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When you were little did you ever play Mad Libs?
Mad Libs was a concept created in the 1950s by Roger Price and Leonard Stern. The game consists of one player prompting others for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story before reading aloud.
I’m sure Price and Stern intended Mad Libs to be good clean fun – that is until my cousins from the Michigan suburbs arrived to visit us in rural Pennsylvania and things suddenly took a twisted turn. My sister and I were 8 and 10, respectively. My cousins had a vast vocabulary of dirty words that my sister and I didn’t possess. During their visit, we filled out our Mad Libs and made them extra funny. We weren’t smart enough to write the fill-in-the-blank words on separate paper, so when my cousins went home, my mom found the Mad Lib books with all the dirty words in the blanks!
I remember her sitting my sister and I down at the kitchen table, reading out each filthy word and asking us to define them. We knew some of the easy ones, like boobs and poop, but the rest of the words we knew were funny but didn’t know what they meant. I don’t even recall if my mom defined them for us. I just remember getting in trouble and feeling so ashamed. I guess this was my first lesson in the birds and the bees – but I still had many gaps in my knowledge for many more years.
I wrote out a few of my mad libs below through a caregiving and self-care lens. We first used these during a Happy Healthy Caregiver Virtual Café event. I host these cafes every other month, usually over the lunch hour, to provide family caregivers a bit of refreshing social-self care in their day. See the Happy Healthy Caregiver events page for details, or be sure to join our email list to be notified of upcoming events.
Grab a sheet of paper and first fill out all the bolded words, then go back and read them with your words. Now, try them a second time by asking your care recipient for the fill-in-the-blank words and hopefully share a few laughs.
Mad Lib 1: My Caregiving Story
When I first became a family caregiver, I felt [verb+ed]. There are so many books like [popular book title] to prepare you to be a [profession], but I couldn’t find any to [verb] me to be a caregiver.
We saw the caregiver [type of natural disaster] coming, but we still weren’t prepared for the [adjective] turmoil. We felt squeezed between caring for our [adjective] children who were playing [type of sport] and our [adjective] parents who were declining and needing more care.
My husband and I were also working full-time. He worked in [type of industry] and I worked as a [job title].
Everything came to a boiling point in [year], which I nicknamed ‘the [adjective] year.’ Both sides of my family were spinning out of control.
Moving mom to [city or town] where three of the six children could share [noun] seemed the only viable answer. Mom’s level of care was too much for any of us who [verb] full-time to handle. We hunted for the perfect [adjective] community. So many details to take care of and decisions to be made. Where would [a celebrity] live? What was their [verb] situation? What do we do with all of this [noun] in their home? The adrenaline just took over, and somehow, we survived. [Exclamation]! Little did I know way more [adjective] stuff was yet to come. I would learn about [verb + ing] for my mom and juggling competing [noun(s)].
The sandwich generation caregiving years have been my most [adjective] consecutive years, yet I wouldn’t [verb] them. Caregiving brought my family closer together. I gained transferrable life skills such as [character trait], resilience, and [adjective] management.
Mad Lib 2: The Antidote to Caregiver Burnout
Even in the best circumstances, being a family caregiver is [adjective].
Over time, the constant [noun] of caregiving can lead to a state of physical, emotional, and [adjective] exhaustion, what’s known as caregiver burnout.
Signs of caregiver burnout include [adjective] problems, feeling [verb], irritability, and fluctuations in [noun]. One of the best ways to help manage stress while boosting your mental outlook and supporting your physical health is regular [activity].
I challenged myself to [verb] more. I had tried in the past, but it never quite stuck. I knew this time had to be different. Part of what makes caregiving so difficult is the mental [noun]. In the beginning, I [verb+ed] once or twice each week, and even in that short amount of time I felt benefits.
Finding caregiver [noun], support, and advice is [adjective] for anyone in a caregiving position. You’re constantly [verb+ing] those around you, and it’s easy to get so caught up in everything that needs to be tended to that you [adverb] [verb] yourself.
Even if you have a [adjective] network of [farm animal] you can lean on, it’s not always easy to [verb] what you’re feeling or for them to truly understand what you’re going through as you [verb] your caregiving role. For this reason, [adjective] groups for caregivers are so beneficial.
The key is to [verb] a support group before you really need it. You want this structure to be in place, so you have a [noun] to turn to when life feels [adjective] or takes you down a [adjective] road. Caregiving is always [verb+ing] and having a supportive non-judgmental group in [a body part] reach provides [adjective] relief.
Even More Mad Libs
Create your own mad lib by first writing out a true or made up story. Then, go back and remove some of the words and put in a blank and define the type of word want. You can say parts of speech, numbers, or get specific like a liquid or body part. Then, try it out on a friend.
Of course, there are countless Mad Lib books out there. Here are a few fun themed ones I found on Amazon:
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