Holding Two Roles: Writing While Caring for Others

The summer we began visiting ALS clinics for my mom was the summer her medical binder thickened with reports, trial information, and my own notes and questions. We spent days on the road, sitting through long clinic visits, anticipating updates, and meeting doctors.

It was also the summer I was supposed to start turning my dissertation into a book. This was a process that felt both mysterious and urgent. With my laptop balanced on waiting-room chairs, I tried to write in the spaces between conversations with doctors. That became the rhythm: writing whenever and wherever I could, often wondering if my attention belonged elsewhere.

At the same time, I was also a mother to two young daughters and a partner trying to make sense of how all these roles overlapped. I often felt like I was balancing teacups filled with scalding tea: unsteady, precarious, never able to give my best to any one thing. My energy was constantly pulled in competing directions.

Writing While Caregiving

Much of my early research for the first book unfolded while I was caring for my mom. Some tasks I managed remotely, but others meant traveling to Virginia and squeezing archive visits between clinic appointments and daily care. Summers—supposedly a time for writing—became a balancing act of caregiving and research.

Progress was slow. Tasks that should have taken hours stretched into days. I compared myself to others and felt constantly behind. On campus, I dreaded being asked about my writing because the answer was complicated.

What I wanted were conversations that reflected my whole self: the writer and the caregiver, always trying to be in two places at once.

Discovering What Caregiver Support Really Looks Like

It took me years to understand the kind of support I needed. I longed for writing communities that valued flexibility over productivity, for project-management strategies that matched energy with tasks, and for spaces where interruptions to writing plans were part of the plan.

Honestly, there wasn’t a single aha moment, but many late nights staring at an ever-growing to-do list, realizing that nothing I had in place was helping. Eventually, I accepted that I would never find all the support I needed in one place. Instead, I had to identify what mattered most, knowing that it might shift day by day.

Over time, I began creating some of that support for myself. I worked with developmental editors who provided accountability, learned how to navigate writing obstacles, built color-coded systems to track projects, figured out ways to make task lists for writing projects not feel more overwhelming than the project itself, and, most importantly, learned to give myself more grace.

I also realized that while my path didn’t look like others’, I could trust my own pace and learn to discern what was worth saying yes to, and what needed to be a no.

Creating Space for Caregivers Who Write

Through it all, one wish kept surfacing: I wanted a space where caregivers didn’t have to explain why writing felt slow, or why even the best effort sometimes led to missed deadlines. A space where being a caregiver and being a writer could coexist without apology.

That vision is now becoming real. This fall, I’m launching my first writing group for caregivers. The program blends quiet writing time with no penalties for arriving late or needing to miss with opportunities to share practices I’ve developed as a writing professor and caregiver. Most importantly, I’m excited to co-create this space with others who are trying to care for their writing as they care for others.

As I work on the final touches, I keep asking the question that guided me through those years: What support made it possible for me to keep writing? What kind of community did I need as both a writer and caregiver? Again and again, I hear from others in similar situations: what we need most is a space that recognizes both.

If you’ve ever longed for that kind of recognition, I hope this community can offer you what I once needed most.