@MomOfMyMom creator wants to ‘build the morale’ of caregivers everywhere

Caregiver Life Balance

Advice on how to avoid burn-out while juggling family caregiving with work and childcare responsibilities

Jacquelyn Joyce Revere was living her best life in New York City when her world was suddenly upended.

While on the subway, she received a call from her mom’s friend. “She pretty much said, ‘Something is wrong with your mom; you need to fly home.’”

The aspiring comedy writer took a 21-day leave of absence from her job and flew to California to find that her mother, an active caregiver to her grandmother with dementia, was also showing signs of the disease. Meanwhile, the mortgage hadn’t been paid, and letters of foreclosure were coming in.

“I came home to a grandmother who did not know who I was at all — which was heartbreaking — and then to a mother who just couldn’t really make sense of her world,” says Revere, now 38.

Revere soon realized that her mother, Lynn Hindmon, and grandmother, Joyce, needed full-time assistance. With the high costs of care and few other options available to the only child, Revere packed up her life, left her job and friends and moved across the country to start a new role: family caregiver.

“Becoming a caregiver at 29 changed my life completely in every way,” she says, “The task of care is all-consuming, and it requires every part of you and even parts of me that I didn’t know.”

Revere took on meals, medication management and doctor’s appointments. Eventually, as suspected, Hindmon was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Then after then after 1.5 years of care, Joyce started failing and she passed away.

With her mom still relatively healthy, Revere fully embraced her caregiving duties. Her main goal: bring joy to her loving mother. “I was just able to create a life that my mother and myself loved. But that only comes with extreme acceptance of the role that you are in.”

In 2020, Revere turned to social media as an outlet for fun and self-care. Her TikTok @MomofMyMom — named because her mother started calling her “Mommy” — started during the COVID shutdown to keep her mom socially engaged and “still make our days meaningful and fun.” And it kept growing.

The site includes short videos of Revere performing everyday caregiving tasks for her mom mixed with silly and playful shorts of the mother-daughter duo dancing, hugging and laughing. “I think we offered a fun, inclusive, joyful, loving way to learn what care is,” she says. “We talk about care. We show care. I also really hope to build the morale of the caregivers that follow me,” she says.

After six years of caregiving, Revere’s mom unexpectedly died in March 2022 of a heart attack. Still, through her lingering grief, she continues to raise awareness of the tireless work of caregivers to her 860K social media followers across all sites, including Instagram and Facebook.

“Caring for my mother has made me think about my own care nonstop,” she says. “I am very aware of the lack of social supports, the lack of societal understanding of the needs [and] the lack of funding.”

“There are 59 million unpaid family caregivers in our country right now, and these numbers are only going to increase,” she says. “And so, putting your time and efforts into understanding the future of care … will not only change the culture and the way we see each other as humans, because we realize the preciousness of life, but…. putting our time towards this will make us better people.”

Nancy Kerr is a senior writer and editor of features content for AARP. Previously, she was the editor of special projects for USA Today; a senior editor for the USA Weekend magazine; an assistant managing editor of digital content at The Washington Post and the director of women’s programming at America Online.