Things We Aren’t Supposed to Talk About: Being a Caregiver

Cadre. Hello. It is Shannon from Cadre. Happy. Oh, my gosh, you guys. Is it Thursday? I think it's Thursday. Happy Thursday. I am walking and talking today as I show up here today on Caregiver day, on Cadre. Today, for those of you, if it's your first time here, today is the day we devote to people who take care of people. In my case, that is a child. I have a son. I have two boys, but I have a son, Wyatt, who is almost 15 years old, and I'm his caregiver. He has autism, and I am responsible for his wellbeing as a mom, as an advocate, as all the things.

And I am also. I'm gonna sit down here on the edge of the curb so that I'm not so bumpy. I also am a caregiver to my other son, who is neurotypical. He is 16 and a half, and he is. He's my typical son. I take care of him. I am also. For those of you who don't know me, I am not a clinician. I am not a mental health professional. I am a human with lived experience. And so for those of you who have been on Cadre before, you know that that's also what we do. Right? We're here to show up for each other as people who have lived through things and know what it means to be caregivers.

So, today, I am here to talk about an event that Cadre actually put on on Monday. So, again, if you're new to the app or if you don't know what we do in the fullest sense of the word, Cadre is here to really create a community. We call it the Cadre sphere because it is humans who are all living through stuff together. Right. So we are different because we're not asking anyone to do this thing alone. Cause it's too hard. Jules, happy afternoon. Thank you for joining me. I switched times today, so thanks for your patience.

But what we do in community is learn from each other. And so, Cadre, on Monday, we had a live event here in Minneapolis. That's where we're headquartered. We brought together all different leaders in the DEI space, people who are doing research on generations and how they interact with each other. And we also brought together people who have lived experiences as neurodiverse people in the workforce. We had a founder of a company called Joshin. J o s h I n. If you want to google it, Melanie Fountain came and spoke to us, and we had a person, a friend, Grant.

Grant Harris, who is a Dei expert, a human who is neurodiverse himself. He has an autism diagnosis, and he goes around the world talking to companies about inclusion. So caregiver day, I'm a caregiver, and I have a son with autism. He's 15. He soon will be in the world. And so I put that lens on as a mom of helping him access things that might be hard for him to access. But as I sat in the room on Monday, I also had my hat on as a leader who leads teams. And it's interesting to bring that caregiver lens and juxtapose it to your leader lens, right?

And I think a lot of us are, I'm gonna say, guilty of this. Not in a way to shame, but in a way that I think many of us mask a little at work. And as you're watching today, if that resonates with you, if you feel like, yep, I've done that before, like, yep, I've shown up as my work self, and then I'm also going to show up as my real self. I'll say in quotes, I think on Monday, what was juxtaposed for me was those two versions of myself. There's the leader version of myself who wants to create a safe workspace for people where all differences are recognized and honored.

And then there's the mom part of me, the caregiver part of me that is, like, I want my kid to be safe and loved and not have hard things happen to him. And so as I sat in that audience Monday and thought about the juxtaposition or sort of the intersection of those two parts, it was soon super fascinating. And I'll tell you what I learned. I learned that as a caregiver, I have every ounce of patience and advocacy, and I'm gonna fight tooth and nail for my person that I love, and I'm gonna sit in meetings, and I'm gonna advocate on their behalf, and I'm going to fight systems, and I'm gonna do every single thing, and I'll do it till, you know, the end of the day, because it's this person that I love, and I'm fighting to get them access.

And then I learned, to my embarrassment slash disappointment, maybe is the right word, that as a leader, while I want my people to feel safe and I'm being really vulnerable here, which honestly makes me uncomfortable because I felt it in my bones, and also, I don't love that I felt it in my bones was there's this part of me that always still wants to win in business. There's this part of me that, yes, I absolutely want to create a safe environment for people at work of all kinds, for neurodivergent people and people who show up in the world in different ways.

And there's that, like, type a side of me who's like, I don't want to slow down, I don't want to have to do things differently. I don't want to do xxx and I think as I came to notice that, it made me, it made me, I don't want to say embarrassed for myself, but I was like, wow, I need to do this differently. And actually it reminded me on Monday, as I sat in that chair with all these leaders, fighting for people like my son, honestly, I was reminded of a time when I was at Panera recently, and I took my son, my other son, to get his driver's license.

We're out of Panera, and I was tired because we got up really early and we got up to the counter and we ordered our food, and the worker was slow, too slow for me, the impatient version of me. And I remember being like, just get me the drink. Like, can you hand me the drink? Pass me the drink. And after a minute I realized, oh, I believe this person is neurodiverse. And in that recognition, I was ashamed of myself because I was like, that could be my kid, right? That could be my son working at Panera in a couple years, standing behind that counter.

And someone could be impatient with him for taking too long to get his drink. So today, I have no answers about that. But what I do have, which is good, I guess, because Cadre exists to create moments of realization, to inspire.