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Start here: the order to read this desk in when you are too tired to choose

Nineteen reads is too many for one night. This is the path, in the order the week tends to break, with a stopping point after every step.

You probably arrived here from a search you typed with the lights off. That is fine. You do not need to read everything, and you do not need to read it in one sitting. Each step below is one or two pages. Read a step, close the laptop, and come back tomorrow for the next one. The desk will still be here, and so will the plan.

The path

1. Name what is happening to the week.Start with burnout as arithmetic, because it gives the tiredness a cause that is not your character. If you left a job to do this, read I quit my job to take care of my mother next. Stop here if that is all you can manage tonight.
2. Count the hours honestly.How many hours a week is too many explains why there is no official line, and I am the only one taking care of Mom covers the sibling split that usually produced the solo week.
3. Book the first four hours.This is the step that changes something. Read how to get a break from caring for your mom, then how respite care works. If a year has gone by with no day off, the first day off is written for you.
4. Let a stranger in, carefully.How to hire someone so you can take a break is the sequence: write the block, call an agency, stay for visit one, leave for visit two. If the guilt stops you before the call, read guilt about hiring a caregiver first.
5. Say the feelings you are not supposed to have.Resentment and anger are on the lists the people who study caregivers keep. If the crying will not stop, go straight to I cry every day, and if you are thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 now, before any reading.
6. Find your room of people.Caregiver support groups in St. Louis lists the groups and the lines that answer late. I cannot do this anymore is for the night the sentence arrives.
7. Look at the money without flinching.Full time caregiver, no income walks through each door and the rule that decides whether it opens. Aging Ahead's caregiver program is the local door most daughters in the county should call first.
8. Write the second plan.What happens to Mom if I get sick is one sheet of paper that means you are allowed to catch the flu.
9. Plan your way back to a life.Going back to work is about covering the hours first and interviewing second. If her memory is part of why the hours keep growing, read when memory changes become more than forgetfulness.

If you only do one thing this week

Pick the size of a break on the break menu and make one call about it. The local help directory has the St. Louis numbers, each read on the program's own page. A call does not commit you to anything. It turns "someday" into a date.

What this desk will not do to you

It will not tell you to try a bubble bath. It will not diagnose you or your mother, and it will not guess at a price it cannot find published. It will not pretend that love should make 168 hours feel shorter. When something is clinical, it sends you to her doctor, her pharmacist or your own. How we write explains the rest.