Waiting to Exhale

This guide provides practical and common-sense strategies and takeaways, leaving you as family caregivers better equipped and motivated to protect your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. It comes from the heart of one who has over 20 plus years of experience as a family and professional caregiver. These years often left me with unspeakable joy, guilt, strength, frustration, love, denial, bewilderment, gratefulness, anger and then some. I have walked, run, and limped in many of these same shoes as you. This book is undeniably relatable, which hopefully will give you the assurance of not being alone in your struggle and that your self-care is crucial. Too often well-meaning people have soft-pedaled what family caregiving actually can entail. We hear that it's challenging. A challenge for one caregiver may mean having to wake up an hour earlier than usual. While another caregiver's challenge is trying to keep a loved one with Alzheimer's from harming them on a daily basis. Being a family caregiver can be one of the most rewarding and beautiful undertakings ever. And yes, it can also be one of the most difficult and thankless challenges a person has ever had to manage. We've got to be more open and honest about the realities of caregiving and call it what it is! We cannot change or improve those things we do not properly name. My nonprofit, It's You AND Me (aka YAM) focuses on the self-care for our African American family caregivers. Our cultural and racial makeup can have a direct bearing on the level of care we give to our loved ones and the love and care we give to ourselves. Being made aware of the health disparities that still often