I met a woman recently who described herself as the world’s worst caregiver.

She told me why she’s the world’s worst caregiver.

She’s impatient.

She tells her husband “no” too much.

She gets angry easily.

She doesn’t always jump up to help when she should.

She orders pizza rather than making dinner.

She helps him take a shower every third day rather than daily.

She had some other reasons as well. I don’t remember all of them.

I remember telling her that she was going to have to give me some more extreme stuff before I would even consider her for world’s worst caregiver.

Did she have an expectation that she would always be patient? That she’d never get angry? Did she think she’d have the energy to make dinner every night? And how important is it that her husband have a shower every single day?

All I could tell her was that, while sometimes not much about caregiving is “normal,” I considered everything she told me to be pretty typical within the realm of caregiving.

Yeah, you lose your cool. Yeah, you’re angry. Sure, you shut down. You aren’t always the best version of yourself. This is real life. And it isn’t always pretty.

Be kind to yourself. You are in a hard situation. And your frustration is valid.

As for the world’s worst caregiver, her husband has Lewy-Body dementia. He doesn’t sleep much at night, so she doesn’t either. He has hallucinations and occasionally chases her with a butter knife. Her kids think she’s exaggerating his symptoms.

If she had said she never got frustrated or angry, I would have accused her of lying. And she would probably get kicked out of any support group she wanted to attend.

Why do we beat ourselves up when we are doing our best in what seems like an impossible situation? Our attacks on ourselves don’t make the situation better. In fact, they make things worse. If you want to make caregiving harder, start identifying and dwelling on all the things you are not doing well.

I was talking to a group of individuals who were caregivers to their spouses when I decided to ask them what they were doing well as caregivers. There was a long silence but I didn’t let them off the hook. Finally, a few hesitant answers.

Someone was good at covering the chores her husband used to do. Someone felt like they were doing well by always playing her husband’s favorite music at night. Another person quietly said that he was proud that he made the choice to move to a smaller and more dementia-friendly home to accommodate his wife.

This was a group that often talked about their shortcomings as caregivers. Without being asked, they never would have talked about their strengths.

Why are we like that? Why can we talk all day about our failures but not bring up our successes?

You may not be successful in every area of caregiving. But you are successful in some areas of caregiving. Turns out, caregiving is just like everything else in life. We have strengths. And we have (what I am now supposed to call) growth areas. You might know growth areas by their previous name, weaknesses.

Caregiving is also like most things in life in that you can get better at it. But you will never be a perfect caregiver.

And, if you think about it, you weren’t a perfect spouse, daughter, son, grandchild, or friend before you started caregiving. Why would you expect you’d be a perfect caregiver? Or a perfect anything, for that matter.

Be realistic and understand this is hard. Think about mistakes as data points. When you think you messed up, consider it an opportunity to learn. And move on. You don’t have the time and energy to dwell on mistakes. Rumination is inefficient.

After all, you are human. We are defined by imperfection and also by growth.

And stop being so unkind to yourself.