Hi, my name is J. Ali and I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine.

I wrote a story which you'll hear in this week's Sunday read about the growing number of young people who are becoming caregivers for their parents.

The story is definitely not about me, but in some profound ways, I do see myself in it.

So for the whole time my husband and I were dating, which was like 11 years, I knew that his mother had serious health issues.

But that said, she mostly managed and she lived relatively independently in her own place.

Then came 2018. I was 32 years old. My husband, who was still my boyfriend at that time, and I were coming home from a vacation in Japan when he got a call saying that his mom was in the hospital.

We went to stay with her after she was discharged. She was weak and needed help in the middle of the night.

While we were there, someone known as an end of life planner came to visit.

We knew nothing about what an end of life planner did. But there we were, jet lags, half asleep, suddenly needing to make major decisions about power of attorney and life support.

That was the day my husband turned to me and said, I don't think mom can live on her own anymore.

I remember feeling instantly overwhelmed. We're both self-employed. We had just moved into our first apartment together, thinking it'd be the two of us.

But we set up an air mattress and took in my husband's mother and tried to get her back to stability.

It took months. With our help, she was able to continue living in her own apartment.

But two years later, in the thick of the pandemic, she had a heart episode. This time, we moved in with her.

Because of COVID, everything we needed to keep ourselves safe, to keep food and medicine in the house, to keep up doctors visits, all of that got so much harder.

And I can remember how isolated we felt because none of our friends were going through this.

We had to juggle our caregiving duties while working from home. So our whole situation sort of crept out while I was speaking to colleagues.

And I also saw parallels to my situation on the news. Stories about the chronic caregiver shortage and daycare and senior care center shutting down.

One day, my editor and I started talking about what all this meant for people who had both kids and aging parents.

I began looking on Facebook groups for caregivers for people around my age. And I was shocked to see how many there were.

It's weird to say this, but that was the first time I really understood that I was one of them, a family caregiver.

Scrolling through postings, there were people carrying toddlers on their shoulders, desperate just to get some playtime outside.

...