From Son To Care Partner: A Journey Through Parkinson’s, Purpose, And Personal Healing

What happens when “showing up” stops being a slogan and becomes your daily life? We sit down with our friend Adrian to trace his path from long-distance helper to full-time care partner for his mother living with Parkinson’s—and the inner overhaul that followed. The journey begins with subtle signs many families recognize: canceled plans, quiet withdrawal, routines that don’t stick. What started as meal prep and check-ins quickly revealed a deeper need for trust, presence, and emotional steadiness.

Together we unpack the moment he chose to leave a career to be home, and why that decision felt less like duty and more like a calling. Adrian shares the assumptions that crumbled—like believing caregiving has a clear end date or that it’s mostly logistical. We talk about the emotional toll, the unpredictable nature of Parkinson’s, and the mirror care holds up to our own blind spots. Our host names the sting of compassion fatigue and the practices that build compassion resilience: seeking help, protecting rest, collaborating with professionals, nourishing the relationship, and planning ahead while staying flexible.

We also challenge gender stereotypes around who “should” care, and how family expectations can both help and harm. Adrian describes learning to set boundaries, invite his mom into community and therapy, and let go of work that isn’t his to carry. Faith shows up not as a platitude but as a daily reset—prayer, journaling, and quiet reflection that slow reactions and restore perspective. By the end, the takeaway is clear: responsibility can refine us if we commit to caring for ourselves while we care for others. If you’re navigating caregiver stress, Parkinson’s support, or the tension between love and limits, this conversation offers tools, honesty, and hope.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:52

Welcome to the Bro Talk Podcast, where we keep it real about life, love, leadership, and responsibility. I'm Jermaine Alberty, Hillen from Las Vegas, Nevada.

SPEAKER_04 1:01

And I'm Brian Williams, coming to you from H Town, Houston, Texas. We are two brothers, two cities, and one mission.

SPEAKER_02 1:08

We're real men having real talk and real transformation. And today's conversation is personal because it's rooted in history, relationship, and responsibility.

SPEAKER_04 1:20

What began as a friendship became kinship, brotherhood, a bond that has remained strong for nearly 35 years. And today, that brotherhood brings us into a conversation many men avoid, but many men live. And that's the topic of caregiving.

SPEAKER_02 1:37

Brian, me and you are both so excited to have a friend of ours, Adrian Smith, to join us for this episode of the Bro Talk. And so I'm going to start us off with our first question. And that is when we talk about real responsibility, we're talking about showing up when it's inconvenient. Adrian, tell us about how caregiving has entered your life.

Adrian’s Story Begins

SPEAKER_03 2:02

Thank you, Jermaine. Thank you, Brian. So caregiving started to enter my life when I was away. I'm from Kansas City. So I lived on the East Coast for a while. And probably about five years ago, I started to observe that my mother was limiting her activity. Okay. My mother was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2015. So she has lived with this well beyond 10 years. And I started noticing about five years ago her limiting her activities, going to church, meeting up with friends, and really withdrawing. And because I was away from her and not living in the home, I had to sort of start reflecting on should I be there? Should I administer care? Do I ask her the right questions? What is it that I need to ascertain to be able to figure out if she actually needs help? Okay. So when I'd visit on holidays, birthdays, visit in the summer, I would actually see visible signs that she wasn't doing well, right? And so in seeing it from with my own eyes, I thought, hey, there's got to be a way that I can help support her as she manages her Parkinson's, being away from her. And it was just so difficult to really put into words. Um, but just seeing it and then finally understanding that she's not going to ask for help really hit me really hard because in my mind, someone who is managing a condition should be able to utilize resources. My mother um has retired from the federal government. I felt that she had the resources, but then I looked at it and I said, it really isn't about resources. She didn't have the ability to actually ask for the help, but I understood and wanted to make the choice to help her. And so I started looking at different ways to help her remotely because I was not living in Kansas City. So I would come home, fly home a lot, back and forth, spending the resources and the money to meal plan, build a calendar, actually, you know, letting her um maintain her independence with prepared meals, right? Anything and everything that I could think of to help support her. And then I knew that that wasn't enough.

SPEAKER_04 4:33

Thank you for being vulnerable and transparent and just sharing with us uh the journey that you are on with your mom. And so as I as I reflect and think about part of the story that you shared, what was that defining moment where you realized that you stepping up and offering support for your mom wasn't just going to be temporary help or assistance, but that this was going to be a full-time responsibility that you were stepping into? Unpack that for us.

SPEAKER_03 5:05

That defining moment was when I was able to sit down with myself and say, Am I gonna risk leaving a job and a career and realizing that support was also needed from me and also for me? And I'll tell you what that means, okay? As I looked at the situation, I kept saying, okay, here I have a set of expenses away from Kansas City, and I'm by myself, right? I don't have any children, I don't have um any responsibility in terms of nurturing and caring for somebody, um, like a child. And then I looked at my mother and I said, all of the things up until now, cumulatively, that she has done and been there for me in my life, I said, you know, she's stable enough where I can pivot and always come back to this career. So it was a no-brainer. But it was in that moment where I had to balance a job versus somebody's life and versus that healing. And I did not know until that moment that I actually needed healing as well. And I said, okay, this is gonna make it easier now. I need to say to her that I'm coming home to help her, and she received that, but I don't think she would have said it had I not said it to her. But I realized in that moment that I actually needed her as well, because I'm making a big decision um with leaving a career, and I thought, well, I'm all in, you know, and and it was in that moment that I thought, you know, this is not just about her caregiving, this is really about me too, needing help.

SPEAKER_02 6:58

Wow, that right there is uh powerful. You said that support was needed from you to her, but you also needed support.

SPEAKER_03 7:10

That's right.

Choice, Duty, Or Calling

SPEAKER_02 7:12

I tell you, sometimes as men we take on responsibilities and sometimes responsibilities are a choice, and sometimes those responsibilities are a sense of duty, and then sometimes it's a calling uh of some sort. So tell me how did you reconcile internally? Is it a choice? Is it duty? Is it calling? Talk to me about that.

SPEAKER_03 7:40

You know, Jermaine, initially it felt like a choice, but soon I realized that it was a calling. And initially I thought, hey, Adrian, you can make this choice to set up some sort of remote help for your mom in terms of a resource, right? Whether it was me using my finances to hire somebody to come and look after her. Then I realized that on an emotional level and a very meaningful level, that I needed to be there to administer hands-on help. And I knew that she wasn't ready to receive remote help. And the reason I knew that is because the times I was flying back and forth and meal planning and cleaning the house and doing all these things, she couldn't necessarily follow them when I left. Right. And there were a couple of instances where she said to me, Hey, I told you that I did something, but I really didn't. And that told me immediately, like, okay, there has to be a new set of trust established. And I said, not only with myself, but just knowing that she wasn't really ready to receive that kind of help. So, yes, it was a choice for me, Jermaine and Brian, to say, hey, I am going to take on this role and I'm going to take it on full time. But it soon morphed into a calling because I also kept looking at how am I going to administer any type of help unless it's hands-on? And that to me translates into me actually needing help as well. You know, that emotional help. The other thing, though, that became very apparent in this is that I started to see my shortcomings and the gaps that I had in administering this hands-on help as a caregiver to her. I thought, this looks very heavy on her. There's certain topics she couldn't discuss, she didn't grieve properly, and she started telling me, hey, I didn't really grieve the death of my husband. I didn't really grieve the death of my father. And her mother just passed in 2024, and that's part of it too. And I saw somebody who looked so fragile, and at the same time, I thought, I don't want to be her if I ever have to carry the weight or the burden of something like this, in addition to managing a condition or a disease like Parkinson's.

SPEAKER_04 10:12

Adrian, it sounds like you were on a journey from accepting the choice and realizing that it is a duty and a responsibility, but that this was more than those two, that it was an overall calling. And it sounds like that it was a reciprocal relationship between you and your mom, that you were there for her to provide some support and to provide needs that she needed, but also reciprocally, she was able to do that for you. And so um, when I think about what I'm gonna ask you next, this relates to assumptions. And so when you think about assumptions that you have or have about caregiving or the ability to be a caregiver, what were some of those assumptions that were immediately challenged once you started living this out day to day?

Assumptions About Caregiving Shattered

SPEAKER_03 11:02

A couple of assumptions. So, first of all, I assume that caregiving would not infringe upon my me being able to balance my personal and practical task with the emotional labor and the emotional toil. Okay. I just had the assumption that this would be very transactional, you know, stepping into this. So what I mean by that is hey, I just want to support my mother arm in arm on the physical aspect of the Parkinsons. I I soon learned that that's not it. It's an emotional toil and a big, a huge emotional commitment. The other assumption that I had that there would be a clear start and a clear end date to this. And it's not. And so when I say end date, I'm not saying death, but I'm saying an end date to me stepping in as a caregiver, saying, if I start on this date, I'm going to end on this date and be able to transition back to where I was. And that is completely false. Because as I look at it and as I've been engaged in this caregiving journey for almost a year, that can't be true because it's not that cut and dry. It's an emotional toil, but also an emotional bridge to my emotional intelligence, to my growth, to my learning and my ability to be immersed in this full time.

SPEAKER_02 12:30

What I find so very interesting, Adrian, is when we think about responsibility as men, I'm really curious how this responsibility has reshaped how you see yourself, not just as a son, but as a man.

Gender Roles And Family Expectations

SPEAKER_03 12:46

You know, Jermaine, the responsibility has really reshaped the perception I had of myself. Right. And I have grown into someone else that I'm starting to love even more. And I'm becoming a bit more humble in knowing that I needed to cross this part of my life off in order to move forward. And it took a while. It hurt to be able to stare myself in the face and say, hey, taking on this responsibility, you're going to start uncovering things, Adrian, that you didn't know that existed in you. And I'm telling you, when I look at my mom and I look at some of the things that I feel are holding her back in terms of her not being able to properly grieve, dealing with certain situations, having the inability to deal with certain situations, I've said to her several occasions, this is outside of the Parkinson's. This is not your Parkinson's. This is something that you had prior to getting diagnosed with this condition. And you have to get it managed. So whether that's therapy, whether it's talking to someone. So in that, me as the instructor, seeing these things and observing, I also deserved in myself. And it scared the hell out of me. It was like, Adrian, who are you to say that somebody needs counseling on this? Because you have the same behaviors. And some of those behaviors that I had were not listening, not being focused, not looking people in their face. And I said, if you're requiring this from your mother, because you know it's going to make your caregiving a bit better for her, you also have to require it for yourself.

SPEAKER_02 14:30

So when we talk about um caregiving, we realize that there's still some gender stereotypes. There's still stigma out there. And so when we think about caregiving, people tend to still label it culturally as women's work. So how did people respond when they learned that you were your mother's caregiver?

Burnout, Boundaries, And Letting Go

SPEAKER_03 14:53

So interestingly enough, my mother is one of 12, and there are nine girls and three boys, and they are living, most of them live in the Kansas City area. But because they were so accustomed to me being the nurturer just in uh my relationship with my mother, um they made some assumptions that yes, I would be the one who would be here to do it. I'm also the oldest. Um and I do have a brother who's 13 years younger than me, um, and then a half-sister. Um, we do not share a mother, but I think it was an automatic for them, right? So I think they were thinking in their mind, just traditionally, hey, if something ever were to happen, Adrian would be the primary person to go in and administer care. The issue with that though is, okay, the issue is my mom denied it. She internalized it, right? She gave the impression to everyone that she was okay, that she needed to maintain her independence because she's always been independent, right? And that everyone around her would say, You seem like something's wrong. Are you okay health-wise? And I think that's part of the reason that she withdrew from everybody, right? She kept quiet about where she was. And it was very hard for me to ascertain early on, okay, I'm speaking to somebody who's not going to explicitly ask for help. And then at the same time, I've got to decode what they might be thinking because I'm not there. And that's what thwarted me and pushed me into okay, you got to be hands-on, you got to be here, visible. You cannot take on another job. You got to do this full time and be all in. Now, at that time, I did not know that this would be really a part of my healing journey. Um, and friends and family, you know, they responded favorably, you know, for me coming back to live in KC and to care for my mother. Some responded as if it should be a given that I do this. And I don't agree with that. I think that's a false notion in my book because it should not be just a given. We have too many resources now afforded to us that we don't have to fall back into these traditional roles of caregiving. So I didn't want people, and I was very clear about that. And I told the family, no, just because somebody else did this with their mom does not mean that I have to do this. I'm choosing to do this because I want to do it. Okay. Mind you, I didn't know that I would be growing myself at that time. But in hindsight, I'm glad I've made this decision because I've been able to mature a bit and grow through this process. Um, and I also told them too, nor do, nor should this responsibility be placed on anybody because some people don't aren't deserving of care just because they are a family member. Okay. And I and I and I stand on that, right? There are other ways to administer care besides somebody physically being there to care for someone who might be facing a terminal illness and so on and so forth.

SPEAKER_04 18:09

I'm going to peel back that layer a little bit, and I want you to kind of think about an experience where either family, friends, colleagues, or even some institutions, healthcare institutions that you had to interact with. Were you ever judged by those individuals or assistants or overlooked or questioned because people did not expect you as a man to be in the caregiving room?

SPEAKER_03 18:37

I wasn't necessarily judged, Brian, because I'm a nurturer in the relationship. And I always have been, just from a very young age. So it just made sense. But it would often make me angry that I'm rendering care to my mother who is not necessarily a nurturer. So here I am rendering care to somebody who may not be capable of rendering the type of emotional care that I need. And I'm finding that out as I'm in it, that she's not equipped to give me the emotional needs that I need. So I'm gonna have to either give them to myself, seek out the counseling that I need, and make sure that I'm being doing the work on me in order to just grow.

SPEAKER_04 19:33

And that although you're supporting and assisting your mom, you're also healing uh emotionally yourself and going through this journey with her. And so prior to us actually starting this podcast, we were kind of joking about weekends and vacations, and you kind of joked and said you know you didn't say it, but in essence, you said those don't kind of exist for you. And so this is a full-time responsibility in calling for you. Not that you don't and you can't take weekends and vacations, but you choose not to because you want to be there for your mom. Physically, emotionally. You just want to be present. But I want to I want to caution you in doing that because all of us face those periods and seasons in our lives when we burn out, when we want to walk away, when we want to throw in the cow. And I want to I want you to be a little more vulnerable with us and with our audience. Can you describe for us a time where you felt like walking away or you were close or on the brink of burning out? And if you had an experience like that, what helped or who helped you continue to show up for your mom?

SPEAKER_03 20:54

Yeah, Brian, you know, the unpredictable nature of managing Parkinson's almost put me over the edge because it is truly a debilitating condition that warrants a lot of hyper care, especially as things progress in the disease. So I found myself at a point where I was starting to yell and raise my voice. And that's not who I am and who I want to be as a care partner. But managing this unpredictable condition, I also learned that hey, my mother needs to be with others who might be managing this so that she's able to learn about how to cope, learn about how to cope with her condition and surround herself with others that will help her fuel her growth. The reason I keep showing up is because somewhere inside of me, I need to let go. And what I mean by this is I feel I need to offer my mother the best opportunity to thrive. Okay. That's why I'm so emotionally and physically and mentally invested. I want her to have every ability as she's still living on this earth to have an opportunity to thrive. So whether that means being around others who do have Parkinson's and learning from them, getting a therapist and being able to talk through cognitive behavioral therapy and figure out some of your past hurts or the things that are holding you back. I want her to be able to do those things. So I continue on, but I'm continuing on for myself and I'm serving as a model for her to latch hold to if she wants. But if she doesn't, I'm letting go. And that's a choice that I have to make. And when I mean let go is let go of doing her work. I'm not equipped, and I say this to her all the time. I am not equipped to continue on to do the emotional work that you might need to do. I'm happy that you want to take steps to do that work for yourself because I want you to thrive and be at your best, even while managing Parkinson's.

Compassion Fatigue And Resilience Tools

SPEAKER_02 23:24

Brian mentioned uh burnout to you, Adrian. And I think it's so important whenever we do uh a podcast like this that we give our listeners just uh ways for them to be able to, as they listen to our guest stories, to also be able to implement these things for themselves. So, what I want to do is I want to introduce a term that a lot of folks may not have heard of, but it's called compassion fatigue. And a classic symptom of compassion fatigue is this decline in the ability to feel sympathy and empathy and accordingly act from a place of compassion. So we know sympathy is when we say something like, hey, I care about your suffering. And empathy is something when we say I feel your suffering. And then compassion is I want to relieve your suffering. So with compassion fatigue, the caring, the feeling, and the acts of compassion decline, and then they can be replaced by an outwardly and passive detachedness. So a lot of people who are providing this care for people, uh, when they experience compassion fatigue, what happens is they can begin to feel all these different negative emotions like anger and annoyance and intolerance and irritability and skepticism and cynicism and embitterment and resentfulness. I think we've been there, right?

SPEAKER_03 24:43

Yeah, so I felt them all. I have felt them all.

SPEAKER_02 24:46

And so there's this concept uh called compassion resilience. And I'm gonna share a toolkit for folks, a link in our podcast to an actual toolkit, a compassion resilience toolkit for them to be able to use that to be able to deal with that compassion fatigue. So, what is compassion resilience? It is the ability to maintain emotional, mental, and physical well-being while compassionately supporting others through the challenges of daily living, work, and so forth. And so I think it's so important that folks realize that yes, you can be as giving and supportive as you want to, but you got to have that compassion and resilience to maintain that.

SPEAKER_03 25:33

And so that's powerful. That is powerful. So every those emotions I felt.

SPEAKER_02 25:40

Yeah. So there are five keys to care partner wellness I want to share. And I'm gonna give folks a link to Parkinson.org. Parkinson.org, there's a library and resources there. There's an actual uh care partner book that they can download. And I'll put that link in our in our podcast, but it gives five keys to care partners wellness. The first key is to seek support and accept help, which you did. The second key is take care of yourself, which Brian just encouraged you to do. The third is to collaborate in care. The fourth key is to nourish your relationship, and the fifth key is to plan ahead and adopt and adapt change. Adapt to change.

SPEAKER_03 26:26

That's amazing. This is amazing. And I wish I had known all of this before, but it sounds like I'm taking the right path, and there are some areas in there that I could do more of. So thank you, Jermaine. That is absolutely wonderful.

Faith As Grounding And Reset

SPEAKER_02 26:44

And I just wanted to share that because I think a lot of people are doing the work, but don't know they're doing the work. And so when you can like create a system or a model that you can then follow, then people go, Oh, that's what I've been doing all along, and it and it and it worked. So we're gonna provide these resources to those who listen to this podcast. We'll put this in our in our description of this episode, and you'll get all these resources there. And one of the things that uh I think is so important is faith. So support, faith, and sustainability. So, what I want to do is jump to um a question around that. And that is, what role did faith, purpose, or spiritual grounding play in sustaining you in this partnership?

What Caregiving Reveals About Character

SPEAKER_03 27:30

It played a role a hundred percent of the time in terms of my um spirituality and in terms of my belief in God. It definitely played a role um in really in those quiet times that I did have by myself where I'm able to reflect. Um, I did pray, and oftentimes I found myself praying for not only my mother, but more so just praying for in general peace, understanding, a little bit more empathy on my part. It played a huge part in my mental health because uh Jermaine, as you mentioned earlier, all of the annoyances and getting anger and all of that, I'd have to stop myself and say, How do I process this? And when all of those things came up, I went right to my spiritual foundation first because I felt that that was the most stable, if that makes any sense at all. I felt that that was the most grounding because this is new territory for me. And I would find myself saying to my mother, like nobody on the street talks to me like you do. I'm giving you help, and you're telling me that you're angry or you're dissatisfied or this. And I thought, we need to preserve our relationship, which moved me into and her into a different sphere, if you will, of how to move forward. I'm like, I love you, I want to maintain our you know, relationship and our friendship and kinship, but we really need to move forward in a healthy way, okay, because it's unhealthy for me to be going through all of these feelings and then not being able to process them in the right way. I thought, oh my gosh, I haven't ever done this thing kind of thing before. What am I doing? Fighting with my mother, or arguing, or being annoyed. And I said, This is not a place for me to be. So spiritual faith played a huge role in just grounding me, even if I didn't know what to say. It would at least stop me and I would read some scriptures, or I would, you know, have a place to go to, if that makes sense at all. Just somewhere that's a grounding force and a place that you could go to. And for me, it was a physical space um to go to, and I would sit, I would journal, I would pray, and that's very important for me because it kind of reset where I knew I needed to be to keep providing um care as a care partner. Before entering this caregiving journey, I needed to understand that I needed to be well equipped emotionally, mentally, and physically. And I was not. The silver lining in that and the snowball effect that I have since learned after being a caregiver or care partner one year in is that it brought up to the surface a lot of the areas that I hadn't managed prior. And that's with my own mental health, that's with my own emotional health, and that's with my own being able to manage the emotional health and emotional intelligence that I thought I had versus what I think I needed to receive.

SPEAKER_04 31:03

Very well said.

SPEAKER_03 31:04

That's it. Okay. It's weird because it's like I think I'm emotionally intelligent, but then when Jermaine read those things off, those five things, it's like that compassion resilience, that's amazing because that's exactly what it feels like. It's sort of like, how am I still supposed to have compassion? And the bottom line is that comes back to me.

SPEAKER_04 31:25

Adrian, it sounds like what you were just summing up for us, and I know you travel a lot, is whenever you take a flight and before that plane takes off, you were just challenging our listeners. You hear the flight attendant always say that in the event that the cabin loses pressure, make sure that you put if you're traveling with a child or accompanying someone, make sure that you put the oxygen mass on yourself first before you try to assist somebody else. And I think that's what you were essentially telling us that if you're gonna take on the role of being a care partner, make sure that um you you have taken care of self and that your cup is full. And so as we bring our conversation to a close, I want you to be thinking about if being a caregiver or care partner is a test of character. What did being your your mom's care partner reveal about who you are as a man and as a son? And what has it revealed about the man and the son that you hope to become?

SPEAKER_03 32:29

It is revealed that I am a compassionate person and that I have really good intentions for others to thrive, and I'm a loving person. What it has not revealed for where I want to go in the future is it has not revealed to me that I need to do more work on myself to engage in more loving situations just in my life, whether it be professional, whether it be personal, and I have a lot of work to go there. I still feel like caregiving and being a care partner were certainly a test to me, to my abilities to see if I could even do this and show up. It has been a true test of my ability to be able to manage my emotions. It revealed to me, being a care partner, that I needed to take care of myself first in a lot of different ways, emotionally, mentally, and physically, before I could actually take on the role of a care partner.

SPEAKER_02 33:37

So, what final word would you leave with with uh our listeners who may one day face this responsibility?

Final Encouragement And Closing

SPEAKER_03 33:42

For all of our listeners, I would encourage you to be gentle with yourself, have compassion, and give yourself mercy before undertaking being a care partner.

SPEAKER_02 33:54

This has been the Bro Talk Podcast.

SPEAKER_04 33:56

Real men, real responsibility, and real transformation.

SPEAKER_02 34:01

So, if this conversation has resonated, I want you all to please share with a brother who may need to hear it because responsibility doesn't diminish us, it defines us.