Short answer
Yes. It can be normal to resent caring for an elderly parent, especially when the care is unequal, invisible, emotionally complicated, or impossible to sustain alone. Resentment can coexist with love, concern, and a sincere wish for your parent to be safe.
The feeling is not a verdict on your character. It is often information about the workload, the relationship, or a family arrangement that has stopped being livable.
The sentence people are afraid to say
You may love your parent and still hate what caregiving has done to your life.
You may feel compassion for their fear and still feel angry that every appointment, call, bill, emergency, and decision seems to find its way to you.
You may remember their sacrifices and still want your own time, body, marriage, workday, or quiet back.
Resentment often grows where care has no edges
At first, you do what needs to be done.
Then the temporary arrangement becomes permanent. The exception becomes the expectation. The person who was simply helping becomes the emotional operations center for the whole family.
That is often when resentment appears. Not because you are unloving, but because the care no longer has a shape that a person can realistically live inside.
Resentment toward a parent
This can feel especially shameful.
Your parent may be frightened, ill, lonely, or losing independence. You can understand that and still feel angry when they refuse help, reject every option, call repeatedly, or expect you to absorb their anxiety.
Understanding someone's suffering does not mean you have to become the place where all of it lands.
Resentment toward siblings
Sibling resentment has its own sting.
It is hard to keep being gracious when someone gives opinions from a distance, visits occasionally, questions the cost, or says, "Let me know if you need anything," while you are already drowning in things.
Sometimes the resentment is not about one task. It is about being left alone inside the role.
What resentment may be trying to tell you
This is too much for one person.
I agreed to help, not disappear.
I need real support, not praise.
The family story about who I am is costing me too much.
Something has to change, even if guilt comes with the change.
What helps resentment become useful
Resentment usually gets louder when it has to remain secret. Naming it does not mean acting it out or directing it at your parent. It means becoming curious about what the feeling is protecting.
Start with the arrangement rather than your character:
Which tasks have become yours without a real conversation?
Which part of care creates the most dread or anger?
What support have you asked for, and what response did you receive?
What would make care more sustainable, even if nothing became easy?
Sometimes the answer is practical: respite, a sibling taking ownership, paid help, a care coordinator, or a smaller commitment. Sometimes the anger is also connected to the earlier relationship with your parent. Present-day care can reopen memories of being overlooked, controlled, criticized, or expected to manage feelings that were never yours to manage.
Resentment is not the only sign to watch
If resentment is arriving with persistent exhaustion, numbness, sleep problems, withdrawal, or the feeling that you cannot face another call, caregiver burnout may also be part of the picture. Canadian caregiver data includes exhaustion, anger, depression, and guilt among the signs of caregiver distress.
That is a reason to widen the support around you, not a reason to shame yourself into trying harder.
When therapy can help
Therapy can help you bring resentment into the room without turning it into an indictment of your parent or yourself.
The work is not to become cold. It is to understand what care can look like when it includes your limits too. Caregiver therapy can help you work with both the immediate pressure and the relationship history underneath it.
