It started with a phone call.
My mom had a ruptured colon. Emergency surgery. Sepsis. A colostomy bag. The kind of call that divides your life into before and after.
At the time, I was living in California with my husband, AJ, our dogs, and the life we had carefully built. But suddenly none of it felt stable anymore. I spent the next four months helping my mom survive surgeries, rehab, fear, and recovery, while trying to hold together a life that was unraveling from 3,000 miles away.
Then came another impossible decision.
When my mom got sick, we knew one thing immediately: we couldn't stay 3,000 miles away. So I found a job in Charlotte, North Carolina, a way to get to the East Coast and build a better future at the same time. But nothing about the timing was clean.
My mom didn't want to move to Charlotte, and we didn't want to go back to Delaware. So she moved into an independent living facility near her sister, a place where she'd have community and support close by. It felt like the right call. It also felt like we were all just doing the best we could with impossible options.
"The move was rushed because they told me if I didn't start by the 25th, they would move on to the other candidate."
So we moved fast. We lived in hotels waiting to close on our house. My son Steven stayed behind in California. He was 21, enrolled in college, and not ready to leave the life he'd built there. I started a brand-new job while carrying the emotional weight of a family spread across three states, and the quiet, constant guilt of not being in any of those places enough.
And just when life began to settle…
My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer.
So every week, I drove nine hours each way between Charlotte and Delaware. Monday through Friday, I was with her through chemotherapy, surgeries, appointments, radiation, medications, fear, and side effects. Then I drove back to Charlotte for the weekends to be with AJ and the dogs, before doing it all over again.
Week after week. Month after month.
People would say, "I don't know how you do it."
The truth? You don't know how.
You just keep moving because someone you love needs you.
By 2022, her COPD had progressed so severely that living alone was no longer safe. So I brought her to Charlotte to live with us.
And caregiving became no longer something I traveled to do.
It became every day.
The oxygen machines. The medications. The monitoring. The hospital visits.
The constant balancing act between work, marriage, exhaustion, fear, responsibility, and love.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I realized something nobody tells caregivers:
There is no handbook for becoming
the person everyone depends on.
No one teaches you how to make medical decisions while sleep deprived. How to advocate with doctors when you're terrified. How to sit in hospital rooms while answering work emails. How to smile at people while quietly falling apart.
That's why I created The Messy Middle.
Not because I have all the answers. But because I know what it feels like to be standing in the hospital hallway, wanting desperately to walk into your loved one's room, while three doctors are talking at you instead of to you.
"I know what it feels like to carry everyone else while wondering who carries you."
And if you're here reading this, maybe you know that feeling too.
— Michele Starling, Caregiver Advocate