Speaker 1: You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mamma Mere acknowledges
Speaker 1: the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
Speaker 1: is recorded on. She cared for you, so now you
Speaker 1: care for her. It sounds so simple and sane, But
Speaker 1: what mother daughter relationship after a lifetime or so is
Speaker 1: simple and sane. Whose life lines up to provide just
Speaker 1: the right measurements of time, patience, and funds to be
Speaker 1: able to return what was hopefully maybe given to you
Speaker 1: at precisely the moment it's needed. Whose home has the
Speaker 1: emotional and literal space to quickly expand to the escalating
Speaker 1: needs of the person whose home you left long ago.
Speaker 1: Caring for your aging parents can be a privilege, a joy.
Speaker 1: It can be a burden, a chore. It can be
Speaker 1: all of these things at the same time. Once, hopefully,
Speaker 1: maybe they were the firmly planted legs you hid behind
Speaker 1: as you looked out at the intimidating world hostile to
Speaker 1: the young and small. Now, hopefully maybe it's you who's
Speaker 1: the protective force between them and the intimidating world hostile
Speaker 1: to the old and frail. You're the translator of scams
Speaker 1: and online everything. Medical administrative assistant advocate in infuriating systems,
Speaker 1: and likely maybe your interventions are met sometimes with rage,
Speaker 1: not grace. They've lived this long and seen so much,
Speaker 1: only to be infantilized again, learned a great deal, only
Speaker 1: to end up with the doctor turning towards you, not them,
Speaker 1: to ask about their bowel movements, their eating, their state
Speaker 1: of mind. For the waiter to address you, not them,
Speaker 1: Does he take sugar? Watching your parents, beloved or distant,
Speaker 1: diminish and fade is one of the cruelest tricks midlife
Speaker 1: has squirreled away for a slow reveal. The worry settles
Speaker 1: on your shoulders, the fear of that phone call, the
Speaker 1: fear of the fall, the fear of the moment when
Speaker 1: everything changes. Muddling through what the hell happens now that
Speaker 1: caring responsibilities have expanded is one of the complications that
Speaker 1: it's hard to discuss because this is just what families do, right.
Speaker 1: They take care of each other, They mop each other up,
Speaker 1: They defend against the worst humiliations age has in store. Yes,
Speaker 1: it is, but if you find yourself are raised in
Speaker 1: that process, then it's not only the elderly who are
Speaker 1: transported back to being young and voiceless, but you too,
Speaker 1: and yet love and duty have no end date. The
Speaker 1: great fortune of having a mum or dad, of still
Speaker 1: having a mum or dad, the kind of mum or
Speaker 1: dad you can pick up the phone to to share
Speaker 1: the manutia of your day, or the big things that
Speaker 1: are keeping you awake and the little things that make
Speaker 1: a world with someone who has carried you literally and
Speaker 1: figuratively through a lifetime or so. That's a fortune worth repaying.
Speaker 1: But airbrushing the complexity of caring to such a simple exchange,
Speaker 1: it leaves.
Speaker 2: Us all poorer.
Speaker 3: Hello.
Speaker 1: I am Holly Wainwright, and I am mid, midlife, mid family,
Speaker 1: mid Sandwich generation. Welcome to our show mid vagen X
Speaker 1: women who are anything but now. Look, I worry sometimes
Speaker 1: that I tell you that the conversations we're having on
Speaker 1: mid are extraordinary every week, and one day you might
Speaker 1: stop believing me. This is not the week to stop
Speaker 1: believing me, friends, Because of course, it's true that every
Speaker 1: why woman I get to sit down with his extraordinary.
Speaker 1: But I can honestly say that I haven't heard a
Speaker 1: conversation like the one you're about to hear between me
Speaker 1: and Caroline Baum anywhere else her story is unique and
Speaker 1: her telling of it is exquisite. It's actually a family
Speaker 1: story with a few parts, so let me unpack that
Speaker 1: bit for you. Caroline Baalum is a writer, a broadcaster
Speaker 1: and a speaker with a long list of achievements. Will
Speaker 1: put a link to Away and find out more about
Speaker 1: those and to her writings in the show notes of
Speaker 1: this episode. But the essay of Carolines that made me
Speaker 1: want to invite her on MID was about placing her
Speaker 1: mother in elder care here in Australia and what she
Speaker 1: wanted people to know about the complexities of doing it,
Speaker 1: of finding a place, of what matters in finding a
Speaker 1: good place and so on. I knew that lots of
Speaker 1: people who listen to MID are dealing with aiding parents
Speaker 1: and that this beautifully written piece of Carolines would be
Speaker 1: really useful to them, and we do talk a lot
Speaker 1: about that towards the end of this week conversation. But
Speaker 1: what Caroline and I ended up discussing is also so
Speaker 1: much more what it's like when you're aging parent or parents,
Speaker 1: like almost everyone's, are not the compliant, gentle wise, little
Speaker 1: old people of easy narrative, but sometimes complicated, difficult, angry, resentful,
Speaker 1: and hard to live with. You're going to hear about how,
Speaker 1: after Caroline's father's death, her mother invited herself to come
Speaker 1: and live with Caroline and her husband, and how complicated
Speaker 1: that was, and how Caroline and her mother ended up
Speaker 1: in therapy aged sixty and ninety respectively, to try to
Speaker 1: find a way to cohabit, about whether or not that worked,
Speaker 1: and how it worked for a while but at great
Speaker 1: cost to Caroline's wellbeing, And you're going to hear about
Speaker 1: what it's like to feel profound guilt again, something I
Speaker 1: know a lot of people feel, if they're honest at
Speaker 1: not feeling like you've done all you can to give
Speaker 1: your parent the final years you owe them. And you're
Speaker 1: going to hear about the difficult hand delt to the
Speaker 1: solo child of troubled people. It's truly an extraordinary conversation.
Speaker 1: I have not stopped thinking about it since we talked,
Speaker 1: and I hope that you are as impressed as I
Speaker 1: am at Caroline's willingness to speak with so much eloquence
Speaker 1: and honesty, as well as respect and love about something
Speaker 1: that we're supposed to think is simple doing your duty
Speaker 1: to your parent. That is actually anything, but sit down
Speaker 1: with us and listen. Caroline. You're a journalist and editor,
Speaker 1: a broadcaster who's written many many things about many many things.
Speaker 1: But the thing I want to start talking to you
Speaker 1: about today is specifically an essay that you've wrote about
Speaker 1: navigating the process of placing your mum in aged care
Speaker 1: that went kind of viral. It was very shared and
Speaker 1: talked about, certainly in my circles, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: start there today. But before we get into it, can
Speaker 1: you tell me a bit about your mum?
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, it's funny, you know, Holly. I've realized that
Speaker 2: since writing that piece, and also since writing my memoir Only,
Speaker 2: which came out about five or six years ago, often
Speaker 2: now the first question people ask me is how's your mum?
Speaker 2: And I've become defined in terms of that relationship more
Speaker 2: than anything else in my life. And I do feel
Speaker 2: quite ambivalent about that. So interesting, isn't it? It is?
Speaker 2: And it's unfavorable.
Speaker 1: No, And do you think it's because certainly the wave
Speaker 1: depicted her in what I have read. It's it's fascinating.
Speaker 1: People are fascinated by that relationship.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I suppose because it's a relationship which is so
Speaker 2: complex and shifting, and people can relate to some of it,
Speaker 2: but not necessarily all of it. And I guess the
Speaker 2: thing that really colors and defines my mother if you
Speaker 2: ask me about her, is that she's French. And when
Speaker 2: I say she's French, I would say that she's pretty
Speaker 2: well French vinegar. So she's a strong personality and quite spiky.
Speaker 2: And I guess that the defining moment in her life
Speaker 2: I now understand happened many many years ago when she
Speaker 2: was five, and she was basically orphaned as a result
Speaker 2: of domestic violence, a murder suicide in which my grandfather
Speaker 2: murdered my grandmother and then turned the gun on himself
Speaker 2: and shot himself. So my mother was five years old.
Speaker 2: She was immediately rejected by her family, as I think
Speaker 2: they called her the fruit of a damned marriage. They
Speaker 2: were conservative and religious, and they thought that this child
Speaker 2: was a sort of manifestation of the terrible shame that
Speaker 2: this murder suicide brought on their standing, and so she
Speaker 2: was fostered. She was passed around like a parcel. Some
Speaker 2: of the people who fostered her were kind, some of
Speaker 2: them were not. But basically, at the age of five,
Speaker 2: my mother felt absolutely abandoned and unloved, and because she
Speaker 2: belongs to a generation where you didn't go to therapy,
Speaker 2: you didn't talk to a professional about that, You just
Speaker 2: kept it all inside. Apparently, I've heard since from psychologists
Speaker 2: that at five that's quite an important age in terms
Speaker 2: of child development. If something earth shattering happens to you,
Speaker 2: one of your survival techniques can be to build a
Speaker 2: carapace around yourself in order to survive, where everything becomes
Speaker 2: entirely and only about you. That is the beginnings of narcissism.
Speaker 2: I know it's a very overused word now, but I
Speaker 2: would say that my mother has very strong traits that
Speaker 2: seemed to be a manifestation of a form of narcissistic
Speaker 2: personality disorder.
Speaker 1: Did you grow up knowing this story about your mum.
Speaker 2: No. A story that took precedence in my family home
Speaker 2: was my father's story, which is tragic as well, and
Speaker 2: because he told it and was more outgoing about it,
Speaker 2: my mother's story sort of was overshadowed. So my father
Speaker 2: was a Viennese Jew, and he left Vienna in nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty eight at the age of ten with his older
Speaker 2: sister as part of something remarkable called Kindertransport, and Kindertransport
Speaker 2: was the largest refugee rescue program for children ever attempted,
Speaker 2: which took Jewish children out of Hungary, Poland, etc. To
Speaker 2: get them away from the threat of the Nazis. So
Speaker 2: my grandparents in Vienna put my father and his sister
Speaker 2: on a train, told them that they were going to
Speaker 2: England on holiday and that they would join them in
Speaker 2: a couple of weeks. They were taken to a camp
Speaker 2: where they were with many many other children like themselves,
Speaker 2: and every Sunday prospective families would come and view the
Speaker 2: children to take them and adopt them. My father wore glasses.
Speaker 2: Children with glasses were not considered as desirable as children
Speaker 2: without glasses. Boys were considered less desirable than girls. My
Speaker 2: father and his sister insisted on not being separated, which
Speaker 2: meant if you took one, you had to take the
Speaker 2: other one. So they were in the camp for a
Speaker 2: long long time. Some families took them out on a
Speaker 2: Sunday and then gave them back, which must have been devastating.
Speaker 2: Eventually he landed with a family of Quakers in Yorkshire
Speaker 2: who were incredibly kind and looked after him until he
Speaker 2: graduated from university. But I think the big difference wholly
Speaker 2: between the story of my mother and my father is
Speaker 2: my father was a victim of history, a great, big
Speaker 2: sweep of history that scooped up all these children, ten
Speaker 2: thousand children, flung them into another world and another country.
Speaker 2: He did end up seeing his mother again. He managed
Speaker 2: to get the Red Cross and various other organizations to
Speaker 2: help him sponsor his mother out of Austria. She was
Speaker 2: able to follow on condition that she get work as
Speaker 2: a domestic servant. That was the rule that the British
Speaker 2: government imposed on parents who followed their children. My grandfather
Speaker 2: never made it, and it's believed that he was shot
Speaker 2: on a forced march somewhere outside ki If we don't
Speaker 2: really know the details, that's all we've got from the
Speaker 2: Red Cross from doing research subsequently. But his story is
Speaker 2: big and grand, and many other people can relate to
Speaker 2: some part of this story. My mother's story is much
Speaker 2: smaller and much more personal. And because my father loved
Speaker 2: to tell the Kinder Transport story to me to make
Speaker 2: sure that I knew what had happened and how good
Speaker 2: the Quakers were and how grateful we should be to
Speaker 2: this particular family. I never really heard my mother's story
Speaker 2: until much later. She didn't tell me anything about what
Speaker 2: had happened to her until I think I was in
Speaker 2: my twenties, and it probably wasn't until I was in
Speaker 2: my forties that I started to join the dots. And think,
Speaker 2: from what I've read about domestic violence, a murder suicide
Speaker 2: doesn't come out of the blue. So it's highly likely
Speaker 2: that my mother experienced other forms of violence at home
Speaker 2: first before this happened. Maybe my grandfather beat my grandmother,
Speaker 2: Maybe there were terrible fights at home. We don't know.
Speaker 2: My mother has complete amnesia for anything and everything that
Speaker 2: happened before the age of five, but she does think
Speaker 2: that in theory, she probably witnessed things that she has
Speaker 2: completely blocked.
Speaker 1: What would this I mean, this is an extraordinary picture
Speaker 1: to be painted of a family, and you're the solo
Speaker 1: child of that family, right, the only child as it were.
Speaker 1: What would you say your relationship with your mother was,
Speaker 1: like you know, before she came to live with you,
Speaker 1: and all the story we're going to get into. But
Speaker 1: this complicated woman, Vinegary woman, teal in your explanation through
Speaker 1: most of your adult life until you're sort of back
Speaker 1: together in that way.
Speaker 2: You know. There's a really good word for this in French.
Speaker 2: It's the word fusionelle, and it's usually used about a
Speaker 2: couple and couple of fusionelle is a couple that's kind
Speaker 2: of I suppose totally blended, maybe codependent. So I would
Speaker 2: say that my mother saw me completely as an extension
Speaker 2: of and a projection of herself. We were dressed alike
Speaker 2: in matching dresses. Right up into my adolescence. I fel
Speaker 2: into an embarrassing age. She smothered me with love and
Speaker 2: affection until I was about twelve, and then as I
Speaker 2: started to separate and individuate, there was an enormous amount
Speaker 2: of conflict between us. But I do remember. I mean,
Speaker 2: it is extraordinary the instincts that we have as children
Speaker 2: that we just ignore, but they're telling us something. I
Speaker 2: remember being a child of about seven or eight and
Speaker 2: going into a shop with my mother and introducing myself
Speaker 2: to the greengrocer and saying, I'm the mother and this
Speaker 2: is my daughter. I felt responsible for this adult, and
Speaker 2: I felt I was the adult in the relationships. Somehow,
Speaker 2: even though I didn't know the backstory, I knew this
Speaker 2: person was vulnerable and damaged and not really fully able
Speaker 2: to parent. So she smothered me with the affections she
Speaker 2: didn't get. And then the moment I started to pull
Speaker 2: away from that, we were pretty well in conflict. And also,
Speaker 2: you've got to remember the thing about being an only child.
Speaker 2: This is the really vivid image for me is it's
Speaker 2: a triangle, and a triangle to me is an awkward shape.
Speaker 2: It's all elbows. It's not the harmony of a square.
Speaker 2: It's not the sort of beautiful elegance of a circle.
Speaker 2: There's something about a triangle. I associate it with those
Speaker 2: traffic signs on the side of the road that are
Speaker 2: warning you wrong way, go back.
Speaker 1: Yes, you've built a life on the other side of
Speaker 1: the world, right, So, but your relationship was always connected.
Speaker 1: You've said you'd go back, you'd You didn't separate from
Speaker 1: each other entirely during those years.
Speaker 2: No, But it was interesting that when I came to
Speaker 2: Australia when I was twenty four, when I fell in
Speaker 2: love and married my first husband, a lot of my
Speaker 2: kind of kluey friends said, oh, you're going as far
Speaker 2: away as possible to get away from your pa. It's no,
Speaker 2: I'm not. I just happened to have fallen in love
Speaker 2: with an Australian and he misses the climate, and he's
Speaker 2: been off at a fantastic job. And I had absolute
Speaker 2: blindness about whether I was in fact fleeing and trying
Speaker 2: to make more space for myself in what was a
Speaker 2: very claustrophobic family dynamic. My parents were incredibly overprotective. As
Speaker 2: a child, I was never allowed to go for sleepovers.
Speaker 2: They were people who naturally and when you think about
Speaker 2: their past, it's not surprising they catastrophized about everything. You know,
Speaker 2: long before mobile phones, I had to wring from wherever
Speaker 2: I was to say that I'd arrived safely. There were
Speaker 2: always contingency plans to come and rescue me from imminent
Speaker 2: danger and threat. I mean, they were two extremely, extremely
Speaker 2: anxious people, and now I can see that at twenty
Speaker 2: four I did take the first available opportunity to get
Speaker 2: away from them. But I was absolutely, stubbornly convinced when
Speaker 2: I was twenty four that I was just madly in love.
Speaker 1: And it had nothing to do with that, and that
Speaker 1: the whole family thing that was separate. I am an
Speaker 1: entirely separate human doing my own separate adventure I think
Speaker 1: probably one of the reasons that people are so fascinated
Speaker 1: with the story of your mother is because with all
Speaker 1: of that context, everybody's story is very different. But many
Speaker 1: people's relationship with their parents are very complicated. Their parents
Speaker 1: are not saints, their parents are their own damaged people.
Speaker 1: But it's not the story we like to tell. We
Speaker 1: like to always see mothers as being nurturing angels to
Speaker 1: a point, who we all owe a great deal when
Speaker 1: it gets a little further along in life, and is
Speaker 1: maybe our turn to take care of them? Right? And
Speaker 1: I'd love to know, given all the context you've just
Speaker 1: painted for us, the point at which you realized you
Speaker 1: did need to or want to, or feel obliged to.
Speaker 1: I don't know. You can tell me that in your
Speaker 1: mother to be with you? How did that? What led
Speaker 1: up to that? Holly?
Speaker 2: I love that question because it presupposes that the initiative
Speaker 2: was mine and it was no, not at all. So
Speaker 2: my father got dementia and had been put into care
Speaker 2: in the UK. And when he died, my mother was
Speaker 2: eighty eight. And I remember we were at an art
Speaker 2: gallery having lunch, and she leaned across the table and
Speaker 2: she said, and now I'm going to come and live
Speaker 2: with you. And there was this look of glee on
Speaker 2: her face, but it was a kind of glee that
Speaker 2: had a little streak of a sort of malice or
Speaker 2: mischief in it, as in, I'm going to create absolute havoc. Now,
Speaker 2: I can't even explain that to you, but I just
Speaker 2: know the look on her her face when she said
Speaker 2: that to me was now, I've got you. I've got you.
Speaker 2: And I think that I'm such an optimist. To be
Speaker 2: perfectly honest, I thought.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how you've ended up being an optimist.
Speaker 2: No, well, with a lot of work, a lot of
Speaker 2: and a very good second husband. Yes, I genuinely thought, Holly, Okay,
Speaker 2: my mother has had a really tough life, a really
Speaker 2: unhappy marriage, terrible years looking after my father while he
Speaker 2: was demented. I mean, visiting him in care and accompanying
Speaker 2: him and witnessing all of that, you know, dilapidation happening
Speaker 2: in some someone's brilliant mind. A terrible thing to have
Speaker 2: to witness for anybody who's gone through that. And I
Speaker 2: thought to myself, Okay, we are going to give her
Speaker 2: the best final years of her life we can. We
Speaker 2: are going to turn this woman's life around and give
Speaker 2: her joy, and we're going to give her affection, and
Speaker 2: she's going to get a new start, and eighty eight
Speaker 2: isn't too late. I just really built a fantasy around
Speaker 2: her throwing this bomb at us. I just thought, Okay,
Speaker 2: we'll make this work. And obviously I did that with
Speaker 2: a husband who was completely supportive and who didn't say
Speaker 2: no way, no way, is she coming to live with us?
Speaker 2: He just said, yeah, okay. And I guess in terms
Speaker 2: of the sort of push and pull and all the
Speaker 2: dynamics of relationships, I should say because this has occurred
Speaker 2: to me since when I met my second husband. He
Speaker 2: had a little boy who was nine at the time,
Speaker 2: who'd been very seriously ill between the ages three and seven,
Speaker 2: with a life threatening illness, and then whethered his parents
Speaker 2: divorce very badly. Are very se to very delicate boy.
Speaker 2: I don't have children of my own, but Louis came
Speaker 2: into my life. I learned an enormous amount from being
Speaker 2: a stepmother. Some of it was extremely difficult and some
Speaker 2: of it was immensely rewarding. But I guess that in
Speaker 2: the sort of give and take of a relationship, I
Speaker 2: had done a lot for Louis, and now it was
Speaker 2: my husband's turn to do the same back for me
Speaker 2: with my mother. So I think that without any of
Speaker 2: that being said, that was just implicit that that's what
Speaker 2: we were going to do.
Speaker 1: After this little break. What happens when Caroline's mum, Judith
Speaker 1: does move in. So you were optimistic, but you're also
Speaker 1: clear eyeding that you knew this was going to be interesting.
Speaker 1: You might have to make particul killer provisions and changes
Speaker 1: to your living situation and to the way that your
Speaker 1: relationship worked. How did you prepare for this, or rather,
Speaker 1: how did you make it happen?
Speaker 2: Well, again, a bit of delusion and optimism there, because
Speaker 2: my mother we thought might live independently of us, just
Speaker 2: down the road, and so we started to look at
Speaker 2: places that might be suitable.
Speaker 1: And now this involved you, theoretically, this involved your moving house.
Speaker 2: No, we thought that we would stay put, but that
Speaker 2: she we would find a place for her to live
Speaker 2: near us, and that soon became not really what she wanted.
Speaker 2: And then she said what she wanted to do was
Speaker 2: she wanted to live with us in our house and
Speaker 2: pay for us to build a second story on the house.
Speaker 1: So sort of an integrated granny flat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but she didn't want to live on the ground floor,
Speaker 2: which would have made more sense given that she already
Speaker 2: had mobility issues. She didn't like ground floors, so she said, no,
Speaker 2: I will have a top floor built and you will
Speaker 2: put in a stair chair. And she had all of
Speaker 2: that worked out. She's very practical. She did the sort
Speaker 2: of assessment of the architect and the beauty pageant with
Speaker 2: the builders, and when the builders came to talk about
Speaker 2: the contract, if they made no eye contact with her,
Speaker 2: she'd say, no, I'm not dealing with them. So she
Speaker 2: chose the youngest, least experienced builder who looked her in
Speaker 2: the eye and who understood that she was the client.
Speaker 2: We were not the clients. Yes, And she made a
Speaker 2: very very good call there. He did a fantastic job,
Speaker 2: and so we moved out of our house together just
Speaker 2: before COVID. Round the corner, the three of us found
Speaker 2: a house that we could live in for the seven
Speaker 2: months that a new story was built on our house,
Speaker 2: and just before COVID, thank god, we were able to
Speaker 2: move back into the house. And at the time, again
Speaker 2: optimist and delusional, I thought, well, there's a kitchenette up there,
Speaker 2: she's going to make herself most meals and come down
Speaker 2: maybe for dinner two or three times a week. But no,
Speaker 2: that's not what happened. So she made herself breakfast up there,
Speaker 2: and she never made dinner, and she never made lunch.
Speaker 2: She came downstairs for lunch every day, and she came
Speaker 2: downstairs for dinner every night, and then after dinner, she
Speaker 2: didn't exactly read the room. Even though she had a
Speaker 2: lovely sitting room upstairs and a television with every streaming
Speaker 2: service under the sun, she always wanted to sit and
Speaker 2: watch something with us in the evening, which usually meant
Speaker 2: that halfway through whatever we were watching, she'd be snoring,
Speaker 2: or David and I would be sitting watching something which
Speaker 2: suddenly had an incredibly explicit, graphic sex scene in it,
Speaker 2: and we'd be sitting there feeling as embarrassed as teenagers,
Speaker 2: while my mother would be sort of glue eyed to
Speaker 2: the rumpy pumpy, you know, like she never looked away.
Speaker 2: It was excruciating, and it got so bad, Holly, that
Speaker 2: the sound of the stairchair coming down the mechanical were
Speaker 2: of the chair became a trigger for me, Like I
Speaker 2: started to feel physically sick when I heard that chair moving,
Speaker 2: because it meant here she comes for lunch, and being
Speaker 2: French for her lunch is a non negotiable. You stop
Speaker 2: your day, whatever you're doing, and you have lunch, and
Speaker 2: it's two courses. It's a main meal. I mean, you
Speaker 2: know in France it would be three. So I suppose
Speaker 2: we were getting off lightly, but you know it would
Speaker 2: be a main dish that'd have to be dessert. And
Speaker 2: I resented this because you were cooking this. I was
Speaker 2: cooking this. I resented it. I'm ashamed of how much
Speaker 2: I resented it, but I did resent it.
Speaker 1: This is an enormous disruption in your life and your marriage. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how did your husband.
Speaker 2: With total grace and calm, I mean extraordinary, extraordinary, but
Speaker 2: he did find himself. So here we are again in
Speaker 2: triangle two point zero.
Speaker 1: The spiking elbows out.
Speaker 2: So it became pretty bad and dysfunctional. And my husband
Speaker 2: said to me, you know, the way you two speak
Speaker 2: to each other is so disturbing to me. He comes
Speaker 2: from a very loving, very well adjusted family. He had
Speaker 2: an obscenely happy, uncomplicated childhood that he said to me,
Speaker 2: I don't know how we're going to survive if you
Speaker 2: two don't find a new way of talking to each other.
Speaker 1: From his outside as eye, the way that you and
Speaker 1: your mother communicated was are we talking about shouting? Are
Speaker 1: we just talking about cruelty? We're talking about bobs? Are
Speaker 1: we talking about out and out insults like what.
Speaker 2: She deploys biting, sarcasm, biting and also furious and relentless
Speaker 2: judgment of me, of the food, of opinions of other people.
Speaker 2: So if other people came to the house afterwards, she'd
Speaker 2: give us a kind of blow by blow of their deficiencies.
Speaker 2: You know, they were ugly, they were badly dressed, They
Speaker 2: didn't have anything interesting to say. I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: really very vinegar. You remember I said vinegar vinegar. So
Speaker 2: that's when I said to my mother, I think we
Speaker 2: need a circuit breaker. I don't think there's anything that
Speaker 2: we can do here. Would you consider coming to see
Speaker 2: a family therapist with me? And, to my amazement, since
Speaker 2: she'd never done therapy, she said yes.
Speaker 1: Why do you think she did? Do you think that
Speaker 1: she knew that you were you know, when you just
Speaker 1: described the trigger of hearing the stairchair going. Do you
Speaker 1: think she knew that you were on your last nerve
Speaker 1: or do you think she had maybe always wanted to
Speaker 1: go to therapy in some way.
Speaker 2: No, but I think she knew that the household was
Speaker 2: becoming very dysfunctional. She can read my face and my
Speaker 2: body language pretty well.
Speaker 1: And when she's pushed you a little too far.
Speaker 2: Yes, maybe. And I think she also at the same time,
Speaker 2: as in a sort of very coquettish French way, she'd
Speaker 2: flirt with my husband and thinks my husband is, you know,
Speaker 2: God's gift. She was realizing that that triangulating that wedging
Speaker 2: was doing some damage, and whilst it gave her some power,
Speaker 2: it definitely gave her some power. I think some part
Speaker 2: of her must have realized that we were becoming a
Speaker 2: very unhappy home, and so she said to me, I'll go,
Speaker 2: but I don't want to open Pandora's box. So I
Speaker 2: don't want us to unpack all of what's happened before,
Speaker 2: or we'll never be able to put it all back
Speaker 2: in the box. So I'll go, but I'll only go
Speaker 2: for six sessions. I thought, well, you know that's not bad.
Speaker 1: You said that the therapist had never said with the
Speaker 1: first mother daughter.
Speaker 2: In this age bracket, well, we were sixty and ninety
Speaker 2: when we went, which is pretty game of my mother.
Speaker 2: I have to hand it to her.
Speaker 1: Going to therapy for the first time at ninety is
Speaker 1: a big deal.
Speaker 2: So how did it go?
Speaker 1: Caroline?
Speaker 2: The lovely therapist was probably, I suppose about twenty years
Speaker 2: younger than me, and I remember walking into her rooms
Speaker 2: and thinking, we are gonna eat you for breakfast. We
Speaker 2: are so fucked up. But you know what, she did
Speaker 2: not appear to be thrown by us at all, and so,
Speaker 2: you know, she said, why are you here? What seems
Speaker 2: to be the problem? And I thought, I'll pick something
Speaker 2: really small, because something small might be fixable. The other
Speaker 2: stuff maybe isn't. But I just said, I'm really struggling
Speaker 2: with the fact that my mother never says please and
Speaker 2: thank you for anything at home. You know, she just
Speaker 2: says wine, butter, bread. It's like we're her staff and
Speaker 2: it's just wearing us down. And the therapist turned to
Speaker 2: my mother and said, is that true, Judith, And my
Speaker 2: mother sort of ruffled out her feathers like a great, big,
Speaker 2: sort of Siberian owl, and she said, I've never believed
Speaker 2: in gratitude. I think it's demeaning that's so interesting, And honestly,
Speaker 2: I mean really, I had never heard a statement like
Speaker 2: that in my entire life. And in the big sort
Speaker 2: of computer of my brain, I was suddenly thinking, but gratitude.
Speaker 2: Gratitude is the lubricant in all social exchange. We are
Speaker 2: all giving and taking and receiving and bartering things and
Speaker 2: emotions and transactions all the time. If you don't have gratitude,
Speaker 2: then it is all purely transactional. And that is so
Speaker 2: cold and so unrewarding and so stark. It's just so stark.
Speaker 2: It just felt terrible what.
Speaker 1: She just said, and you'd never heard her say that. No,
Speaker 1: did it also click a lot of things into place
Speaker 1: for you in that room?
Speaker 2: It did? It did not in that room because it
Speaker 2: was too much of a bombshell to process everything. But
Speaker 2: then when I went back over my life and thought, gratitude, gratitude,
Speaker 2: let me see, let's go back in the files and
Speaker 2: think about gratitude.
Speaker 1: Hmm.
Speaker 2: Interesting. Never enjoys giving presents for Christmas and birthdays. Interesting, hmm.
Speaker 2: When she gets presents for Christmas and birthdays and she
Speaker 2: doesn't like them, she immediately pulls her face and says,
Speaker 2: I don't like it. Can I give it back?
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Suddenly a whole lot of memories flooded in and I thought,
Speaker 2: that's right. She doesn't do gratitude. It was a complete
Speaker 2: epiphany moment. The therapist said to her, well, you know
Speaker 2: what they say, Jude is just fake it until you
Speaker 2: make it. Why don't you just try, just try saying
Speaker 2: please and thank you a bit and see how you
Speaker 2: go with that. And my mother said, well, I can
Speaker 2: do that, but of course I won't mean it anyway.
Speaker 2: In the car on the way home, to my amazement,
Speaker 2: my mother said I liked her, whereas I thought she
Speaker 2: was going to say, well, I never want to go
Speaker 2: there again. And that evening we normally put out a
Speaker 2: glass of wine for her at about six o'clock, and
Speaker 2: she pre emptied the glass of wine, and she said,
Speaker 2: in a sort of child's voice, please thank you, please
Speaker 2: thank you, please thank you. Ken, I have a glass
Speaker 2: of wine. Please thank you.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, and you're going then, please thank you.
Speaker 2: My husband just pushed the glass of wine towards her
Speaker 2: and said, you know, instead of saying you're welcome, he said,
Speaker 2: don't mention it. He said mention it. He just pushed
Speaker 2: the glass of wine towards me and said, mention it. There's
Speaker 2: a sort of little provocation. She loves being teased by him.
Speaker 2: She loves being teased. She thinks it's affectionate, which it can.
Speaker 1: Be, but also maybe a little outlet for him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So every evening with the wine, she would do
Speaker 2: the please, thank you, please, thank you, and he would
Speaker 2: do the mention it routine, and after about ten days
Speaker 2: she dropped the baby voice and she just said, please,
Speaker 2: can I have a glass of wine? We taught my
Speaker 2: mother manners one oh one at ninety. At ninety it's extraordinary.
Speaker 3: So this whole experience, the therapy, I'm still combs backed
Speaker 3: a boy, that whole thing, particularly these days when we're
Speaker 3: so obsessed with gratitude and how it's the cornerstone, as
Speaker 3: you say, of everything, and now we've got to write
Speaker 3: our gratitude journals and we have to think of all
Speaker 3: the things we're grateful for.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, yeah, okay, anyway.
Speaker 2: I did try that, by the way, with my mother.
Speaker 2: I don't think the therapist suggested this, but I said
Speaker 2: to my mother in a kind of Pollyannis moment, when
Speaker 2: she said she was suffering from depression and loneliness and isolation.
Speaker 2: I said, have you tried a gratitude journal? And she said,
Speaker 2: what's that? And I explained to her what it was,
Speaker 2: and she said, oh, try give me a notebook. So
Speaker 2: you know, I gave her a notebook to write three
Speaker 2: things down. And after about two weeks, I said, how's
Speaker 2: it going, and she said, I can't think of three things?
Speaker 2: I said, well, just think of one. Then doesn't work,
Speaker 2: she said, about three weeks later, and that was the
Speaker 2: end of gratitude journaling that when.
Speaker 1: Did it I mean not that it was an enormous
Speaker 1: surprise after this story, but when did it become apparent
Speaker 1: that your mother wasn't going to be able to keep
Speaker 1: living with you?
Speaker 2: Oh? Well, you know, these things generally happen very suddenly.
Speaker 2: So she had a tendency to get UTIs UTIs I
Speaker 2: didn't know this at the time can lead to extreme delirium,
Speaker 2: and so she suddenly started behaving like a truly crazy
Speaker 2: person and hallucinating in front of us, seeing all sorts
Speaker 2: of figures from her childhood in France from stories she'd read.
Speaker 2: So she'd say, oh, a pretty pass Dona charp, you know,
Speaker 2: the little princess come into the room or something, or Tattaila,
Speaker 2: you know, Tintin is here. Incredibly pleasant hallucinations, but hallucinations nonetheless.
Speaker 2: Or she'd bang on the floor at three o'clock in
Speaker 2: the morning from upstairs and say, I have to discuss
Speaker 2: the film we've just watched, and we'd be thinking, oh
Speaker 2: my god, it's three in the morning, what is going on.
Speaker 2: The kind of behavior she exhibited was not the same
Speaker 2: as my father in the earth stages of dementia when
Speaker 2: he was still at home. So I didn't think that
Speaker 2: she was becoming demented. I didn't think it was progressive
Speaker 2: cognitive decline. I did wait quite a long time to
Speaker 2: call the doctor, and when I called the doctor, the
Speaker 2: doctor said, ambulance immediately, uti delirium. Off she goes, And
Speaker 2: sadly for my mother, not that any of us knew
Speaker 2: this at the time, that day when she was taken
Speaker 2: to hospital suffering from delirium was the last day that
Speaker 2: she was at home, because after that, various other things
Speaker 2: ensued that made it impossible, according to the medical team
Speaker 2: supervising her, for her to come home, and those were
Speaker 2: a combination of things to do with continence and mobility,
Speaker 2: and I racked my brains. I thought, I have got
Speaker 2: to be able to bring her home, because she kept
Speaker 2: begging and begging. In her lucid moments, she would just
Speaker 2: the word home, home, home, over and over and over again.
Speaker 2: She also said home, home, home even when she was delirious,
Speaker 2: so it was really a powerful, powerful idea in her head.
Speaker 2: I tried to cost out what it would be like
Speaker 2: to have a nurse come in and change her pads
Speaker 2: three times a day and put her to bed and
Speaker 2: do all the things. And the medical team said to me, really,
Speaker 2: this is not going to be feasible. And the agencies
Speaker 2: that I spoke to that would have provided the staff
Speaker 2: and made a lot of money out of us, said,
Speaker 2: this is going to ruin your life. You will be
Speaker 2: perpetually chasing after carers that don't show up. You will
Speaker 2: be forced to have strangers in your house three times
Speaker 2: a day because you'll never get the same people. We
Speaker 2: just can't guarantee that, even though this would be a
Speaker 2: very profitable contract for us, we have to say to you,
Speaker 2: in all honesty, don't do this.
Speaker 1: When we come back. Caroline sets out on what can
Speaker 1: own only be described as an aged care odyssey, stay
Speaker 1: with us. This is where this part of your story
Speaker 1: is very relatable. I think to a lot of people
Speaker 1: who come to this point with their parents, and that
Speaker 1: thing about old age of the going into hospital, and
Speaker 1: is that the end of home life is very common,
Speaker 1: terrifyingly common. What you've written and talked about then about
Speaker 1: how to find the right place for your mother, and
Speaker 1: you know what, and this is probably a really glib
Speaker 1: thing to say, so I apologize in advance. But given
Speaker 1: everything that you've just laid out then, the amount of
Speaker 1: care and effort and that you went to even in
Speaker 1: that explanation just then to try and keep her home
Speaker 1: with you when really having a home with you is
Speaker 1: ruining your life, it's extraordinary. Do you just think that's
Speaker 1: a very deep seated instinct to want to protect and
Speaker 1: love her as much as you can, even though actually
Speaker 1: it's probably better for both of you if she's not.
Speaker 2: There, Holly, I don't think it's about love, but I
Speaker 2: do think it's about duty, and I'm very interested in
Speaker 2: duty and the sense of responsibility. I think I was
Speaker 2: inculcated with having a sense of duty to my parents
Speaker 2: very early. I owed them a lot. They were very
Speaker 2: conditional in their love of me, so it was very
Speaker 2: dependent on me getting good marks, being compliant and being obedient.
Speaker 2: And I also got a sense of a kind of
Speaker 2: huge weight of tragedy on both their shoulders, where all
Speaker 2: their expectations were invested in me, and my duty was
Speaker 2: to deliver. I couldn't disappoint them because everything else had
Speaker 2: disappointed them, and with my father, I was able. My
Speaker 2: mother had a nervous breakdown when my father got diagnosed
Speaker 2: with dementia, and she became completely useful and passive. So
Speaker 2: I went to London and I managed to negotiate and
Speaker 2: navigate my way through the British healthcare system and I
Speaker 2: got my father into what is regarded as the best
Speaker 2: care in Britain, and I was incredibly proud of doing that.
Speaker 2: It was very difficult. I outlined what I had to
Speaker 2: do in my memoir, but I had to basically create
Speaker 2: a narrative around his identity as a Jew, which was
Speaker 2: not entirely honest, but I had to play that up
Speaker 2: to get him into Jewish care, which is regarded as
Speaker 2: the best in Britain. I felt with my mother that
Speaker 2: I had to do exactly the same thing, but I
Speaker 2: could I couldn't build a narrative in the Australian healthcare
Speaker 2: system where I could find the right place for her,
Speaker 2: So she's ended up somewhere where she's completely a fish
Speaker 2: out of water. This is a very sophisticated, very well read,
Speaker 2: very cosmopolitan woman who's lived an extremely privileged life, materially
Speaker 2: privileged life, but also has an extraordinary mind. You know,
Speaker 2: she's really interested in contemporary politics and affairs. She's interested
Speaker 2: in contemporary cinema. She's reading in three languages, English, French
Speaker 2: and Russian to this day. And she's sitting somewhere very
Speaker 2: whitebread with people who mostly haven't traveled, who are deeply
Speaker 2: suspicious of anything that's foreign, who don't like spicy food
Speaker 2: or anything that's too you know, pronounced. She has no
Speaker 2: one to talk to about the things that matter to her.
Speaker 2: So the other day I took her on and outing
Speaker 2: to the Margrete exhibition at the Art Gary of New
Speaker 2: South Wales. And the next day she said to me,
Speaker 2: I couldn't tell anyone about the exhibition because none of
Speaker 2: them had heard of Margreete. Well, you know, Magreete is
Speaker 2: not something or someone that everybody needs to have heard of.
Speaker 2: But there are so many examples I can give you
Speaker 2: of where I do feel every day that I have
Speaker 2: failed her and I have betrayed her because I have
Speaker 2: not been able to do for her what I did
Speaker 2: for my father.
Speaker 1: That's incredibly difficult, but it sounds like, given the context,
Speaker 1: in the situation that you were in, you did try
Speaker 1: incredibly hard to get her in the best care that
Speaker 1: you could. What did you learn about that system here
Speaker 1: in Australia.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. Well, first of all, the first place
Speaker 2: I took her to, I was fooled by the rooms
Speaker 2: which were glossy and looked sort of hotel lukesish and
Speaker 2: nicely maintained gardens. And one of the most stupid things
Speaker 2: that we do is somehow we think if they can
Speaker 2: take care of the plants, they can take care of
Speaker 2: the people. Well, I'm sorry, but the gardening team are
Speaker 2: not the nursing teams, so you should not make that equation.
Speaker 2: And that case turned out to be so bad, so
Speaker 2: badly run, and so bad in every way that I
Speaker 2: actually had to stage an intervention and take out and
Speaker 2: put her into a new place, which of course is
Speaker 2: extremely disruptive for her. But she agreed with me. I
Speaker 2: mean she obviously she wanted to go. I would never
Speaker 2: have done that against her wishes. She's still not in
Speaker 2: the right place. So look, one of the problems is
Speaker 2: that we lived in the Illawarra. The Illawarra has a
Speaker 2: chronic bed shortage of more than one hundred and sixty
Speaker 2: two beds short when I was looking in our area,
Speaker 2: so this was at the end of last year. I
Speaker 2: don't know what the shortage is now, but it's probably
Speaker 2: just as acute, which has forced me outside our community,
Speaker 2: which means I don't have the same GP, I don't
Speaker 2: have the same Allied health services. I've had to start
Speaker 2: again in a completely new suburb where I know no
Speaker 2: one and nothing, and I am driving up and down
Speaker 2: the highway halfway to Sydney three times a week to
Speaker 2: compensate for all the things that are wrong with the
Speaker 2: place where mum is. And the place where mum is
Speaker 2: is regarded as one of the better places in the
Speaker 2: Sydney metropolitan area, but it's not great.
Speaker 1: What do you think with all of those things said,
Speaker 1: what have you learned both in your experience in Britain?
Speaker 1: And here are the things that matter? As you were saying,
Speaker 1: you know, like don't be fooled by the nice rooms.
Speaker 1: Don't be fooled by the shiny plants. What matters, what
Speaker 1: makes it right? I mean, And given also what you've
Speaker 1: said about the cultural fit, is probably not going to
Speaker 1: be right.
Speaker 2: No, I think that's probably the hardest thing of all.
Speaker 2: I think there's only one place that Mum would fit,
Speaker 2: and it would probably be even though she's not Jewish herself.
Speaker 2: I think it probably would be Jewish care simply because
Speaker 2: the mix of residents would be more European and they
Speaker 2: have the same background culture. Look in the end, Holly,
Speaker 2: it's very very simple to say what the problem is,
Speaker 2: and it's impossible to fix. And it's the staff, the
Speaker 2: training of the staff, and the retention. So I'll just
Speaker 2: give you an example of something that I think is
Speaker 2: so poignant about where Mum is. Most of the staff
Speaker 2: where she is are wonderful young people from Nepal, probably
Speaker 2: from rural families, probably from quite extreme poverty. Most of
Speaker 2: them are studying to be nurses or engineers if they're males.
Speaker 2: The training is so basic and so rudimentary that the
Speaker 2: other day I was in the kitchen area of Mum's place.
Speaker 2: They welcome you being in the kitchen, and the nice
Speaker 2: thing about where she is is there is an open
Speaker 2: planned kitchen and the food is cooked on her floor,
Speaker 2: so you can smell the food cooking, which is great
Speaker 2: and it's one of the things that Maggie Beer, for example,
Speaker 2: has really championed in that fantastic program of hers because
Speaker 2: the smell of the food triggers your salivary glands, so
Speaker 2: it actually has a physiological benefit. Anyway, as in the kitchen,
Speaker 2: and I was making mum a piece of toast, and
Speaker 2: one of the care is said to me, oh, is
Speaker 2: that what toast is? And I said, yeah, of course
Speaker 2: that's what toast is. What did you think toast was?
Speaker 2: And she said, well, we don't eat toasts, so I
Speaker 2: didn't know what toast was. So I just always put
Speaker 2: the bread in the machine to warm it up. But
Speaker 2: I didn't know it had to change color. Oh okay,
Speaker 2: so that's really basic. Let me give you another example. Porridge.
Speaker 2: My mother has porridge in the morning. Sometimes the porridge
Speaker 2: comes with lumps. It's absolutely inedible. So I go to
Speaker 2: the cares and I say, the porridge is lumpy, how's
Speaker 2: about you try and make it like congy And immediately
Speaker 2: there's a light that goes on in their eyes because
Speaker 2: they know conngy. They eat congy, Suddenly the porridge has
Speaker 2: no lumps in it. If you don't train people who
Speaker 2: don't eat any of the food that you're dishing up
Speaker 2: to your residence to know what the barometer is of
Speaker 2: should it be salty or sweet, Should it be lumpy
Speaker 2: or smooth, should it be brown or white? You know,
Speaker 2: these are basics that we take for granted, but you
Speaker 2: take away the quality of life. A good piece of
Speaker 2: toast and a smooth bowl of porridg It sounds so simple,
Speaker 2: but if that's not part of the training, it's really
Speaker 2: you know, this stuff is really upsettingly basic.
Speaker 1: Yes, because it's it makes such a difference to the
Speaker 1: everyday experience of being there and the dignity and any
Speaker 1: little pockets of joy.
Speaker 2: That's right, So the pocket of joy rests on the
Speaker 2: fact that you have enough butter and marmalade on your
Speaker 2: properly browned piece of toast.
Speaker 1: Tell me about asking you you wrote in that essay
Speaker 1: about how the word was I was gonna say pushy,
Speaker 1: but that's the wrong word. But like, how involved as
Speaker 1: as a family member to be in like, not necessarily
Speaker 1: in that specific example, but to be asking about the
Speaker 1: care and the small things that happen and that you know,
Speaker 1: you wrote about whether or not they lose garments in
Speaker 1: the cleaning process, whether or not if you are a
Speaker 1: family member who is very involved and you're there and saying, look,
Speaker 1: my mother needs things like this or like that, or
Speaker 1: is it well received, does the squeaky wheel get the grease.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's an interesting question. Look, I have been told
Speaker 2: that people like me who are really on their case
Speaker 2: are regarded as absolute nightmares. But I've also been told
Speaker 2: that families where there is a high level of advocacy
Speaker 2: tend to get better treatment. I think though, that all
Speaker 2: of that has come with a very high price in
Speaker 2: terms of my mental health. So I have had several
Speaker 2: kind of moments of absolute mental wobble and collapse where
Speaker 2: I have felt completely overwhelmed by the advocacy role and
Speaker 2: by being sometimes the mediator between this very vinegary mother
Speaker 2: and these very sweet, very overworked, under trained staff. So,
Speaker 2: you know, funny enough, when we go back to the
Speaker 2: gratitude thing, there was an incident where I was called
Speaker 2: by my mother and there was some sort of standoff
Speaker 2: between her and a nurse who had complained that my
Speaker 2: mother didn't say please or thank you. So we're right
Speaker 2: back at that. You'll remember I learned well, you know,
Speaker 2: I had to say to the nurse, your job is
Speaker 2: not to teach my mother manners. Your job is to
Speaker 2: care for her. I agree with you. My mother is
Speaker 2: not the most grateful person in the world. She's French,
Speaker 2: she's blunt, she's spiky. I acknowledge all of those things.
Speaker 2: But it is not your job to tell her to
Speaker 2: say please and thank you. The other day, my mother
Speaker 2: was in high dudgeon because the caress had said to her,
Speaker 2: you should smile more. And my mother said, you're all
Speaker 2: obsessed with smiling here. This is a smiling culture. In Australia,
Speaker 2: you smile all the time, and it's completely meaningless. In France,
Speaker 2: we don't smile all the time. And I thought about that,
Speaker 2: and I thought, you know, you're right. We do smile
Speaker 2: a lot. We do use that facial expression as a
Speaker 2: way of navigating, you know, unfamiliar situations, et cetera. And
Speaker 2: it is true that the French dispense their smiles a
Speaker 2: little more sparingly, you know. So these are cultural things
Speaker 2: and she's clashing with people all the time, and then
Speaker 2: I'm having to come in and kind of try and
Speaker 2: settle everybody down, apologize for her rudeness and high handedness
Speaker 2: to the staff, try and get my mother's feathers kind
Speaker 2: of smooth down, and remind her that there is some
Speaker 2: things about this place that are good, and there's some
Speaker 2: cares that she likes, as well as some cares that
Speaker 2: she doesn't. But it's incredibly taxing, and I do feel guilty.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's also for many families who are in the
Speaker 1: situation that you are in, and you have been. You
Speaker 1: are your mother's primary carer. I guess, for one of
Speaker 1: a better term, for that period before she went into
Speaker 1: the facility, that must have been a lot of mental
Speaker 1: load and physical work of its own kind. And I
Speaker 1: think that people often think, well, once I've got her
Speaker 1: in the right place, that will be lifted from me.
Speaker 1: But it sounds like that is all still there.
Speaker 2: Look, I think that that is really a miss in
Speaker 2: this whole situation. And so many people have said to me, oh,
Speaker 2: you must be so relieved she's not at home anymore. Well, yes,
Speaker 2: I don't have the trigger of the stairchair sound. I
Speaker 2: don't have the interruption of having to make lunch every day.
Speaker 2: She's not there watching television with us in the evening.
Speaker 2: All of those things are a great reprieve. However, to
Speaker 2: compensate for how unhappy she is, how much of a
Speaker 2: fish out of water she is, I've hired a companion
Speaker 2: whom she refers to dismissively as my jiggelow. I've hired
Speaker 2: a couple of physios to try and help her with
Speaker 2: improving her mobility. But the myth is that you give
Speaker 2: these people over into professional care and that suddenly you're
Speaker 2: footloose and fancy free and you've got oodles of time. No,
Speaker 2: you're still bringing things from home. You're often supplementing little
Speaker 2: or no social activities. You are advocate, you are the
Speaker 2: first port of care for any medical interventions appointments. I
Speaker 2: still take my mother on an outing once a week
Speaker 2: to try and give her something to look forward to.
Speaker 2: And what is staggering to me is that there are
Speaker 2: statistics that bear this out. I think in the twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four survey that carers New South Wales did, they
Speaker 2: discovered that one third of carers of people who were
Speaker 2: in residential aged care were providing between eight and forty
Speaker 2: hours of support a week, and that forty three percent
Speaker 2: we're providing more than twenty hours. Now, that is a
Speaker 2: lot for someone that you've technically handed over to be
Speaker 2: looked after by other people. You are still doing a
Speaker 2: fair amount. And so when I discovered that the cares allowance,
Speaker 2: if you're eligible for it, stops the day you put
Speaker 2: someone into care, I thought this is out of step
Speaker 2: with reality. The reality surely should be that you should
Speaker 2: continue to receive the care as allowance at least for
Speaker 2: three to six months as an adjustment buffer while you
Speaker 2: work out what your role and responsibility is going to be,
Speaker 2: because you are not going to be able to suddenly
Speaker 2: find a job magically the moment you've handed your parent over,
Speaker 2: and you are still going to be required, especially in
Speaker 2: those first three to six months, to ease them in.
Speaker 1: Absolutely the attention that the piece that you've read about
Speaker 1: this got, because it obviously struck a big nerve. Tell
Speaker 1: me a little bit about the response and whether or
Speaker 1: not you think that this is an issue, because we've
Speaker 1: been seeing a lot about age care in the headlines
Speaker 1: for several years now. Do you think it's a fixable issue?
Speaker 1: And do you think that any of the responses and
Speaker 1: the conversations you've had around this since you started talking
Speaker 1: about it actually have an impact.
Speaker 2: It's been really poignant and very overwhelming, and I'm sorry
Speaker 2: that I haven't been able to answer the hundreds of comments.
Speaker 2: So I think when the peace in the Guardian first appeared,
Speaker 2: there were nearly seventy comments almost immediately, and most of
Speaker 2: them were along the lines of I feel seen, I
Speaker 2: feel heard, thank you for sharing an experience that identifies
Speaker 2: absolutely or correlates absolutely with my own. Then there's another
Speaker 2: lot of people saying this is all the problem of
Speaker 2: this being a for profit business. The moment you mondetize
Speaker 2: old age, you're never going to get anything good happening.
Speaker 2: Most people seem to agree with me that the training
Speaker 2: of staff is the bottom line problem, and I have
Speaker 2: to say that I think that the Star rating system.
Speaker 2: I know we're all completely obsessed with rating systems, whether
Speaker 2: it's our holidays or our meals or our ubers or
Speaker 2: whatever it is, but the Star rating system for aged
Speaker 2: care facilities is not done by an independent assessment that
Speaker 2: is in any way a reliable guide or marker standards.
Speaker 2: It can provide you with some warning of some places
Speaker 2: where things look a little bit ropey and you might
Speaker 2: want to avoid them. But I think we need a
Speaker 2: completely different system of independent assessment, and that we haven't
Speaker 2: got any of the safeguards in place that we need,
Speaker 2: and that we are not at the moment able to
Speaker 2: recruit the right people into this profession and make it
Speaker 2: in any way attractive. And I can, having seen what
Speaker 2: my mother's cares have to do, I can see that
Speaker 2: it is not an attractive profession. But that, for example,
Speaker 2: I was saying to the care home the other day,
Speaker 2: you know, most of the staff here very well meaning,
Speaker 2: very kind. The Nepalese are very kind and very patient
Speaker 2: and gentle people. Their English is absolutely terrible and almost
Speaker 2: completely incomprehensible. So if you add in the difficulty of
Speaker 2: hearing aids, these these two lots of people are not
Speaker 2: able to communicate. So I said to Mum's care provider,
Speaker 2: just think how you would stand out from the pack
Speaker 2: as an attractive prospect if you offered ongoing English lessons
Speaker 2: to your staff. And you know they wrote that down
Speaker 2: in a notebook and said, what a fabulous idea.
Speaker 1: Well I'm waiting, Caroline, Thank you so much for telling
Speaker 1: me your story in your mother's story, there is actually
Speaker 1: one more thing I wanted to ask you, how has
Speaker 1: this experience affected what you're thinking about your lady is.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. Well, this is where being an only
Speaker 2: child really sucks a in terms of my responsibility for
Speaker 2: my mother, but also in terms of the fact that
Speaker 2: as an only child with no children, I have to
Speaker 2: think to myself, Okay, what are the options going to
Speaker 2: be for me? And I've decided, Holly, that my preferred
Speaker 2: option is going to be robot care. I want a
Speaker 2: robot to wipe my bump. I don't want a person
Speaker 2: to have to do that. And I'm also a very,
Speaker 2: very big believer in voluntary assisted dying. I hope that
Speaker 2: we will be able to roll that out to a
Speaker 2: wider group of people. My mother says to me about
Speaker 2: once a month, I want to go to Dignitas in Switzerland.
Speaker 2: I need to go to Switzerland. She doesn't say how
Speaker 2: we're going to get her to Switzerland, but basically she's
Speaker 2: had enough and she would like to check out. And
Speaker 2: I completely agree with that.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. This has been an extraordinary, wonderful conversation,
Speaker 1: and I know very many of our listeners are going
Speaker 1: to feel exactly the way the readers did and say
Speaker 1: I feel seen after that.
Speaker 2: Thankk you, Holly, thank you. Okay.
Speaker 1: All I have to say after that interview is thank
Speaker 1: you to Caroline for her honesty and grace, to all
Speaker 1: of you for giving us a reason to make this
Speaker 1: show and me a chance to sit down and listen
Speaker 1: to stories like Caroline's. It is an honor and I
Speaker 1: I'm so grateful for it. As I said, if you
Speaker 1: want to find out more about Caroline and her impressive
Speaker 1: work and her beautiful writing, there's a link in the
Speaker 1: show notes. Go and do that. And if you're struggling
Speaker 1: with the loss or preemptive loss of a parent, please
Speaker 1: scroll back to our episode on grief. It was in
Speaker 1: the first season of mid with Jackie Bailey. It's called
Speaker 1: Grief Has No Time for Your Bullshit, And again it's
Speaker 1: about the reality of loss, not the greening card version.
Speaker 1: And if you want to hear another story from a
Speaker 1: wise woman about the complexity of family and mothers, go
Speaker 1: and listen to the interview I did with Virginia Trioli.
Speaker 1: It's about food on the surface of it, but it's
Speaker 1: actually about so much more, and she tells an extraordinary
Speaker 1: story about her own Vinegary mother. The executive producer of
Speaker 1: this show is named A. Brown, Senior producer is Grace Rufrey,
Speaker 1: the producer is Tarlie Blackman, and we've had audio production
Speaker 1: from Jacob Brown. And I want to thank all of
Speaker 1: them for making mid so special. I hope this episode
Speaker 1: made you feel seen. I hope it helped. I hope
Speaker 1: you come back next week