When Caregiving Kills: What One Night in Calgary Taught Me About Mothers, Poverty, and Our Bodies

I attended a talk in Calgary earlier this year. I was expecting to be moved. I wasn't expecting to have my entire understanding of women's poverty reframed in a single evening.

Here's what stayed with me.

We are bio-psycho-social beings. The body is not separate.

The talk opened with a framework that sounds obvious when you hear it — but that our entire medical system ignores. We are bio-psycho-social beings. Our biology is inseparable from our psychology, our relationships, and the culture we live inside of. Disease doesn't just happen to us. It happens through us — through the accumulated weight of what we've suppressed, what we've endured, and what we've taken on for everyone else.

And for women — especially mothers — that weight is not personal. It's structural.

This wasn't said to be alarming. It was said as evidence. Evidence that the chronic stress of caregiving — the saying yes when you mean no, the absorbing everyone else's pain, the relentless self-erasure — has a biological cost. That cost shows up in our bodies. It shows up as disease.

The question that wrecked me

At one point, the room was asked a simple question: "Where in your life are you not saying no?" I looked around. The room was full of women. And I watched every single one of them go somewhere private with that question.

Because for most mothers — and especially for mothers in poverty — the honest answer is: everywhere. We say yes to everyone. We are the emotional managers, the default parents, the ones who remember the appointments and the allergies and the permission slips. We absorb everyone else's stress so they don't have to carry it.

We don't ask ourselves: how can I put myself first? We ask: what does everyone else need? And it is making us sick.

The marriage paradox

Then came the statistic that stopped me cold. Married men live longer than unmarried men. Their health improves. Their outcomes are better across the board. Married women, on the other hand, tend to live shorter lives than their unmarried counterparts.

Why? Because when a man gets married, he gains a caretaker. When a woman gets married, she becomes one. The invisible work — the emotional labour, the mental load, the physical caregiving, the constant anticipating of everyone else's needs — falls disproportionately on women. And that labour has a biological cost.

So what does this have to do with poverty?

When women spend decades saying yes to everyone else — when they step back from careers to raise children, manage households and relationships and the emotional climate of a family — they often end up with nothing saved. No career advancement. No pension. No safety net. And when marriages end, women are left holding the children, the debt, and the impossible math of paying for childcare on a single income.

The system isn't broken. It was never built for us.

Someone in the audience asked whether the culture of poverty was creating the stress and illness, or the other way around. The pushback was gentle but clear. It's not just poverty. It's culture. The culture that assigns caregiving to women as a natural, inevitable, unpaid role. The culture that rewards men for marrying and quietly penalizes women. The culture that calls a woman selfish for putting herself first and calls a man 'career-focused' for doing the exact same thing.

The question I left with: Where in your life are you not saying no? And the harder one: what would it cost you — financially, physically, emotionally — to change that? That's the conversation we need to have. About the full cost of caregiving. About whose health is being sacrificed to keep the system running. Because until we count it, we can't change it.