The Weak Helping the Weak

What happens when crisis demands a strength you aren’t sure you possess.

Sometimes it’s easy to let days, weeks, or even months pass before I address my mental health. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about depression sinking its claws into my brain again. This time, it was a slow, gradual thing. Perhaps each episode is just that—slow and gradual so that it settles over you before you even realize it...

This time, though, it felt different. Somehow…less. While I have been plagued nearly all of 2026 with a weariness deep in my bones, the depression that used to be my closest friend didn’t show up the way I remembered from previous encounters. It had less power over me this time. That’s really the only way I can describe it.

I never see it until I begin to feel better. I’m currently writing this while rain pelts the back deck and thunder peels loudly outside. An early morning thunderstorm that I can feel aching in my joints also brings me joy this morning. It is only day three of feeling like the fog is finally starting to lift, and I’ve only been on Paxil for one week. They say it can take a few weeks to begin to feel the medication work.

One week. That’s all it has taken. I know it is working because it isn’t quite 6 AM yet, and here I am wide awake and ready to take on the day. Saturday and Sunday both found me awake and able to get up out of bed without a lot of negotiating with myself. Now it’s Monday morning as I write this, and while my body aches from the usual chronic pain, my brain feels alive again.

Yesterday, with a little help from my friend Bre, we finally fully cleaned the kitchen. Once the kids moved out last weekend, I began trying to get the house back to how it was when we first moved in back in 2022. When we first moved to what we lovingly call our miracle home (or sometimes our vacation or dream home), we only moved with the youngest of our four kids, who was finished their last year and a half of high school. Kris, Vi, and I quickly found a routine that worked for us, and for the first time in my adult life, I found it easy to take care of my home. Having a larger space, with drawers and cabinets for everything, certainly made organization a breeze. Over time, and with the addition of one of our bonus kids to the home, habits began to slip. As more messes were made around the house, and some of those were not cleaned up with the same attention to detail that had kept the home free of clutter, things began to feel unmanageable.

I would clean my kitchen, only to have teenagers cooking in it at 10 PM. Sometimes dishes were rinsed, but more often than not, food was left out, dirty pans littered the stove, dishes were piled in the sink (a HUGE pet peeve) and messes were just congealed to the counter as if it were some kind of art project on display. I don’t say this to shame the teenagers. It’s not solely their fault. I didn’t step in from the start and lay a chore chart at their feet, so I certainly didn’t put any boundaries in place. I’m not great with confrontation, so I let things go when I shouldn’t have. I kept silent, at the cost of my mental health. When I had the energy, I just dealt with the mess.

The problem was that I often didn’t have the energy to actual deal. In fact, someone else’s mess is often debilitating to me if we are in a shared living space. It’s hard enough for me to keep up with my own mess and clean as I go. When you share that space with three or five other people on a regular basis, unless everyone is in agreement and working with the same end goal, a home can quickly become a disaster zone. When you add fluctuating mental health among those teenagers and myself into the mix, I simply didn’t have the heart to lay down the law or demand that the others in my home live up to my standards—which, trust me, are far from perfect. I’ve become very comfortable with good enough. But more often than not, I allowed someone else’s mental health to take the front seat while I sat in the back, wrestling with my own brain for control.

And then, into that existing survival mode, cancer entered our lives.

Laundry that had been done weekly and had never been a problem in our new home—main-level laundry for the win!—suddenly began to pile up. Taking out the trash every week and remembering to put the bins out for pickup became my job. The dishes, which were predominantly left to me, piled up like they did when I was at the old house. Cooking when the kitchen is a mess simply doesn’t happen, so we ate out a lot. Sometimes I could only muster the energy to get myself cheese and crackers for lunch or nothing if I didn’t feel like going out to get fast food. In that season of constant trips to the ER, hospital admissions, and multiple surgeries, I became a caregiver—a role I quite honestly never wanted.

Some people are born caregivers.

Me?

To borrow from Weird Al Yankovic, I would rather:

rip my heart right out of my ribcage
with my bare hands
and then throw it on the floor
and stomp on it ‘till I die

...than be a caregiver.

Ever.

And I know for someone who has four children it can sound like a crazy thing to say that caregiving is not my strong suit. I can nurture with the best of them. I can even cuddle with a sick kid, stroke their hair, and tend to their needs. But God forbid my husband have a cold. You would think a man was dying by the way a simple cold would make me believe my world was ending. I can’t even recount the amount of times I said to Kris over the years, “I wish you would just go to your mom’s until you’re better.”

Heartless, right? What kind of wife tells her husband to go to his mom’s until he’s not sick anymore? For so long, I couldn’t understood why it bothered me so much when Kris got sick. It wasn’t about not liking him being sick, not that I enjoyed it. It was for the betterment of our marriage that I urged him to go to his mom’s and let her take care of him. It felt like a mother’s job, and I already had four kids to mother.

If you’ve been married to a man, been around one, or just been alive at all ever, I believe you understand the “man cold.” I could go into detail about what it is like to live with a man who has a cold, but I fear that if I did, I would offend men everywhere, and I’m not trying to do that. It’s really not fair to them, you know? The way we give them such a hard time for having a cold.

Perhaps it’s because women don’t always get to take a break when they are bleeding for days with debilitating cramps that don’t relent, but the minute a man gets a sniffle, he somehow seems to be on the brink of death with that first cough with the long groan at the end. C’mon ladies—you know what I’m talking about. We give them a hard time, but they really can’t know what it is like to live in a woman’s body. And so I imagine a cold would feel quite grave-like. So I am sorry, men. We come by our annoyance honestly. We know what it is like to have to go to school or work feeling like razor blades are slicing through your abdomen and back (and sometimes our nether regions—yes I said it) and so it’s a tad irritating that a simple cold can take you out so vigorously.

But it goes deeper than that—my inability to deal with sick adults. It never bothered me when my kids were sick. Vomiting bothered me; it froze me right in my tracks. But it never felt like a burden when my kids were sick like it does with my husband. Mothers have a certain degree of caretaker built into them. For me, I had just enough built into me that I could care for my kids when they were sick without feeling like it was an act of agression towards me. Do you know what I mean? When Kris would get sick, there was this intense anger that would rise up within me—a frustration I couldn’t explain. Though I finally know what it stems from, I am still not sure I can adequately explain it.

So naturally, when Kris was diagnosed with cancer in 2024, I was terrified. I couldn’t even handle the man having a cold without telling him heartlessly to go to his mom’s. It didn’t come from a hateful place; it came from a place of true terror. I knew I was a horrible caretaker. I’m impatient, sarcastic, and some days it’s all I can do to hold my own failing spine up. We joked about it often before Multiple Myeloma made its home in his bones and blood. Being thrust into a lengthy battle with something that has no cure and doesn’t even go into remission—they call it a complete response instead, which means the cancer is just hiding quietly in his body until it decides to come out to play again—felt like my world really was ending. And I wasn’t even the one with the cancer!

See how I manage to make everything about me?

That has been the personal struggle for me here: taking the back seat and letting my husband be the one who is tended to. For so much of our marriage, everything revolved around me in the most narcissistic ways. I understand now that I did this because of my trauma, not because I am a clinical narcissist. Believe me—I have spent a lot of time researching and trying to understand if I am a narcissistic. Fro so long, I—unknowingly at the time—made everything all about me and demanding others tiptoe around my emotions. Also, I began to change. I was capable of seeing my self-centered behavior and how it was impacting those around me, and I said, “No.”

I wasn’t able to do it in time to give my kids an emotionally healthy childhood. They have very real wounds they now have to heal from. I was late in healing, and they are paying the price as they fly off into adulthood. It breaks my heart, but it will not break my spirit. That’s one thing the Enemy will not get. He will not have the pleasure of watching me sit idly by and justify the mother I was, or worse, see me pretend that I didn’t inflict damage on my kids. Me, in my pride and selfishness, with my unhealed wounds, heaped pain on my children.

My husband, too, bore the brunt of my fury and blustering. I was like the storm raging outside right now. Loud. Booming. Scary. Some days, I was quiet, but not the kind of quiet that comes as a storm finally settles and rolls on down the road. It was the eye-of-the-hurricane kind of quiet. The fury that builds inside of a tornado. The calm before the storm. It was that kind of quiet.

I held tightly to sanity and I remembered that these babies were gifts from God and I needed to steward that gift well, but underneath it, I was just waiting for the storm wall to tower over me.

It was a shaky kind of waiting, and I was scared all the time. Of everything. Most of all, I was scared of passing down trauma to them. The very thing I didn’t want to do, I did in spades. My entire family suffered because I kept falling into the same trap.

“For I do not do the good I want to do. Instead, I keep doing the evil I do not want to do.” Romans 7:19

That’s the funny thing about life and cancer. You don’t know what you have in you until you are forced into a situation you would rather not be in. Thrust into the role of caregiver as my husband battled not just cancer but five back fractures put me in a place where it literally could not be about me. I am grateful that God had already begun to work on my heart in this area before Kris’ diagnosis.

I had to face my very real, unrelenting fear that my husband would die. I’ll write about this in more detail down the road, but it is safe to say that throughout our marriage I have lived in constant fear that Kris would die and leave me to raise four children on my own. I actually feared Kris would die from the moment I married him. All I ever wanted in life was to be a wife and a mother, and once I achieved the first, I spent all my time ruminating about Kris dying. I wasn’t trying to speak it into existence, and I certainly wasn’t going to do anything to manufacture it, but it is safe to say that it consumed a large part of my thinking. And it was not healthy.

I just found something I wrote twelve days into the cancer journey. It speaks to how far I have come with that fear of Kris dying, and how I have been able to put myself aside while also struggling with that very thing. I hope you don’t mind if I share it here:

August 12, 2024

Because I’ve been walking this healing journey for a bit now, I wasn’t surprised when I started feeling unsafe throughout this last week and a half. Feeling safe, when I have spent much of my life living in fear of everything, well, it’s a big deal. It keeps me balanced and helps me regulate my emotions. So to be facing a situation that is absolutely scary and unsafe leaves me feeling fearful.

But I’m not afraid of Kris dying. To live is Christ. To die is gain. As long as he is granted more time here, we will love each other and we will serve the Lord. But if he dies (and there’s no evidence he will from this), I know he is going home, to a place I am also very eager for.

And while I don’t look forward to the bad side of cancer (the pain, the sickness, the exhaustion, etc...), I’m not afraid of that either. I’m not afraid of what will be needed of me, in terms of doing the majority of driving now, which is its own source of anxiety for me. I’m not afraid of our marriage suffering as we battle this. We have been through worse, and we will be strengthened and grow through this as well.

You know what I’m afraid of? I’m afraid I won’t be good enough. Yet again, it all comes back to this, the common theme of my life. I’m simply worried that I haven’t grown ENOUGH to walk this road with grace and humility, even though I can recognize that I am handling this far better than anyone could have imagined, especially if you have ever seen me on prior occasions when Kris has been sick. My reaction to this is different, because I am, in fact, different. I am not the same woman who left her husband at the hospital in 2021, telling God I wasn’t ready to bury him. Even though I know I have changed for the better, there’s a fear that I will NEVER be good enough, that I will never grow enough to walk through this well, in a way that my husband feels loved and safe and secure. He has given me those things, and what I can offer to him in return feels beyond insignificant. I told my therapist I felt like I could never even come close to supporting Kris the way he has supported me. I don’t see myself the way I see him and so where it looks like he has sacrificed for me over and over and over again, it feels like what I am doing is just trying to get by, to survive this. I also can recognize this as a place in my heart that needs healing, so I’m not claiming that as truth, but it was truthfully where I was in that moment.

In the quiet moments alone at home or in the car, the lies come and try to suffocate me. And I have to claw with all my might to hold onto the truths I have learned about myself through therapy. I have been preparing for this exact type of situation for two years, learning to hold on less tightly to my husband. Growing and changing, getting healthier emotionally. I’ve been accepting and then learning to believe that if my worst case scenario happens, and I lose my best friend, my human safe haven, I WILL BE OKAY. There is a great assurance in this and in those moments where the enemy tries to whisper those lies, I am now healthy enough that I can refute the lies and remind myself of the truth that God has given me everything I need to face this. And in the harder moments when it has felt impossible to declare the truth, God has not failed to prompt someone to text, call, or reach out to me in some way to remind me. He has never failed before, and he won’t stop now. This is why it is so important to surround yourself with a faith community. Because they can lift you up and intercede for you when all you can do is take the next breath.

In the weaker moments, when I really dig deep and try to see what’s really going on inside me, it’s this: I don’t trust myself. When I boil it all down, as a caretaker, I’m afraid that I will not do it well. Or that even if I do it well, I won’t do it well ENOUGH. It’s a recurring theme and one that I know God wants to stretch me in. So know that while it’s going to sound bleak as I’m sharing my heart, I also want to say that I’m clinging to the truth I know and the hope I have in Jesus.

When my focus is in the wrong place (usually on myself) I find myself worrying that I will make Kris’ life HARDER, instead of supporting him. I’m afraid of, well, exactly what happened last night. That we will have a conflict and I will panic or raise my voice or snap at Kris or make it about me while trying desperately not to make it about me (or all of the above) and then I am the awful woman who lost it with her husband who is in pain and has cancer. For someone who talks about grace so much, I sure have a hard time giving it to myself in moments like this.

Last night was really hard. It was the hardest night we’ve had so far since this started. There is a lot more heavy lifting involved for me now, on a physical level. I’m not talking about rolling Kris over or lifting him. When I say heavy lifting, I am referring to the physical load I have now vs. the load I was carrying before. With bulging discs up and down my own spine, some days are better than others. But yesterday, the pain was flaring up, likely from rain coming in and too many long hours at the hospital, forgetting to drink water or move around.

Perhaps attempting to shower at home last night was a little too advanced for where we are right now, but Kris wanted to try so I was going to make it happen. It was literally 30 minutes of prep time and we were both exhausted before we even turned the shower on. I think Kris and I are both in agreement we will not be doing that again any time soon! It was a lot. On both of us. Physically and emotionally, for independent reasons.

It wasn’t really surprising that there were meltdowns last night (for both of us). My low back has been trying to officially go out for about 3 months, and now there are certain things I need to do to help that are taxing. I’m doing the best I can, but it’s a lot to juggle my own pain with the need to care for Kris in his, with the helplessness I feel when Kris is in pain and there’s nothing I can do, with trying to rest and take care of myself so I can then be available for what Kris needs, while also trying to figure out when I’ll go back to work, as I am not currently getting paid, as I ran out of PTO by day 2. All of the conditions were right for a storm.

Getting Kris’ brace off and on isn’t an easy task. It’s not something he can just sit up and do, because without the brace, he’s not supposed to be above 30 degrees. So, to put the brace on requires rolling both ways for Kris, which causes him a lot of pain, and it requires some waiting, standing, bending and pulling on my part, which causes me pain. It’s the blind leading the blind over here, or perhaps more aptly, the weak helping the weak, and the stress of all of it spilled over last night.

Though, now that I think about that, the weak leading the weak, maybe there’s a lesson in that. Maybe it’s a picture God wanted me to see. That it’s okay that I’m weak. God uses the weak to help the weak, doesn’t he? So I suppose beating myself up and worrying about if I am going to be good enough to support Kris through this is irrelevant (though the enemy sure wants me to believe it matters). I suppose that God can not only use my weakness, he can also give me the strength (and he HAS) to do these physically demanding things and will continue to do so.

Wow. Reading that again nearly two years later and reflecting on just how far God has brought me leads me right back into a posture of gratitude for all God has done. For how He found a broken woman, caught in adultery, with narcissitic tendencies and he pulled her close. He went so very, very low to find me. To hold me. To lift my tear-stained face to meet His gaze, just so that I could see the love in His eyes. So I would know that I mattered. That He saw…me.

I stand in awe of You, God.

Jamie

Let’s Stay Connected

If this spoke to your heart, there are a few quick ways you can support my ministry:

• Subscribe: Hit the subscribe button here on Substack so you never miss a post or podcast episode. It is always free to subscribe. If you want to support my ministry with a financial donation, you are welcome to do that as well.

• Follow along: You can find me on Instagram @theweightofstillness for daily encouragement, behind-the-scenes thoughts, and community.

• Share the hope: If this message touched your heart, please share it with someone who needs it. You never know who in your life is waiting to hear that they are loved, valued, and worthy of grace.

The Weight of Stillness is a reader-supported ministry.
There will never be a paywall blocking you from full
access to what God is teaching me as I embrace
stillness. But if you are led to donate to this ministry
God is birthing out of my journey, you can become a
paid subscriber.