It's November, which means it is National Family Caregivers Month. NFCA has been organizing this national time of recognition for family caregivers since the mid nineties. Our theme this year is Speak Up - Speak Up for Your Rights, not something family caregivers tend to be very good at.
What doe sit mean to Speak Up? On the simplest level, it's about raising the sound of our voice so others can better hear us. Speaking up is how we solve problems. It's how we learn. It's how we educate. It's how we bring about change.
In the course of a typical day, we probably all speak up quite a bit. When it comes to family caregiving, however, many of us tend to be very quiet. We don't tell our children we need help caring for their Dad. We don't tell our boss that we need a more flexible schedule. We don't speak up to question a doctor when our guts tell us we should.
Speaking up tends to be hard for family caregivers because we are on uncertain ground. We question our knowledge and our actions and don't get to talk with other family caregivers all that much to boost our confidence. We tend not to think that maybe the difficulties we face have nothing to do with our own actions but, rather, with the fact that we really are swimming upstream as we try to make life better and easier for our loved ones and ourselves.
How do we Speak Up, on behalf of ourselves, our loved ones and all family caregivers? How do we get more of what we need without coming off as a difficult person?
Here's what I think we need to do:
- We need to come from a place of confidence, a belief that "I can do this"
- We need to come from a place of anger, not too much that can be counterproductive, but just enough to say "I am not going to take this anymore or I am not going to do this anymore".
- We need to come from a place of knowledge so we can speak with some authority.
- We need to believe that speaking up for our rights is critical if we, and our loved ones, are going to journey down the crooked path of caregiving without tripping and falling each time we turn a corner.
