Don’t Let Caregiving Kill Your Creativity
Talking with TV writer and “Mom of My Mom” founder Jacquelyn Revere.
Good morning! I’m leaving in a few hours to take my dad to the Titanic Exhibition in New York City. He’s obsessed with the Titanic (both the real-life story and the James Cameron movie, which he’s seen more times than his once Leo-obsessed daughter), so I’m hoping he has fun. But one never knows! I’ll report back next week.
Today I’m sharing a conversation I had with a talented TV writer and content creator, Jacquelyn Revere, who managed to keep her creative ambitions alive during her six-plus years as a caregiver. I find her story to be so inspiring and hope you do, too.
Don’t let Caregiving Kill Your Creativity
Jacquelyn Revere was a 29-year-old writer’s assistant in New York City when she got word that something was wrong with her mother. “A friend of my mom’s said, ‘You need to come home,’” she tells me. “So I took a 21-day leave from my job, packed one large bag, and came home.”
It was 2016, and Revere had been working on a new sketch show starring Cardi B. “That was before we knew who Cardi B was, but I felt like I was finally getting to a place in my career where people trusted me,” she says. “I also had a really cool apartment seven blocks from Central Park. It was great.”
But that version of her life would soon be over. Once Jacquelyn saw how bad things had gotten back home in Los Angeles, where her mother had been living with her own mom (who also had dementia), she decided to return for good.
“I was trying to fix as much as I could [on leave], and then on Day 19, I said, ‘I can’t. They need me.’ When I flew back to New York to pack up my whole apartment, I was calling my mom every day, having her take her medicine, explaining which ones she should take. ‘Look at the purple one. Look at the white one.’”
In the early days of caregiving, Jacquelyn thought her career was dead—that there was no more room in her life for creativity. But, slowly, and with the help of a therapist, she figured out how to merge her new role with her old ambitions. She started sharing her experience online, under the handle @momofmymom, and focused on scriptwriting.
Today, she has a full-on brand with more than 900,000 followers across platforms, and she’s completed two writing fellowships. She was also just named one of 25 writer mentees for Mentorship Matters, an initiative meant to boost opportunities for emerging writers of color (the program pairs talent with showrunners).
Jacquelyn’s mother died in March 2022, and her grandmother a few years before that. But everything she does today is in their honor. “Mom of My Mom coming out of this [experience] is a way of me doing what I know my mother would have wanted,” she says. “She always wanted me to do what makes me happy. Were she aware that I gave up everything to move back home and care for her, that would make her so sad.”
Below is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.
You always made a point of showing on social media that you weren’t “just” a caregiver, that you had other things going on in your life. Why was that important to you?
I think it took me so long to become somebody that I liked, that I just didn’t want to let [that person] go. I stutter. But when I was younger, my stutter was so severe that I would opt out of talking all the time. And I had to really work on putting myself in fearful situations and changing how I thought about myself, changing how I thought about what it meant to stutter. There are so many core beliefs that I had to work on and manipulate and switch over, that I didn’t want to let go of all of that work to then just become someone who was caring for someone else.
I think Mom of My Mom helped me with that. Because it gave me something outside of care [to focus on].
You figured out a way to take on the role of caregiver and have it dovetail with your creativity and ambition.
Right. People say, “I’m not a caregiver type”—I’m not either. I found a way to make it fit where I felt like I wasn’t giving up 100% of myself, or where I still felt like I could get joy out of it. So filming something and then putting it up and seeing people comment, “Aww, this is so sweet”—that’s a way of feeding that need to make art and then have people see it.
Do you consider yourself an influencer, or is that just a label put on you by outsiders?
From a technical standpoint, sure. But sometimes I’ll meet people and they’ll ask me what I do, and I’m like, “I’m kind of an influencer…but here’s the story and how it happened, and this is the type of influencer I am.” I think “influencer” is starting to mean more than, “Here’s what I ate today, guys” and “Here’s my outfit.” There are more niches now.
Did you worry about losing momentum in the TV industry during your years as a caregiver?
All the time. The TV field is all about networking. And so if you’re not [doing that], people don’t get to know you. And so I decided that instead of networking and all of that, I’m going to put my time into becoming the best writer. I would take night time courses; I joined writing groups where we would meet once every two weeks and read each other’s work. And then I started sending my scripts into fellowships. And so I got my first fellowship in 2020, and I sold a pilot from that.
That’s incredible. Can you share anything about it?
It’s based on caring for someone who has dementia. I’m working to tell this story in a fun, light way, where it’s not heavy, you’re-going-to-cry-every-episode type stuff.
You’ve shared a little bit online about having housemates, which I imagine provided some inspiration. How did you wind up with roommates?
My grandmother and my mom bought this four-bedroom house when I was in high-school, because my grandmother was planning on caring for her mom here also—
Your great-grandmother?
Yeah, but she ended up passing before we moved in. And so we had this huge house—too much house for the amount of people here—and when my grandmother passed, her pension, you know, left. And so my mom and I moved upstairs into the one-bedroom and started Airbnb-ing the downstairs rooms so that we could continue paying the mortgage. At that time it was fine, because my mom wasn’t too far in and she had a day center that would come and pick her up. But around 2020, I had to get really specific about the people who stayed here, and I started to get renters.
You hired a full-time paid caregiver eventually, right? Like a 9-to-5 situation?
Yeah, she was there from 9-to-6.
What made you decide to do that?
That happened in 2020, too, after my mom stopped being able to bathe herself. I did bath-time for about six months, and it was a lot. My mom was strong up until she passed away. And so I needed to give that task to someone. Once I realized how much more at peace I was giving that task to someone, it allowed me to dabble a bit more in [designating]. But I wasn’t ready to hire someone full-time until I found someone who treated my mom the way I would. And as soon as I found her, I was like, “You can have all the hours.”
So you had a good relationship with her caregiver?
I loved her because I loved how she treated my mom. More than that, her being so attentive to my mom allowed me to step back into the daughter role. That was really important, and I even think my mom felt that. She treated me more like her child instead of someone who’s coming to wake her up, to walk her to the bathroom, to change her sweater.
Did you find your caregiver through an agency?
No. She was private. I found her from a Facebook group that was targeted for my city. She lived so close that she could walk to our house.
Do you think about where you’d like to be in five years?
I would like to be a parent. I would like to have a spouse. I want to get my show on air. And I want Mom of My Mom to do conferences for caregivers, in a place where they can actually relax, meet other people who give care, and have fun. Maybe have an artist respite center with a masseuse. I want it to be a conference of relaxation.