Career vs Caregiving — A Life Choice

A dear friend called me last night to share how dramatically his mother’s condition had changed over the past month. She had begun forgetting many things that were once familiar to her, and as he described her symptoms, my mind immediately went to dementia.

I could hear the anxiety in his voice. More than once during our conversation, he had to pause and attend to her. Amid all this, he had made a life-altering decision — to walk away from a lucrative role with a global company. Given the seniority of his position, working from home wasn’t an option. But for him, being with his mother mattered far more than the career he was stepping away from.

As I listened to him, I found myself revisiting a decision I had made ten years ago.

At the time, my company wanted me to relocate to Mumbai. Just as the transfer was being finalized, my mother went through a similar health crisis. While we were trying to understand what was happening and find the right treatment, one thing became abundantly clear — I needed to stay.

Stepping away from that opportunity wasn’t an easy decision especially since my daughter was still in university overseas. Knowing that I had my wife’s complete backing and emotional support and my daughter stepping up to becoming financially responsible and independent gave me the courage to take the decision. Looking back today, I know it was one of the best decisions I have ever made in life.

There’s no universal answer to this tension between career and caregiving. But sitting with my friend’s story last night, I understood something about my own choice that I hadn’t fully named before.

Career and caregiving aren’t just competing for time — they’re competing for identity, for security, for a sense of who you are. What made my decision easier, in hindsight, is that elder care has a feature that career decisions don’t: it’s finite, and it’s unpredictable. I didn’t know if I had two years with my mother in that state, or ten. The job, on the other hand, could wait, or be rebuilt in some other form. I told myself that at the time, and I still believe it, though I know it isn’t true in every field.”

I also remember thinking hard about what “being available” meant because it wasn’t obvious at first. It didn’t have to mean quitting outright — for some people it means flexible hours, hiring help, moving closer, splitting duties with siblings. For me, given how things stood, it meant staying rather than relocating. I had to get specific about what my mother actually needed before I could decide what I was willing to give up.

There was also the question of what the decision would cost me if I got it wrong — not just professionally, but in my own capacity to keep showing up. Burning out doesn’t make you more available to the people who need you; it can make you less able to help them, and less able to hold yourself together afterward. I didn’t fully understand that risk until I was living inside it.

And underneath all of it was a quieter question: what kind of person I wanted to be. Some people build their sense of self mostly through work. Till that point in life, I had done exactly that. Others build it through presence, through relationships, through being there. I’ve come to believe neither is wrong — but pretending to be the other type, when push comes to shove, usually backfires.

One of the strongest factors behind a decision like this is the people around you — your spouse and children who can absorb what you step back from. The other is simply your own sense of what matters more. Sometimes those two things blur together, as they did for me, and as I suspect they are blurring for my friend right now.

In my own case, the care we provided enabled my mother to improve over time, and I feel blessed for having made that choice. I am certain my friend will feel the same, in time.

That decision changed the shape of my life in a way I didn’t expect. In the years that followed, I found myself surrounded by others who had faced the same fork in the road — people who had stepped back from demanding careers to care for a parent, and who understood, in a way few others could, what that trade-off actually costs and what it gives back. Out of those conversations, and that shared understanding, Vasutti was born. Most of the practitioners who’ve joined me have lived through some version of this same choice, and in making it, they’ve found a way to support what I still believe is life’s biggest blessing — one’s parents.