Mom & Me Four Archive

    A couple of times a week I check my Sitemeter stats to see what search terms bring people to my site. There's always an interesting, and often amusing, array of words and phrases listed, some of them laugh out loud funny. I get a lot of visitors, for instance, who are focused on having sex with their mothers. This morning, while scanning the visitors for Essaying the Situation, the phrase in the title of this post showed up as a search phrase typed into Google at around 1500 yesterday, bringing the searcher to This Isn't Your Mother's Caregiving. There was a link (which no longer exists) that delineated how and why the searcher was brought to this particular essay.
    I was startled to tears. It's hard to describe what I'm feeling: I guess the best way to put it would be a feeling of compassionate concern and understanding. I wonder what moment in this caregiver's day drove her or him to the internet for some communal relief. I wonder if this moment was one of those fleeting surges that can plague even the most dedicated of caregivers or if it was one of many connected moments from which the caregiver almost never experiences relief. I doubt that the essay to which the searcher was delivered offered much help.
    Although my guess is that there are millions of caregivers who experience these moments, however rare or frequent, this is the first time I've noticed someone being directed to one of my sites because they could no longer stand the moment and had to express their frustration, if only by typing the words online, hoping they could join stressed hearts, however distant the connection, with at least one other person in the great maze of humanity who had posted, somewhere, the experience of similar thoughts.
    That's why I decided to write this post. Oh caregiver, whomever you are, so deep into the frustration of caregiving that you must put a voice, however muffled, to it in order to experience some relief, know that you are not alone. Your thoughts are neither uncommon, nor "bad thoughts". I think of you often and, if I could, I would embrace you in your pain and rage until you had sobbed and shaken away the daymare and calmed yourself in the knowledge that "this, too, shall pass". Sometimes, this is the only comfort available to caregivers in desperate straits.
    Later.