more than anyone is acknowledging. The ones who know their mother’s medication schedule the way they know their own phone number. The ones who track who needs which form, which appointment, which gentle phone call. The ones who park outside the supermarket for five quiet minutes because they cannot face one more aisle yet.
Monique tells the story of her friend Maeve — fifty-two, two teenagers, a mother with dementia — who phoned her from a carpark after a specialist appointment and realised she couldn’t remember the last time anyone had asked her how she was doing. She tells the story of a woman at a workshop who hadn’t seen her own GP in three years because it had started to feel selfish.
This is the long, quiet grief of caring for someone you love while they slowly become less of who they were. Of doing something extraordinary in almost complete silence. Of being asked to be infrastructure when you are, in fact, a person.
If you’ve been holding everything together — please listen. You are not failing. You are doing something almost no one acknowledges. And this episode is one quiet acknowledgment.
