June 10, 2025 • 32 mins
On this week's Teach-in Tuesday, Morgan opens with a grounding meditation, drawing inspiration from the wisdom and resilience of Biddy Mason—an iconic 19th-century nurse, entrepreneur, and foremother of community care. Then, Vanessa guides a powerful and healing teach-in for caretakers, exploring the journey of releasing guilt and embracing the strength to ask for and receive support. A transformative episode for all who give so much to others!
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Episode Transcript
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(00:08):
We are sick and tired. Of being sick and tired the.
Disrespected person in America. Is the black woman?
But still like dust. All right.
Pretty girls in the VIP they came with.
(00:30):
Drain. They'll need ideas.
The revolution will not be televised, brother.
You are by the new Joe John, even if you are not ready for
the day, it cannot always be night.
(01:03):
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.
Wherever you are on the planet, you're welcome here.
Welcome to self-care school, y'all.
This is Morgan. Today is Tuesday.
What is Tuesday? Oh, Lord.
Teaching Tuesday. It is teaching Tuesday.
That is the voice of Vanessa that you hear.
You are walking with Girl Track 1,000,000 Black women.
(01:25):
We are the largest health movement in the world for our
health y'all, and we're walking with you, cheering you on.
It started with two friends, nowwe are over 1,000,000 /
1,000,000 women who are walking,talking and solving problems
together. My name is Morgan, you just
heard Vanessa. We are your host.
Listen, y'all, this is our dailySOS to save ourselves, to save
(01:47):
our sisters. And this week we are talking
about caretaking. And we start as we always do, by
moving on to the porch, opening the door to fresh air, to
sunlight. It is always there, y'all.
It is always accessible. Your breath is connected to this
great beautiful Mother Earth. So I invite you to stand on the
(02:07):
porch today. And we always dedicate these,
these porch meditations to one of our foremothers who came
before us, or to a group of foremothers who came before us.
And today, in the spirit of caretaking, we are the daughters
of Biddy Mason, Biddy Mason, BIDDY Mason Mason.
(02:29):
We are the daughters of Biddy Mason.
Begin by settling into a comfortable, standing position.
If it is safe, I invite you to close your eyes, to feel the
earth beneath you, to let your breath slow down as we learn who
we are. The Daughters of Biddy Mason was
(02:49):
born into slavery, 1818. She walked over 1700 miles to
California, still enslaved. But in 1856, she bravely fought
for her freedom in court, and she won.
She went on to become a nurse, amidwife, A landowner and a
(03:09):
philanthropist in Los Angeles. Her hands delivered babies,
healed the sick, and built a future not just for herself, but
for an entire community. She transformed her pain into
power. Breathe that in.
We are the daughters of Bitty Mason.
(03:31):
Now. Gently bring your awareness to
your hands. Wiggle your fingers.
Press your palms together in front of your heart.
Feel the warmth, the pulse of life.
Repeat silently or aloud. These hands hold history.
These hands hold healing. Let your breath move into your
(03:56):
chest. You can relax your hands soften
your heart space. Imagine Bitty Mason walking
through time, each steady step sacred and strong.
Place a hand on your heart, one on your belly.
Inhale deeply. Exhale slowly.
(04:22):
With every breath, sense the courage in your ribs.
With every breath, honor the wisdom in your body.
Repeat to yourself. I am rooted.
I am resilient. I remember today we let Biddy's
(04:45):
story rise through our spines, straighten our bodies.
We are tall, we are unbroken. Please feel the legacy of care,
of justice, of deep grounded groundedness, and of presence.
Take one more deep breath, exhale softly, Return to this
(05:11):
moment, Open your eyes if they are still closed.
We are carrying Bitty Mason strength with us for the rest of
the day. Welcome to self-care school
y'all. Thank you for that, Morgan, and
thank you, Bitty Mason for walking and for demanding what
you deserved, Y'all. Let's step now out into the
porch. I'm sorry, into the driveway
(05:33):
because we're going to do a little bit of a self-care audit
for today's episode. It's Tuesday and a week where
we're talking about care. The two life saving skills that
we're going to learn today are one, how to release the guilt
that comes from being a caregiver and how to reclaim and
receive support and the support that you deserve and need so
(05:56):
that you can do the best that you absolutely can.
So before we get into those two skills, I want us to just audit
a few of our kind of attitudes and our behaviors to get us
started. And my very first question for
you is if you have started setting more boundaries since
self-care school has started because we're deep into it now.
(06:16):
And if you have noticed yourselfsetting more boundaries and you
feel good about that, step forward.
If you have skipped a meal or sleep taking care of someone
else this week, I want you to take this step back.
If you have accepted help recently, even if it made you
nervous, I want you to take a step forward.
(06:41):
If you need help right now but don't know how to ask for it or
don't know who to ask, I want you to take a step back.
If you have judgment about families who put loved ones in
care facilities and think I would never do that to my mom or
dad, take a step back. If you have prayed for or
(07:06):
offered help to a friend, a sister friend who's struggling
to take care of a child who might have special needs or some
sort of need special care, I want you to take a big step
forward. All right?
I want everybody to look around,ask your body.
How did those questions feel? Morgan, did anything come up for
(07:26):
you during that self-care? Audit, I was quite neutral and I
was on the on the positive side of of today's audit.
Yeah, thank you for sharing thatfor me.
Question #5 if you have judgement about families who put
loved ones in care facilities and think I might never do that
to my mom or dad was such a triggering question for me.
And I put it in there intentionally because that was
(07:47):
my family growing up. And everybody was like, ain't no
way you putting me in a home. Ain't no way.
And that's just how I grew up. Like with this understanding
that I would never do that to myfamily and that when I was 13
years old and my grandmother whowas taking care of me was still
alive. My great grandmother, her mother
came to live with us because shehad dementia and we cared for
(08:11):
her until she passed away at 96.Even after my grandmother passed
away and I was just like, it wassuch literally she needed 24
hour care. We never, there wasn't even a
key to lock the door anymore to the house because somebody was
always there. She, me and my cousin Rhonda
were her caregivers. And I'm going to talk a little
bit in a minute about how you can get support, financial
support if you're in this situation.
(08:32):
But we bathed her in the morning, we fed her, we came
home from school right in time so we could take care of her.
My grandfather, my aunt. It was a collective effort, but
it took such a toll in this way that I was just like, I don't
know if everybody is set up to do that.
And if you don't have the right ADA compliance at your house, if
you don't have somebody to be there, 24 like there's so many
(08:53):
things that I think are at play.And yet I do think that,
especially in the Black community, there is a judgment
and there is a stigma around ourability or inability to care for
especially our aging loved ones in our home.
And I just hope that part of this episode speaks to the
person who's out there who's might be really carrying a heavy
(09:13):
burden and doesn't feel seen or doesn't know who to talk to and
is carrying a lot of guilt. And I have some statistics about
guilt and caregivers, which is really extensive.
And I just want to make those people feel comforted and I want
to make those people feel supported. 46% of caregivers
report feeling guilty that they aren't doing enough. 36% feel
(09:38):
guilty when they take time for themselves. 57% of caregivers
say that they don't know how to talk about how caregiving is
impacting them emotionally. Over 40% screen positive for
anxiety and depression, but mostaren't receiving treatment.
(10:01):
And so you're absolutely right, Morgan.
The first call to action for everybody is to figure out how
you can start to ask for help. And I want to talk about some
ways that we can start to release some of the guilt that
we experience as caregivers. First off, I have a clip,
(10:23):
Morgan, that I want to share right now of a woman who is just
talking about very briefly how she felt, the guilt that she
felt. And I know that this is very
common. And then I want to do a tapping
exercise with everybody just so that we can release any kind of
judgments that we have around ourselves, around our ability to
for our loved ones, or around where we are in the care
(10:45):
process. First, let's just play this
woman. Her name is Amy Scruggs, and
she's talking to anyone else who's out there and who's
experiencing what she's experiencing.
Amy here after the loss recovering caregiver.
Today's question I noticed that I feel guilty if I am having
fun. We had my daughter's birthday
(11:05):
last weekend. I got to see the other kids and
the grandbaby and I was happy for a minute and then I was
overwhelmed with grief and guiltthat I was happy.
And I want to know if anybody else is experiencing that when
you're in grief or after the loss, especially as a caregiver,
(11:26):
what is that coming from? I know Dad would have wanted me
to be happy. Why did I feel guilty?
Curious what your thoughts are. Morgan it's the worst thing that
we can do to ourselves to feel guilty about being happy.
Like I promise you all, it is the worst thing that we can do.
But when I was going through theresearch for this episode, I
(11:48):
kept coming over. I kept finding that occurrence
in people and a lot of clips outthere of people talking about it
over and over and over again. And I was trying to think about,
even spiritually, even at the cellular level, what does it
mean when you associate happiness with guilt?
Like, what does that do to your nervous system?
What does that do to your body? And then what does that do to
(12:09):
your ability to show up and takecare of others?
And I now want to just offer us this tool.
I'm going to have bring in a guynamed Paul Hemlin, and he's
going to just take us through a one minute tapping exercise,
Morgan, where we can just start to tap about our guilt.
Tapping as a form of therapy that has been proven to be very
effective for a lot of people and helping to move emotions
(12:32):
through our bodies and to help to signal to our brain certain
things. Vanessa, I'm excited about this
tapping exercise. If you haven't done tapping
before, you can just take your index finger and your middle
finger and you just find a rhythm that feels good as you
like. If you just tap your arm now
with your two fingers, your pointer finger and your middle
(12:52):
finger and just tap it to a rhythm and a depth that feels
good, and then he's going to instruct you.
You do it with both hands. He's going to instruct you what
part of your body you tap on. And then as he gives you the
affirmation, it's really helpfulif you say it out loud as you're
tapping, right? So if you're tapping your
collarbones, you say it out loudand you can start to feel the
energy move through you. So that is the exercise of
(13:15):
tapping. Thank you for introducing that,
Vanessa. Let's just bring in this tapping
exercise. We'll consider this a recess,
y'all, wherever you are walking,maybe in a park, out on your
street, you can follow along. He's going to give you the
instructions of where to tap on your body.
And let's just experience this tapping for a moment.
Top of the head. I keep replaying the past inside
(13:36):
of the eyebrow. I wish I had done things
differently. Side of the eye.
I carry so much guilt under the eye, but I did the best that I
could back then. Under the nose.
(13:58):
I am allowed to grow and learn chin point.
I forgive myself for being human.
Collarbone. I don't need to punish myself to
heal under the arm. I release the guilt and I make
(14:21):
space for peace. I release the guilt and I make
space for peace. You can rewind this episode if
you need to do that tapping overagain.
You can do it as many times as you need to to feel good.
And I hope that it really contributes to your spirit
(14:44):
rising today, y'all? I want to share two really
important and in depth resourcesfor caregivers out there.
These two resources cover a breadth of tools that people
could use. The first is AARP Care Connect.
It is a free online caregiving portal.
(15:04):
I mean, you can set up a whole account.
It helps you to organize, it helps you to delegate and it
helps you to deal with your emotions.
It has a checklist of daily caregiving duties on there and
it helps you to manage your daily caregiving duties.
It helps you to assign tasks to others so that it's not all on
you, which is one of the things it walks you through.
Morgan, how you can ask for helpfrom a family member and how you
(15:29):
can have the critical conversations with a family
member and how you and your family members can set up plans
for your other relatives who need you.
So I would highly recommend AARPCare Connect as a resource for
people. The second resource is is almost
as good or just as good probablyas AARP.
It's caregiver.org and it's a trusted research backed
(15:55):
organization that is supporting caregivers.
They have a deep learning library.
They provide legal and financialplanning.
They help you to manage caregiver burnout.
They have a lot of resources there and they help you define
resources of people, trusted resources of people who can help
you with your caregiving responsibilities.
(16:16):
So those are two solidarity spotlights out there and they
are two really powerful resources to help people with
caregiving. Now that I've shared those two
resources, I want to talk about a caregiving population that I'm
surprised we don't talk about orlift up as much.
(16:37):
And I feel personally guilty about this.
And it's Black men. I mean, I feel like caregiving
at this point is synonymous withBlack women.
I feel like culturally, we're just like, Black women are
caregivers. We're taking care of everybody
else. But I ran across some research
that says that 40% of the caregivers are Black men.
And I have a really beautiful story that I want to share
(17:00):
that's from NPR, of a Black man talking about how he's been
doing caregiving for his father.And it was really important for
me to share it in this episode because once I read the article,
I was like, yeah, actually, the best, maybe the best caregiver
I've ever known in my life was my grandfather.
And so I actually just want to lift him up.
(17:21):
William Gold, He's no longer here with us.
But first of all, he married my grandmother after she had eleven
children. So I just wanted to let you know
a man who was like, I got you, woman with 11 children.
And the way he caregived for herchildren and for us as his
grandchildren was so, so powerful.
But yeah, Papa was such a good caregiver.
And after my grandmother passed away, I want y'all to imagine
(17:43):
that this man cared for his wife's mother, my great
grandmother, I'm talking about. He was the primary caregiver.
He gave her around the clock care and worked full time as a
janitor at the University of Washington.
He cooked, he cleaned the house,he cooked the food, he bathed
her. He gave her medications.
He was her primary caregiver. And then Morgan, maybe even more
(18:04):
powerfully, after my great grandmother passed away, my
Uncle Rex, who was also living in the house with us, my Aunt
Peggy's husband had a major and massive stroke.
And then Papa became his caregiver.
And he shaved him every day and bathed him every day, cooked his
food every day, loved on him every single day.
And so I want to just share thisstory from NPR.
(18:27):
And I just want to give space inthis episode for the Black men
in our lives and in our communities and in the ways that
they are showing up as caregivers.
Let's play this this clip. Almost 40% of people who care
for an older family member are men, and a third of them are
Black. But Black male caregivers face
some issues that other men don't.
(18:48):
Their health is worse, and they're also more likely to be
unmarried and caregiving by themselves.
Ashley Milne Tite reports. The last day has not gone the
way Robert Turner expected. His father, who's 85, ended up
in the hospital last night and he's just picking him up to take
him back to the family home in Piscataway, NJ.
(19:08):
Say goodbye to the hospital there.
Tell everybody goodbye. About half an hour later, Turner
pulls into the driveway of the house where he grew up, uses his
dad out of the car and, with thehelp of their home health aide,
supports him up the stairs is. That OK, OK.
And settles him into a chair in the living room.
(19:29):
How's your hair feel? Much better.
Much better. Yeah.
It's good to be back from the hospital, right?
All right. Turner's father, also called
Robert, has Alzheimer's. He joined the Marines at 19
years old, became an electrician, had four kids and
in later years was a Deacon at his church.
Turner has been taking care of his dad since his mom died two
(19:50):
years ago. He is glad to do it.
He has shown me every step of the way how to be a man.
Even now in his state, he is showing me what dignity and what
grace is and what honor and respect and how to age
gracefully. As well as being a son, Turner
is a professor in the medical school at George Washington
(20:12):
University, and for the last several years he's been
conducting a study into the brain health of black men who
look after someone with dementia.
He says not only do African American men have poorer health
than other Americans and deal with negative perceptions of who
they are. They rate that they have more of
a financial burden being a caregiver than any other group.
(20:36):
Family relationships can affect stress levels, too.
Diane Mariani overseas the Caring for Caregivers program at
Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.
Sometimes there's a large familybut nobody else is asking what
can I do or providing support. There's a lot of excuses.
Adding to feelings of isolation and overload.
(20:57):
It's fascinating. It is fascinating, Morgan.
We don't get enough opportunities to hear in any
regard, black men caring for each other there.
I was just like, wow, I don't even know if I've ever seen a
story like this, maybe on a television show, on a movie, on
anything. Like, I just don't even think
it's a it's a character out there.
So I'm just wanted to make spacefor that. 45% of in home
(21:22):
caregivers are black people. There has become a huge industry
of especially men coming from the continent.
Paris has several friends. My man has several friends who
are from Cameroon and who are caregiving.
Actually. I love always thinking about
them. He has this one friend who's
like super tall, super strong and I'm just like, man, you must
be the very best caregiver out there.
(21:43):
And I just love thinking about that.
And there is a huge, I want to put this out there as a business
opportunity for people. My cousin Shante has been
researching this a lot in Seattle.
There is a huge need for in homecare facilities.
There is a huge need for Black people to start to create our
own in home care facilities. And so it might actually be that
(22:06):
you feel like I have a gift and a skill around this.
And you can look in your state at how to buy a building, rent a
building, turn your own home into a care facility place.
And if you are listening and youare out there and you know right
now of any Black-owned Black runcare facilities and you want to
shout them out, please go to myselfcareschool.com, access the
(22:27):
classroom, Scroll down to the bottom, leave a message, let us
know what are the resources out there right now so that we can
use this platform, platform especially in this week or
before we close out self-care schools so that we can uplift
some of the people who are out there doing that work.
Vanessa, I have another, I have another call to action for my
(22:47):
selfcareschool.com and leaving audio messages.
You know, we prepare for these in advance and we start thinking
about what we want to share withyou, doing all of our research.
And I was like, I don't know if we can do a whole care week
without talking about black parenting.
And I was just like, but I'm nota parent and Vanessa's not a
(23:08):
parent. And we might even need some
help. And I was like, we can read all
the statistics and everything, but we might just need some
practical advice. And so I am pleading with you
out there and I will need you todo this in the next 24 hours.
So don't let your your nervousness stop you right after
this episode. If you have some wisdom to share
(23:29):
around what you have learned, mistakes you have made, what you
would tell your earlier self as a parent.
If you are a brand new parent and you made a you had a
breakthrough or a victory yesterday, you got your baby to
start breastfeeding. Like whatever it is, nothing too
small, nothing too big. I just want to run through some
practical advice, you know, by the mothers, for the mothers
(23:51):
around good healthy parenting because everything all the
science points to like you can extend life expectancy like
right from the womb if you are doing great parenting.
And we talked about the adverse childhood experiences, we want
to stop those. We want to lower that number for
our children. So all of that to say, if you
(24:12):
got 1 tidbit of advice that you would give to your younger
parenting self or one breakthrough that you've had in
the last year or two in parenting or one aha, or just a
prayer for parents or anything, 60 seconds or anything, we want
to fill the show with your voices on Friday, which means
please, please do it today so wecan sort through them and get
ready for Friday. So that's just my plug.
(24:33):
Thank you so much, Fee. And actually, I have a section
in here in this actual episode, so I'm going to move to it right
now where I was thinking about this week.
And I was like, we define caregiving mostly as like caring
for our elders or caring for people who have disabilities.
But I did actually want to even name and mention in this episode
(24:54):
that there are so many parents out there right now who are
caring for children with disabilities or chronic
illnesses, and you are a 24/7 care coordinator, nurse
advocate, and therapist right now for your child.
I'm talking about children who have autism, Down syndrome,
ADHD, type 2 diabetes, epilepsy,sickle cell, severe asthma.
(25:17):
There are so many parents out there right now.
And Morgan, I wanted to offer some quick advice for those
parents around navigating the school systems and recommending
that anyone out there who is parenting a child with special
needs needs to understand in their state what an IEP is.
(25:38):
That is an Individualized Education Program.
It is a legal document developedfor K through 12 students in
public schools who need special education.
It outlines the students learning goals, the services,
the accommodations, and how progress will be tracked.
And students who have learning disabilities qualify.
(25:59):
That includes speech and language impairments.
That includes dyslexia. And students whose disabilities
impact their ability to just succeed in general in the
classroom qualify. The way that you can get help
with an IEP is to start with a written request or evaluation.
So submit a formal request in writing to your child's school
principal or special education coordinator asking for an
(26:20):
evaluation for special educationservices.
Another resource that I want to offer for the caregivers who are
out there right now who are caring for loved ones who have
mental health or addiction challenges, because that's a
whole other level of caregiving where you have to navigate
behavioral health systems, psychiatric care or rehab
centers. And I want to offer for anybody
(26:43):
out there who doesn't know NAMI,nami.org, NAMI is they have
family support, they have mentalhealth support.
They have specific support for Black family caregivers, for
siblings, aunties, all sorts of things who are out there, crisis
hotlines. They have hospital contacts,
they help with emergency plan, they have mental health training
(27:04):
that you can actually receive. So I would highly recommend for
folks who are caregiving out there, for folks who have mental
health or addiction challenges that you can start at nami.org
to find more resources out therefor yourself.
So I want to put that out there and then Morgan, I want to close
by sharing some resources, some more general resources for
(27:26):
everyone who's out there. We talked a bit about the
abilities or the need in our communities to create care
facilities for folks. But right now there are so many
people who are caregiving in their homes and are not
accessing the current resources that you could use.
Even when I was in high school, me and Rhonda and we were caring
for our great grandmother because she was elderly and
(27:48):
because she was on Medicaid, we qualified for to be designated
as her paid caregiver. And I think we got like $275
each a month or something, but it was like real money.
And my aunt gave us the money because we were really caring
for her. We were able to use it for
school clothes and all sorts of things.
And so if you, you can go to theMedicaid site and if you put in
(28:10):
your state plus Medicaid waiver for family caregivers, look for
a Medicaid waiver for family caregivers.
That's the first place to start.And then on that site you should
be able to find consumer directed services which lets
your loved ones designate you astheir paid caregiver.
So Medicaid sets aside money so that your family members can
(28:32):
access those facilities, etcetera, but they could just
designate you as their paid caregiver and then you can
receive the money for caring forthem.
And so every single person out there who has the ability to
qualify for this, you need to access this family caregivers
Medicaid waiver so that you can start getting compensated and
(28:54):
start getting financial support for the work that you're doing.
I pray to God, y'all, that you are now returning back after
this walk. I hope you've gotten in a
beautiful 30 minutes. I hope your body feels good.
I hope you've released some of the guilt.
I hope you've expanded your own mindset around what's possible
in terms of caregiving. I hope that you, every single
person here, because every single one of us, Morgan knows
(29:15):
somebody who is caregiving, right?
Every single one of us let us know somebody who we can call up
today and be like, did you know that?
Are you claiming all your expenses on your taxes?
Like just imagine that level of help to somebody just to be
like, are you claiming because you can do this or have you
checked with your state or is your loved 1A veteran?
So think about a person in our life.
This is one of the things I saw out there about caregiving
(29:36):
Morgan, where a woman was sayingthat people aren't calling and
reaching out because they feel like they're being a burden.
But she was like, I don't have the time or the energy to reach
out, and I need people to reach out to me.
And so that's something that I will say and invite everyone to
just think about the fact that if somebody is a caregiver, that
they often don't have the time, the capacity, the mental space,
(29:57):
the language to know how to ask for help.
And that's where we can be the agents of change and we can push
in support and we can push in help for people.
I'm going to close Morgan with aclassic gospel song, and I'm
actually going to close with a version sang by the Kojic
International Mass Choir for singing.
He'll bring you out and so I will just let everybody just
(30:20):
closeout to these words and let them wash over you.
(30:47):
Somebody told me, somebody told me.
(31:46):
I know, I know. Hey, hey, hey, hey.
Somebody told me. I will send that.
Somebody told me. Whenever you get in trouble,
give me the help. When you get a little lonely.
We are sick and tired. Of being sick and tired the.
Disrespected person in America. Is the black woman?
But still like dust. All right.
Pretty girls in the VIP they came with.
(00:30):
Drain. They'll need ideas.
The revolution will not be televised, brother.
You are by the new Joe John, even if you are not ready for
the day, it cannot always be night.
(01:03):
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.
Wherever you are on the planet, you're welcome here.
Welcome to self-care school, y'all.
This is Morgan. Today is Tuesday.
What is Tuesday? Oh, Lord.
Teaching Tuesday. It is teaching Tuesday.
That is the voice of Vanessa that you hear.
You are walking with Girl Track 1,000,000 Black women.
(01:25):
We are the largest health movement in the world for our
health y'all, and we're walking with you, cheering you on.
It started with two friends, nowwe are over 1,000,000 /
1,000,000 women who are walking,talking and solving problems
together. My name is Morgan, you just
heard Vanessa. We are your host.
Listen, y'all, this is our dailySOS to save ourselves, to save
(01:47):
our sisters. And this week we are talking
about caretaking. And we start as we always do, by
moving on to the porch, opening the door to fresh air, to
sunlight. It is always there, y'all.
It is always accessible. Your breath is connected to this
great beautiful Mother Earth. So I invite you to stand on the
(02:07):
porch today. And we always dedicate these,
these porch meditations to one of our foremothers who came
before us, or to a group of foremothers who came before us.
And today, in the spirit of caretaking, we are the daughters
of Biddy Mason, Biddy Mason, BIDDY Mason Mason.
(02:29):
We are the daughters of Biddy Mason.
Begin by settling into a comfortable, standing position.
If it is safe, I invite you to close your eyes, to feel the
earth beneath you, to let your breath slow down as we learn who
we are. The Daughters of Biddy Mason was
(02:49):
born into slavery, 1818. She walked over 1700 miles to
California, still enslaved. But in 1856, she bravely fought
for her freedom in court, and she won.
She went on to become a nurse, amidwife, A landowner and a
(03:09):
philanthropist in Los Angeles. Her hands delivered babies,
healed the sick, and built a future not just for herself, but
for an entire community. She transformed her pain into
power. Breathe that in.
We are the daughters of Bitty Mason.
(03:31):
Now. Gently bring your awareness to
your hands. Wiggle your fingers.
Press your palms together in front of your heart.
Feel the warmth, the pulse of life.
Repeat silently or aloud. These hands hold history.
These hands hold healing. Let your breath move into your
(03:56):
chest. You can relax your hands soften
your heart space. Imagine Bitty Mason walking
through time, each steady step sacred and strong.
Place a hand on your heart, one on your belly.
Inhale deeply. Exhale slowly.
(04:22):
With every breath, sense the courage in your ribs.
With every breath, honor the wisdom in your body.
Repeat to yourself. I am rooted.
I am resilient. I remember today we let Biddy's
(04:45):
story rise through our spines, straighten our bodies.
We are tall, we are unbroken. Please feel the legacy of care,
of justice, of deep grounded groundedness, and of presence.
Take one more deep breath, exhale softly, Return to this
(05:11):
moment, Open your eyes if they are still closed.
We are carrying Bitty Mason strength with us for the rest of
the day. Welcome to self-care school
y'all. Thank you for that, Morgan, and
thank you, Bitty Mason for walking and for demanding what
you deserved, Y'all. Let's step now out into the
porch. I'm sorry, into the driveway
(05:33):
because we're going to do a little bit of a self-care audit
for today's episode. It's Tuesday and a week where
we're talking about care. The two life saving skills that
we're going to learn today are one, how to release the guilt
that comes from being a caregiver and how to reclaim and
receive support and the support that you deserve and need so
(05:56):
that you can do the best that you absolutely can.
So before we get into those two skills, I want us to just audit
a few of our kind of attitudes and our behaviors to get us
started. And my very first question for
you is if you have started setting more boundaries since
self-care school has started because we're deep into it now.
(06:16):
And if you have noticed yourselfsetting more boundaries and you
feel good about that, step forward.
If you have skipped a meal or sleep taking care of someone
else this week, I want you to take this step back.
If you have accepted help recently, even if it made you
nervous, I want you to take a step forward.
(06:41):
If you need help right now but don't know how to ask for it or
don't know who to ask, I want you to take a step back.
If you have judgment about families who put loved ones in
care facilities and think I would never do that to my mom or
dad, take a step back. If you have prayed for or
(07:06):
offered help to a friend, a sister friend who's struggling
to take care of a child who might have special needs or some
sort of need special care, I want you to take a big step
forward. All right?
I want everybody to look around,ask your body.
How did those questions feel? Morgan, did anything come up for
(07:26):
you during that self-care? Audit, I was quite neutral and I
was on the on the positive side of of today's audit.
Yeah, thank you for sharing thatfor me.
Question #5 if you have judgement about families who put
loved ones in care facilities and think I might never do that
to my mom or dad was such a triggering question for me.
And I put it in there intentionally because that was
(07:47):
my family growing up. And everybody was like, ain't no
way you putting me in a home. Ain't no way.
And that's just how I grew up. Like with this understanding
that I would never do that to myfamily and that when I was 13
years old and my grandmother whowas taking care of me was still
alive. My great grandmother, her mother
came to live with us because shehad dementia and we cared for
(08:11):
her until she passed away at 96.Even after my grandmother passed
away and I was just like, it wassuch literally she needed 24
hour care. We never, there wasn't even a
key to lock the door anymore to the house because somebody was
always there. She, me and my cousin Rhonda
were her caregivers. And I'm going to talk a little
bit in a minute about how you can get support, financial
support if you're in this situation.
(08:32):
But we bathed her in the morning, we fed her, we came
home from school right in time so we could take care of her.
My grandfather, my aunt. It was a collective effort, but
it took such a toll in this way that I was just like, I don't
know if everybody is set up to do that.
And if you don't have the right ADA compliance at your house, if
you don't have somebody to be there, 24 like there's so many
(08:53):
things that I think are at play.And yet I do think that,
especially in the Black community, there is a judgment
and there is a stigma around ourability or inability to care for
especially our aging loved ones in our home.
And I just hope that part of this episode speaks to the
person who's out there who's might be really carrying a heavy
(09:13):
burden and doesn't feel seen or doesn't know who to talk to and
is carrying a lot of guilt. And I have some statistics about
guilt and caregivers, which is really extensive.
And I just want to make those people feel comforted and I want
to make those people feel supported. 46% of caregivers
report feeling guilty that they aren't doing enough. 36% feel
(09:38):
guilty when they take time for themselves. 57% of caregivers
say that they don't know how to talk about how caregiving is
impacting them emotionally. Over 40% screen positive for
anxiety and depression, but mostaren't receiving treatment.
(10:01):
And so you're absolutely right, Morgan.
The first call to action for everybody is to figure out how
you can start to ask for help. And I want to talk about some
ways that we can start to release some of the guilt that
we experience as caregivers. First off, I have a clip,
(10:23):
Morgan, that I want to share right now of a woman who is just
talking about very briefly how she felt, the guilt that she
felt. And I know that this is very
common. And then I want to do a tapping
exercise with everybody just so that we can release any kind of
judgments that we have around ourselves, around our ability to
for our loved ones, or around where we are in the care
(10:45):
process. First, let's just play this
woman. Her name is Amy Scruggs, and
she's talking to anyone else who's out there and who's
experiencing what she's experiencing.
Amy here after the loss recovering caregiver.
Today's question I noticed that I feel guilty if I am having
fun. We had my daughter's birthday
(11:05):
last weekend. I got to see the other kids and
the grandbaby and I was happy for a minute and then I was
overwhelmed with grief and guiltthat I was happy.
And I want to know if anybody else is experiencing that when
you're in grief or after the loss, especially as a caregiver,
(11:26):
what is that coming from? I know Dad would have wanted me
to be happy. Why did I feel guilty?
Curious what your thoughts are. Morgan it's the worst thing that
we can do to ourselves to feel guilty about being happy.
Like I promise you all, it is the worst thing that we can do.
But when I was going through theresearch for this episode, I
(11:48):
kept coming over. I kept finding that occurrence
in people and a lot of clips outthere of people talking about it
over and over and over again. And I was trying to think about,
even spiritually, even at the cellular level, what does it
mean when you associate happiness with guilt?
Like, what does that do to your nervous system?
What does that do to your body? And then what does that do to
(12:09):
your ability to show up and takecare of others?
And I now want to just offer us this tool.
I'm going to have bring in a guynamed Paul Hemlin, and he's
going to just take us through a one minute tapping exercise,
Morgan, where we can just start to tap about our guilt.
Tapping as a form of therapy that has been proven to be very
effective for a lot of people and helping to move emotions
(12:32):
through our bodies and to help to signal to our brain certain
things. Vanessa, I'm excited about this
tapping exercise. If you haven't done tapping
before, you can just take your index finger and your middle
finger and you just find a rhythm that feels good as you
like. If you just tap your arm now
with your two fingers, your pointer finger and your middle
(12:52):
finger and just tap it to a rhythm and a depth that feels
good, and then he's going to instruct you.
You do it with both hands. He's going to instruct you what
part of your body you tap on. And then as he gives you the
affirmation, it's really helpfulif you say it out loud as you're
tapping, right? So if you're tapping your
collarbones, you say it out loudand you can start to feel the
energy move through you. So that is the exercise of
(13:15):
tapping. Thank you for introducing that,
Vanessa. Let's just bring in this tapping
exercise. We'll consider this a recess,
y'all, wherever you are walking,maybe in a park, out on your
street, you can follow along. He's going to give you the
instructions of where to tap on your body.
And let's just experience this tapping for a moment.
Top of the head. I keep replaying the past inside
(13:36):
of the eyebrow. I wish I had done things
differently. Side of the eye.
I carry so much guilt under the eye, but I did the best that I
could back then. Under the nose.
(13:58):
I am allowed to grow and learn chin point.
I forgive myself for being human.
Collarbone. I don't need to punish myself to
heal under the arm. I release the guilt and I make
(14:21):
space for peace. I release the guilt and I make
space for peace. You can rewind this episode if
you need to do that tapping overagain.
You can do it as many times as you need to to feel good.
And I hope that it really contributes to your spirit
(14:44):
rising today, y'all? I want to share two really
important and in depth resourcesfor caregivers out there.
These two resources cover a breadth of tools that people
could use. The first is AARP Care Connect.
It is a free online caregiving portal.
(15:04):
I mean, you can set up a whole account.
It helps you to organize, it helps you to delegate and it
helps you to deal with your emotions.
It has a checklist of daily caregiving duties on there and
it helps you to manage your daily caregiving duties.
It helps you to assign tasks to others so that it's not all on
you, which is one of the things it walks you through.
Morgan, how you can ask for helpfrom a family member and how you
(15:29):
can have the critical conversations with a family
member and how you and your family members can set up plans
for your other relatives who need you.
So I would highly recommend AARPCare Connect as a resource for
people. The second resource is is almost
as good or just as good probablyas AARP.
It's caregiver.org and it's a trusted research backed
(15:55):
organization that is supporting caregivers.
They have a deep learning library.
They provide legal and financialplanning.
They help you to manage caregiver burnout.
They have a lot of resources there and they help you define
resources of people, trusted resources of people who can help
you with your caregiving responsibilities.
(16:16):
So those are two solidarity spotlights out there and they
are two really powerful resources to help people with
caregiving. Now that I've shared those two
resources, I want to talk about a caregiving population that I'm
surprised we don't talk about orlift up as much.
(16:37):
And I feel personally guilty about this.
And it's Black men. I mean, I feel like caregiving
at this point is synonymous withBlack women.
I feel like culturally, we're just like, Black women are
caregivers. We're taking care of everybody
else. But I ran across some research
that says that 40% of the caregivers are Black men.
And I have a really beautiful story that I want to share
(17:00):
that's from NPR, of a Black man talking about how he's been
doing caregiving for his father.And it was really important for
me to share it in this episode because once I read the article,
I was like, yeah, actually, the best, maybe the best caregiver
I've ever known in my life was my grandfather.
And so I actually just want to lift him up.
(17:21):
William Gold, He's no longer here with us.
But first of all, he married my grandmother after she had eleven
children. So I just wanted to let you know
a man who was like, I got you, woman with 11 children.
And the way he caregived for herchildren and for us as his
grandchildren was so, so powerful.
But yeah, Papa was such a good caregiver.
And after my grandmother passed away, I want y'all to imagine
(17:43):
that this man cared for his wife's mother, my great
grandmother, I'm talking about. He was the primary caregiver.
He gave her around the clock care and worked full time as a
janitor at the University of Washington.
He cooked, he cleaned the house,he cooked the food, he bathed
her. He gave her medications.
He was her primary caregiver. And then Morgan, maybe even more
(18:04):
powerfully, after my great grandmother passed away, my
Uncle Rex, who was also living in the house with us, my Aunt
Peggy's husband had a major and massive stroke.
And then Papa became his caregiver.
And he shaved him every day and bathed him every day, cooked his
food every day, loved on him every single day.
And so I want to just share thisstory from NPR.
(18:27):
And I just want to give space inthis episode for the Black men
in our lives and in our communities and in the ways that
they are showing up as caregivers.
Let's play this this clip. Almost 40% of people who care
for an older family member are men, and a third of them are
Black. But Black male caregivers face
some issues that other men don't.
(18:48):
Their health is worse, and they're also more likely to be
unmarried and caregiving by themselves.
Ashley Milne Tite reports. The last day has not gone the
way Robert Turner expected. His father, who's 85, ended up
in the hospital last night and he's just picking him up to take
him back to the family home in Piscataway, NJ.
(19:08):
Say goodbye to the hospital there.
Tell everybody goodbye. About half an hour later, Turner
pulls into the driveway of the house where he grew up, uses his
dad out of the car and, with thehelp of their home health aide,
supports him up the stairs is. That OK, OK.
And settles him into a chair in the living room.
(19:29):
How's your hair feel? Much better.
Much better. Yeah.
It's good to be back from the hospital, right?
All right. Turner's father, also called
Robert, has Alzheimer's. He joined the Marines at 19
years old, became an electrician, had four kids and
in later years was a Deacon at his church.
Turner has been taking care of his dad since his mom died two
(19:50):
years ago. He is glad to do it.
He has shown me every step of the way how to be a man.
Even now in his state, he is showing me what dignity and what
grace is and what honor and respect and how to age
gracefully. As well as being a son, Turner
is a professor in the medical school at George Washington
(20:12):
University, and for the last several years he's been
conducting a study into the brain health of black men who
look after someone with dementia.
He says not only do African American men have poorer health
than other Americans and deal with negative perceptions of who
they are. They rate that they have more of
a financial burden being a caregiver than any other group.
(20:36):
Family relationships can affect stress levels, too.
Diane Mariani overseas the Caring for Caregivers program at
Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.
Sometimes there's a large familybut nobody else is asking what
can I do or providing support. There's a lot of excuses.
Adding to feelings of isolation and overload.
(20:57):
It's fascinating. It is fascinating, Morgan.
We don't get enough opportunities to hear in any
regard, black men caring for each other there.
I was just like, wow, I don't even know if I've ever seen a
story like this, maybe on a television show, on a movie, on
anything. Like, I just don't even think
it's a it's a character out there.
So I'm just wanted to make spacefor that. 45% of in home
(21:22):
caregivers are black people. There has become a huge industry
of especially men coming from the continent.
Paris has several friends. My man has several friends who
are from Cameroon and who are caregiving.
Actually. I love always thinking about
them. He has this one friend who's
like super tall, super strong and I'm just like, man, you must
be the very best caregiver out there.
(21:43):
And I just love thinking about that.
And there is a huge, I want to put this out there as a business
opportunity for people. My cousin Shante has been
researching this a lot in Seattle.
There is a huge need for in homecare facilities.
There is a huge need for Black people to start to create our
own in home care facilities. And so it might actually be that
(22:06):
you feel like I have a gift and a skill around this.
And you can look in your state at how to buy a building, rent a
building, turn your own home into a care facility place.
And if you are listening and youare out there and you know right
now of any Black-owned Black runcare facilities and you want to
shout them out, please go to myselfcareschool.com, access the
(22:27):
classroom, Scroll down to the bottom, leave a message, let us
know what are the resources out there right now so that we can
use this platform, platform especially in this week or
before we close out self-care schools so that we can uplift
some of the people who are out there doing that work.
Vanessa, I have another, I have another call to action for my
(22:47):
selfcareschool.com and leaving audio messages.
You know, we prepare for these in advance and we start thinking
about what we want to share withyou, doing all of our research.
And I was like, I don't know if we can do a whole care week
without talking about black parenting.
And I was just like, but I'm nota parent and Vanessa's not a
(23:08):
parent. And we might even need some
help. And I was like, we can read all
the statistics and everything, but we might just need some
practical advice. And so I am pleading with you
out there and I will need you todo this in the next 24 hours.
So don't let your your nervousness stop you right after
this episode. If you have some wisdom to share
(23:29):
around what you have learned, mistakes you have made, what you
would tell your earlier self as a parent.
If you are a brand new parent and you made a you had a
breakthrough or a victory yesterday, you got your baby to
start breastfeeding. Like whatever it is, nothing too
small, nothing too big. I just want to run through some
practical advice, you know, by the mothers, for the mothers
(23:51):
around good healthy parenting because everything all the
science points to like you can extend life expectancy like
right from the womb if you are doing great parenting.
And we talked about the adverse childhood experiences, we want
to stop those. We want to lower that number for
our children. So all of that to say, if you
(24:12):
got 1 tidbit of advice that you would give to your younger
parenting self or one breakthrough that you've had in
the last year or two in parenting or one aha, or just a
prayer for parents or anything, 60 seconds or anything, we want
to fill the show with your voices on Friday, which means
please, please do it today so wecan sort through them and get
ready for Friday. So that's just my plug.
(24:33):
Thank you so much, Fee. And actually, I have a section
in here in this actual episode, so I'm going to move to it right
now where I was thinking about this week.
And I was like, we define caregiving mostly as like caring
for our elders or caring for people who have disabilities.
But I did actually want to even name and mention in this episode
(24:54):
that there are so many parents out there right now who are
caring for children with disabilities or chronic
illnesses, and you are a 24/7 care coordinator, nurse
advocate, and therapist right now for your child.
I'm talking about children who have autism, Down syndrome,
ADHD, type 2 diabetes, epilepsy,sickle cell, severe asthma.
(25:17):
There are so many parents out there right now.
And Morgan, I wanted to offer some quick advice for those
parents around navigating the school systems and recommending
that anyone out there who is parenting a child with special
needs needs to understand in their state what an IEP is.
(25:38):
That is an Individualized Education Program.
It is a legal document developedfor K through 12 students in
public schools who need special education.
It outlines the students learning goals, the services,
the accommodations, and how progress will be tracked.
And students who have learning disabilities qualify.
(25:59):
That includes speech and language impairments.
That includes dyslexia. And students whose disabilities
impact their ability to just succeed in general in the
classroom qualify. The way that you can get help
with an IEP is to start with a written request or evaluation.
So submit a formal request in writing to your child's school
principal or special education coordinator asking for an
(26:20):
evaluation for special educationservices.
Another resource that I want to offer for the caregivers who are
out there right now who are caring for loved ones who have
mental health or addiction challenges, because that's a
whole other level of caregiving where you have to navigate
behavioral health systems, psychiatric care or rehab
centers. And I want to offer for anybody
(26:43):
out there who doesn't know NAMI,nami.org, NAMI is they have
family support, they have mentalhealth support.
They have specific support for Black family caregivers, for
siblings, aunties, all sorts of things who are out there, crisis
hotlines. They have hospital contacts,
they help with emergency plan, they have mental health training
(27:04):
that you can actually receive. So I would highly recommend for
folks who are caregiving out there, for folks who have mental
health or addiction challenges that you can start at nami.org
to find more resources out therefor yourself.
So I want to put that out there and then Morgan, I want to close
by sharing some resources, some more general resources for
(27:26):
everyone who's out there. We talked a bit about the
abilities or the need in our communities to create care
facilities for folks. But right now there are so many
people who are caregiving in their homes and are not
accessing the current resources that you could use.
Even when I was in high school, me and Rhonda and we were caring
for our great grandmother because she was elderly and
(27:48):
because she was on Medicaid, we qualified for to be designated
as her paid caregiver. And I think we got like $275
each a month or something, but it was like real money.
And my aunt gave us the money because we were really caring
for her. We were able to use it for
school clothes and all sorts of things.
And so if you, you can go to theMedicaid site and if you put in
(28:10):
your state plus Medicaid waiver for family caregivers, look for
a Medicaid waiver for family caregivers.
That's the first place to start.And then on that site you should
be able to find consumer directed services which lets
your loved ones designate you astheir paid caregiver.
So Medicaid sets aside money so that your family members can
(28:32):
access those facilities, etcetera, but they could just
designate you as their paid caregiver and then you can
receive the money for caring forthem.
And so every single person out there who has the ability to
qualify for this, you need to access this family caregivers
Medicaid waiver so that you can start getting compensated and
(28:54):
start getting financial support for the work that you're doing.
I pray to God, y'all, that you are now returning back after
this walk. I hope you've gotten in a
beautiful 30 minutes. I hope your body feels good.
I hope you've released some of the guilt.
I hope you've expanded your own mindset around what's possible
in terms of caregiving. I hope that you, every single
person here, because every single one of us, Morgan knows
(29:15):
somebody who is caregiving, right?
Every single one of us let us know somebody who we can call up
today and be like, did you know that?
Are you claiming all your expenses on your taxes?
Like just imagine that level of help to somebody just to be
like, are you claiming because you can do this or have you
checked with your state or is your loved 1A veteran?
So think about a person in our life.
This is one of the things I saw out there about caregiving
(29:36):
Morgan, where a woman was sayingthat people aren't calling and
reaching out because they feel like they're being a burden.
But she was like, I don't have the time or the energy to reach
out, and I need people to reach out to me.
And so that's something that I will say and invite everyone to
just think about the fact that if somebody is a caregiver, that
they often don't have the time, the capacity, the mental space,
(29:57):
the language to know how to ask for help.
And that's where we can be the agents of change and we can push
in support and we can push in help for people.
I'm going to close Morgan with aclassic gospel song, and I'm
actually going to close with a version sang by the Kojic
International Mass Choir for singing.
He'll bring you out and so I will just let everybody just
(30:20):
closeout to these words and let them wash over you.
(30:47):
Somebody told me, somebody told me.
(31:46):
I know, I know. Hey, hey, hey, hey.
Somebody told me. I will send that.
Somebody told me. Whenever you get in trouble,
give me the help. When you get a little lonely.
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