Devoted daughter seeks help when caring for mom becomes too much
Miriam Sabir reveals how a caregiving facility Holladay, Utah, helps her cope with caring for her aging mom Connie.
In her late 20s, working in fashion in New York City, Nicole Nurse felt on top of the world. She’d just gotten a promotion at her fashion brand, complete with a corner office and her own assistant.
That was in 2011. A month after her promotion, her mom was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease.
“It was very challenging,” Nurse, who lives in Brooklyn, said. “I felt like I didn’t have enough space to support my mom emotionally when I was going through so much at work.”
Nurse said her choice was clear, if painful. She packed up her office and became her mom’s full-time caregiver.
But it turns out, her mom’s diagnosis didn’t halt Nurse’s career − it sparked a new one. Now 43, Nurse is a media strategist in the health and wellness field.
Family caregivers often give up careers or pull back from jobs to assist their loved ones. While that transition can significantly impact caregivers’ finances and sense of purpose, some caregivers find themselves called to continue care work, as health aides, advocates, storytellers and in other ways. Even caregivers who leave the workforce for several years find they’ve gained new, resume-worthy skills.
Problem solving, research, time management, prioritization, negotiation, adaptability and empathy are all skills essential to caregiving that can be brought into other professions, said Phyllis Stewart Pires, associate vice president of employee support programs and services at Stanford University. Diane Ty, managing director at the Milken Institute Future of Aging, added patience, compassion, communication skills and project and crisis management to the list.
“We think that they should be skills that you proudly put on your resume, on your LinkedIn profile,” Ty said.
Ty noted that some caregivers might be hesitant to open up about their caregiving experience in the workplace for fear of being passed over for promotions or other advancements. But some employers find transparency is more admirable than a resume gap. “Why make them guess?” said Tatyana Zlotsky, CEO of A Place For Mom.
During the 12 years she cared for her mom, Nurse found part-time and freelance work and shared her caregiving story on social media, providing a millennial face to the caregiver story. At the time, she said, she didn’t see anyone her age in a caregiving role.
Nurse continued to tap into her fashion roots by dressing in bold colors, parading red lipstick and nail polish. In her blog and social media posts, Nurse emphasized the need for caregivers to care for themselves, too.
“We don’t have to lose ourselves or our identity when we are caring for a loved one, even though it feels like it,” Nurse said.
Eventually, she said, writing and content creation “became more of a career… accidentally.”
Why aren’t we talking about senior care?
While parenting responsibilities are widely understood and sometimes better supported in the workplace, senior care still has a long way to go, Zlotsky said. She helped care for her grandparents for over two decades after her family moved to the United States from Moscow.
“No one cares that your 85-year-old grandmother is sick,” Zlotsky said. But caring for older adults requires time and energy, she said, and America needs to talk about it.
With kids, there are expected milestones that offer some caregiving relief, such as when children go to school. But in caring for an older adult, Ty said, “it’s often sudden, it can be episodic, it can be long term.” That’s why something resembling a parental leave policy might not always work for a senior caregiver, Zlotsky said.
As with all caregiving, the burden falls overwhelmingly on women. According to a recent caregiving report from AARP, 61% of America’s 63 million caregivers are women, and women caregivers report some of the worst impacts of caregiving, including physical and emotional strain, loneliness and financial hardship. Women caregivers are also more likely to provide constant care than their male counterparts.
Employers should want to retain caregivers when they can, Ty said. By supporting them, employers can prevent expensive turnover costs and build trust among workers.
Zlotsky has seen the same story play out again and again, where a woman leaves work to care for her kids, comes back for a second chapter in her career and then, within a couple of years, leaves again to care for her aging parents. That second bout of caregiving, Zlotsky said, comes with many of the same challenges as parenthood but with less resources and awareness, and oftentimes more guilt.
“It can’t just fall on the woman,” Zlotsky said. “It can’t just fall on the daughter, because it’s crushing them.”
Lived experience is worth more than degrees to some employers
Sarah Kilch Gaffney was 25 when she became a caregiver to her husband, Steven Gaffney, who was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor in 2009. He died five years later, leaving her a grieving single mom without a clear path forward.
She was in the midst of nursing school, a career path she’d never imagined before his diagnosis.
“Honestly, you know, doctors do a lot but really it’s the nurses who make such a difference in the day to day,” Gaffney said.
But “juggling full-time nursing school with a toddler and a slowly declining husband was really hard,” she said. After he died, her heart wasn’t in nursing school anymore. She quit, planning to take a short break from working, when a new opportunity caught her eye at the Maine chapter of the Brain Injury Association of America.
They were looking for someone with a master’s degree in social work, Gaffney said. She has a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and environmental studies. She decided to apply anyways, and found her lived experience was enough to land her the gig.
A recent report from ADP found skills have emerged as a strong indicator of employee success compared to other, more traditional qualifications like degrees and industry experience. A 2025 survey of more than 1,000 employers by TestGorilla, a hiring platform, found more than half of employers have eliminated degree requirements, 85% are using skills-based hiring and 72% agree that considering the whole candidate including their skills, personality and cultural alignment leads to better hiring decisions and improved organizational outcomes.
Gaffney’s job was part time, offering flexible hours and the ability to work from home, which was rare in 2015. Most importantly, Gaffney found the work to be incredibly meaningful, advocating for families like her own who had minimal resources while working through painful diagnoses.
“I think it helps people feel a little bit more comfortable, sometimes,” she said. “I’m not someone who has 45 different letters after the end of my name, but I have a lot of experience living through it and that’s really valuable to a lot of caregivers to know that.”
Gaffney, 41, still works for the association and often facilitates caregiver support groups. She remarried in 2017 and has since had two more daughters with her second husband.
She’s caregiving for a spouse again, with her second husband battling long COVID. It’s felt like “nonstop fight or flight” for her, she said.
Having an understanding employer makes “the difference between me being able to stay in the workforce and not,” she said.
Madeline Mitchell’s role covering women and the caregiving economy at USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.
Reach Madeline at memitchell@usatoday.com and @maddiemitch_ on X.