Making a commitment to care - 2024 01 26

 

I have been processing the time records from 2022 and thinking about how impossible it was that I was trying to take care of Mom, a frail elder with complex health issues, and work full time. Even if you remove my attempt to maintain my fulltime paid work, the fact that I was on caregiving duty each month, sometimes exceeding 600 hours in a single month, often more than 550, never less than 500, was already an impossible workload to survive with any degree of success.

In early April, 2022, I wrote to my friend, a health science professional, about the situation I was in,

"I wonder if we have an accurate assessment of the real cost of transferring primary caregiving duties into home-based care and how those costs are being calculated, factored and substantially shared by stakeholder institutions - institutional providers, municipal government, provincial government, health services, federal government.

These are my top-of-mind thoughts after our discussion on Tuesday. What I noticed, internally, was a sense of relief to put my finger on why I feel my time, effort and resources are being taken advantage of, even as my family, my community and my government benefit from the health outcomes as a direct result from my untraced expenditure of valuable service."

At the end of April, 2022, I had been taking care of Mom for 6 months. I as struggling mentally, emotionally and financially. My paid work was suffering because I was barely able to complete minimal tasks to fulfill requirements. I was unable to leave the house and property for more than 20 minutes at a time most days. Any replacement caregiving I could schedule for Mom, that time was immediately used up getting caught up on paid work. I had not foreseen the difficulty I was in. I had expected that I would be able to seamless incorporate Mom's life and needs into my own and carry on with the life I already had before she arrived. I had assumed that my years in professional work, as an administrator, educator, academic, carpenter and project manager would be sufficient for me to manage Mom's family caregiving with ease.

I had not foreseen the growing feeling of resentment I would experience as I realized the expectation of my family, and my society, were that I would shoulder this work alone. Work that no one else was willing to do. Work that would put my Mom at risk of loneliness, injury, and early death if I put her in an institution. I felt taken advantage. I felt put upon, I felt exploited. I was baffled and appalled at the profound lack of systems support for the work I was doing. I was angry at the inequitable distribution of work. I was anxious about the increasing frailty of my household - our increasing socio-economic vulnerability - the longer we succeeded at giving Mom the quality of life and care that she deserved.

This morning I was thinking about the difference between the work of raising my own three children in admittedly impovershed conditions, and the work of caring for my 93 year old fragile elder Mom.

What occurred to me this morning is that I neve questioned the work of raising my children, I accepted it as a condition of giving birth. I expected to give everything I had to taking care of them to the best of my ability. I didn’t expect anyone else to help me out, I was grateful for nearby grandparents who were similarily committed to their grandchildren. I was grateful for the family allowance cheques that came each month. It made an extremely difficult mission achievable and all my children survived my parenting to become functional adults with their own families.

It is different with the care of my elderly Mom. For one thing, I am not her only child. The work of caring for Mom should at least distribute equally across all her children. But, as a female child, and as the one child who had prepared living accommodations for Mom, this translated into the rest of my siblings not feeling the same level of obligation and commitment. This is not unusual. The majority of family caregiving time is being covered by a single female child of the frail elder, even when there are other siblings capable of taking on the same level of commitment.

A second key difference is that our frail elders have spent their lifetimes, to the point of living to a frail old age, making a contribution to their society. They have worked, paid taxes, volunteered, raised families. They have given their life work to their society. The society has benefited from their life work. Why, then, does not our society feel a compelling sense of commitment to ensure the health and well being of these frail elders in their final years?

This is the generational difference I see between raising children and caring for frail elders. The health and well being of our children is the responsibilty of the parents, with support from the society who benefits from bringing up future contributing citizens. The health and well being of our frail elders should be the responsibility of our society, including near family. Neither of these missions should be left on the shoulders of one woman.