The One Topic I’ve Struggled to Write About

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

Over the past 35 years, I’ve written about everything from my sex life, hoarding, and binge eating, to declaring bankruptcy, dropping out of law school, being an obsessive worrier, and more. If you’d asked me a year ago, I’d have told you there was nothing I was afraid to write about. That was true, until last summer, when pretty much overnight I became the sole caregiver for my mother, who’s in the early stages of dementia.

At first, I was so overwhelmed with the myriad tasks involved in her care that I didn’t have time to do anything more with words than the tasks required for my steady freelance gigs. Gradually, as my mom’s life got more settled, I started to open up some time and space to make sense of my life via the written word. Still, I held off on putting my mom’s issues—and my related ones—down on paper.

It’s only in recent weeks that I’ve started to address in my writing how this change in responsibility and identity has impacted me. I’ve always been an open book, but my mom is much more private, and no amount of “I” statements I can use that will make writing about this shift in status solely about me. She’s as much a character in my current life as I am, which puts me in the tricky position of trying to respect her privacy while being true to my need to connect with others via my writing.

When I was in college, I wrote about how my father’s alcoholism impacted me for PARADE magazine, the supplement found in many Sunday newspapers. I received dozens of handwritten letters from other children of alcoholics, teaching me in a visceral way that even our scariest personal stories can offer a beacon of light to others in similar circumstances, even if the impulse to bare all is primarily self-interested.

That principle has guided me every time I’ve debated whether or how to write about others in my life. I know in my bones that there’s camaraderie to be found in sharing the most humorous and heartbreaking aspects of being a caregiver. As a reader, I found Dr. Sandeep Jauhar’s memoir My Father’s Brain, about his dad’s experience with Alzheimer’s disease—and how that impacted him and his siblings—enlightening precisely because he didn’t hide his father’s worst behaviors, or how troubled and angered they often made Jauhar feel.

But Jauhar’s book came out after his father had died. My mother is still alive, and aware enough to be hurt should I reveal some of her darkest moments. There are many I will hold off on publicly writing about while she’s able to comprehend them, but others I feel the desire to share now, while they’re still fresh, when I know that the act of writing them down and releasing them from the confines of my mind will be cathartic, whether I ever receive any direct feedback or not.

Maybe it’s a sign of maturity that I haven’t rushed to document the ways this abrupt change has altered not just my day-to-day life but how I conceive of myself as a daughter and human being. I’ve given myself time to carefully consider what and how I write, and to process some of the most challenging moments I’ve faced thus far.

I don’t know what the future holds for my mom, or me, but I do know that simply acknowledging the fact that our roles have largely reversed feels freeing. It’s still scary, not only because I worry about what my mother will think if she were to read the things I’m writing, but also because I worry about how they reflect on me. Will I sound mean, ungrateful, incompetent? By which I’m really asking: Am I mean, ungrateful, incompetent?

In her craft guide Writing Is My Drink, Theo Pauline Nestor offers this writing prompt: “How have you kept silent or limited your writing because you feel that somehow you owe this silence or limited articulation to another family member?” She goes on to ask, “Has that same family member ever actually been the impetus in some way for your writing? How can you credit them for their contribution to your eagerness to write?”

For me, this is a complicated series of questions, but I don’t want to simply brush aside my urge to write because it doesn’t come as easily to me as some of my past topics. I want to grapple with the complexities, to find solace and humor and empathy for myself and possibly also offer those to others in a similar position.

It’s much easier to brush off potential naysayers when I’m writing about my own flaws and failures, the ones that haunt my waking hours and my dreams. Writing about being a caregiver, much like the act of caregiving itself, feels like walking on a sheet of ice that may crack beneath me at any moment. But the only way I’ll know whether that’s the case is by taking the first step.
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Rachel Kramer Bussel has written essays and articles for a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, and The Village Voice. She’s the editor of personal essay publication Open Secrets, and is the author of craft guide How to Write Erotica, short story collection Lap Dance Lust, and has edited over 70 anthologies.