Caregiving, Crisis & Chaos: How My Neurosparkle Wiring Forged Our Marriage Stronger (And Why Yours Doesn’t Have to Break)

💔 Caregiving Didn’t Break Us—But It Could Have

In this series, I aim to help cognitively complicated caregivers make sense of the invisible labor no one talks about—especially when the caregiver is neurodivergent and the aging parent becomes cognitively complicated due to dementia.

The caregiver gets the kudos..but who cares for the caregiver? Who cares for the partner who cares for the caregiver?

📊 The Reality We Don’t Talk About

A CBS/Caring.com study found:

• 46% of baby boomers caring for aging parents said caregiving damaged their romantic relationship.

• 1 in 4 divorced boomers reported that caregiving played a major role in their divorce.

Meanwhile:

• An estimated 60% of ADHD-impacted couples experience chronic marital dissatisfaction (conflict, dissatisfaction) with 12% of non-ADHD partners pursuing separation.

Let that sink in.

Caregiving is hard. Mixed cognition marriage is hard.

Being married to someone who is cognitively complicated and currently caring for a parent who is cognitively complicated? That adds a whole new layer of chaos, crisis, and communication challenges.

Here’s How We Thrived Through What Most People Can’t Even Imagine Surviving

1. We knew that caregiving was coming “one day” so we built our life around it from Day One.

When my father was diagnosed 16 years ago, I made a vow: Help my parents stay independent for as long as humanly possible and then care for them full time when they could no longer remain independent.

Greg and I met shortly after that moment. And instead of pretending life would stay simple, we designed everything around the truth:

Caregiving was inevitable.

So we crafted systems and engineered flexibility that could absorb crisis without collapsing our marriage or our business.

And still, it was hard AF.

I honestly don’t know how couples with “normal” jobs do this. I don’t know how caregivers who don’t have supportive spouses do this. Frankly, I’m still not sure how I did this.

Because caregiving isn’t a side gig. It’s not a task list.

It’s a total nervous system commitment and if you don’t have shared language and structure, your relationship becomes the collateral damage.

2. We didn’t wait until crisis showed up to talk about what caregiving would require.

We didn’t start planning when the stroke happened two years ago. We started long before—because we knew it was coming.

We built a life around caregiving before it arrived. That preparation didn’t make it easy. But it did make us ready when the hard conversations had to happen.

Our shared agreement was simple but sacred:

We would help my parents but not at the cost of our marriage, our health, our business, or our own home.

My parents vowed to make caregiving easier for us, not harder. They promised we wouldn’t have to sacrifice our future to protect theirs.

That promise was easier to make back when we thought caregiving would come in slowly like a tide that eventually erodes the dunes. Instead, it came like a tsunami that flattened everything in its path and threatened to drown us all.

One phone call:

A stroke. A fall. Three broken ribs. And nothing was ever the same after that.

My mom died unexpectedly just six months later. Three months after moving to my hometown so Greg and I could care for them.

The move was traumatic. But so was the version of caregiving we’d lived before that.

Years of 14-hour drives, coordinating care between hotel photography jobs, years of me rarely being home, trying to hold everything together across state lines and time zones. My only sister was caring for her husband as his 5 year battle with melanoma came to an end. Her only daughter was caring for a new baby after losing her first child and then her father and then her grandmother.

The only thing that made those impossible decisions bearable was this: We had set the boundary before we were forced to draw the line.

We had already said the hard things. So when the time came, the conversation didn’t break us.

It reminded us of what we’d already promised: We’d protect our marriage while we cared for my parents, not lose it to caring for them.

3. I Had the Neurosparkle Cognitive Wiring and the Frameworks to Understand Dementia in Ways Most NearlyNormies Don’t

I’m a Neurosparkler: hyperverbal, hypercognitive, hyperaware.
I think constantly about thinking differently.

My undergrad degree was in speech communications.
I completed most of a master’s in social work.
And I’ve had 40 jobs in 40 years—many of them in:

• Professional caregiving

• Financial planning

• Crisis response

• De-escalation and behavior management

Greg and I even built a business photographing senior living and residential treatment facilities. I took mental notes the whole time. My brain doesn’t miss things. It sees everything at once.

So when we finally learned my father didn’t have Alzheimer’s (read that story here), but instead vascular dementia caused by a stroke, it all began to make sense.

The area of the brain affected by his stroke? The same region that lights up differently in people with ADHD.

That’s when I started to see the overlap.

This wasn’t the kind of memory loss where things are gone.
This was the kind of loss where things are just out of reach—until someone cues them.
His dementia didn’t erase his stories.
It just scrambled the index of his echolalia

And I know the index of his mind by heart.

Thanks to my mother, who remembered everything, and to my brain, which remembers random details all at once, I can fill in the blanks now that she’s gone.

The bottom line: I didn’t try to “win” at caregiving. I tried to stay myself inside it.

I became:

• Nurse

• Power of Attorney

• Social worker

• Logistics manager

• Grief container

• Sometimes… punching bag

But I didn’t become someone else. I was still the wife, sister, aunt, business owner, and daughter that I have always been. I am still Auntie Paige.

I returned to rituals, language, and structure I had created long before the crisis came.

I clung to them. They held. And now I am sharing my perspective because not every family has an Auntie Paige.

💬 TL;DR

Caregiving didn’t break me.

It didn’t break my marriage.

It stretched us. It transformed us. It made us fall even deeper in love. Because we had already built what we would one day need to survive it.


Not in spite of the chaos, but because we chose each other in it…again and again. We saw what we were made of and we still wanted more of each other.

🧭 Final Word to the Cognitively Complicated Caregivers

I’m not here to romanticize caregiving. And I sure as hell won’t romanticize neurodivergence.

I’m here to say: You are not crazy. You are caregiving.

And there is a way through—if you don’t drown first.

Next week, I’ll share Part 2:

📬 What Happens When the Caregiver Is Neurodivergent and the Parent Has Dementia

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Because cognitively complicated couples need a shared language and this is where we start learning how to speak us fluently.