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You and Yours - Transcript 成人论坛 Radio 4 |
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TX: 10.01.08 - Looking After Mum PRESENTER: PETER WHITE |
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THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE 成人论坛 CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. WHITE As many of you will know by now throughout this month we and other parts of the 成人论坛 are presenting a special series of features on the issues surrounding social care - the help needed by an increasingly ageing population to go on living as full a life as possible. But just because we presenters sit here each day, apparently dishing out good advice on all manner of topics it doesn't mean that when the chips are down we then actually get it wrong ourselves sometimes. And it when it came to looking after my mum, towards the end of her life, I think that despite the best of intentions, I think, I got it wrong. I suppose what I tried was a care of - a kind of care pre-emptive strike. My mum was in her late 70s when we invited her to come and live with us. She'd already had a couple of falls and had she stayed living on her own she might well have qualified for some social care. But what she really needed, we thought, was someone to keep an eye on her. She'd just been widowed very suddenly for the second time, she'd never enjoyed her own company anyway, sheltered warden controlled accommodation might have been an option but she was dead against the idea - full of old people - she said, as if she was about 23. And so she came to live with us. I think what my mum visualised when we invited her was that we would all be one big happy family, it would be like it was when we invited her up for Sunday lunch or when she came for Christmas - long cosy chats in the front room, watching telly together, regular trips out. Put like that it doesn't sound unreasonable does it? But Jo and I had lived together as a couple, with no other adults, a few kids, for 27 years, suddenly there was someone else in the equation and not just for the odd meal, not just for Christmas but forever. And someone who thought they'd been invited as a house guest. Bluntly, it was a disaster, not a sudden explosive rip roaring disaster, just a slow drip, drip oh what have we done kind of disaster. Mum too had run her own home for 56 years and at the very least she now wanted to help us run ours. She wanted to bring her own pristine ideal home housekeeping to us and thought that Jo, a working wife, would be glad of it. But Jo quickly, I realised, though not quickly enough, gritted her teeth every time she left some washing up in the sink and came back to find it perfectly put away. And every time mum picked up a duster to spirit away almost invisible flecks of dust all attempts to stop my mum doing this fell on increasingly, literally, deaf ears. But perhaps more crucially there was just a serious mismatch of expectations. It was, I guess, all about space and boundaries and controls. We tried talking - me with my mum, Jo with mum, me with Jo, sometimes, though not often enough, altogether, nothing seemed to sort it out. I can only convey how bad it got by telling you the almost unthinkable, something that I'm still ashamed about, which is that two years later we found ourselves sitting down with my mum and a pile of brochures on accommodation for the elderly, suggesting that we had to look for some kind of an alternative, it just wasn't working. My mum obviously was deeply hurt, Jo felt like an ogre but an ogre who'd come to the end of her tether and as for me I just felt caught in the middle really, having failed to read the situation properly. In the end my mum stayed. Confronting the situation head on Jo realised that mum couldn't move out, psychologically it was far too late. So Jo soldiered on and circumstances changed enough that we could first adapt a bed sitting room for her needs and finally construct the nearest thing to a granny flat we could produce. So mum ended her life secure in her accommodation but not surrounded by the contentment that I'd wanted for her. So could we have done anything differently? And what about other solutions? In a moment I'll be talking to Jackie Highe, who's author of Now Where Did I Put My Glasses - Caring For Your Parents. But first this is an experience I'm sure that's been reflected throughout the country. Anita's mum died suddenly on holiday just over a year ago and this forced a decision on her and her husband, Dave, they invited Anita's father, Ernie, to live with them and their sons Chris and James. Well I visited them in their Cambridgeshire home to hear more about their experiences. DAVE It was something we'd talked about and planned for and hoped would be many years away. But it was almost instantaneous, there was just no question of your father wanting to live on his own was there? ANITA He was so upset, she was just dancing and one minute here and the next minute off she went. We don't think really that dad felt he'd got a choice other than to come and live here, he literally said what am I going to do, I can't bear my life without her. They'd been together since they were eight years old. He always thought that he would go first and that mum would be left and we would look after her. WHITE Have you ever thought that perhaps we were hasty, perhaps we didn't - hadn't seen it all through? DAVE We knew that there'd be difficulties but we've coped with everything that's come along haven't we? ANITA And I think he feels more comfortable now than the first few months, which were quite hard, because they obviously had their own home and he was boss of that, if you like. So I think he's found it a major adjustment to come here. WHITE That was what my mum found I think, I don't think we completely forced - she'd run her own home since her early 20s and my wife thought at least that she wanted to run hers. DAVE It's very difficult when you've got any number of adults in the same space - you've all got your own ideas on how to do things and sometimes there's bound to be clashes isn't there. WHITE I'm actually trying to remember the decisions we made and the extent to which we thought them through and particularly I'm trying to think whether we thought about the relationships between individuals. ANITA I think that is always difficult. I mean our children find it difficult and we've found this mainly with Chris, since dad's been here, although he's got older and he's wanted his independence he's not here so often, which we find quite difficult to cope with to be honest. My father doesn't understand how the younger generation work - their music, their clothes, their lifestyle - and he's very, if you like, slating towards Chris sometimes, which does obviously sometimes cause friction. WHITE I sense in you, Anita, someone almost a bit like me who was trying to make everybody happy but in my case, you know, I didn't foresee some of the pressures that my wife and my mum would have. Two people who'd got on really well before. DAVE At a distance. WHITE Sharing - well not in the same house. Yeah. ANITA It is difficult and one of the situations I find hard is that I feel that as soon as I'm up I ought to be going to make sure dad's okay, although he would never admit it he has become more and more dependent upon us. And I guess as he gets older that situation will continue to change. WHITE With Chris and your dad, your younger son, do they talk this out at all, the fact that there's a clash? ANITA No, I don't think so, I don't think Chris would see it as a problem, I just think that he's more comfortable if he's out of the way sometimes. That's just my opinion. Chris may tell you something different I don't know. CHRIS My granddad will say oh yobs, blah, blah, blah, youths no respect for anything and he doesn't know really at all, he just likes to assume everything as one. If he sees us walking down the street and it's dark - oh bloody yobs up to no good. And it's hard to mix without having an argument about oh it should be done like this and we would have done it like that and how we have it. WHITE What kind of things do you argue about? CHRIS A lot of stuff really. College, apparently we get off easy now because we don't get the slipper or anything, stuff like that. Just in general old fashioned style things that he thinks should carry on that don't. ERNIE He doesn't want to learn anything I can teach him, nothing. I'd like to teach him lots of things - astronomy, navigation, all sorts of things - but he doesn't want to know. WHITE Have you sat down at all and talked about that? ERNIE Yes occasionally we'll sit and talk about it, yeah. But we agree to differ as it were. WHITE And what about Anita, because it bothers her a bit doesn't it? ERNIE Obviously because she's in the middle all the time, so she tends to pacify us both. WHITE Yeah, I remember that feeling very well, being in the middle. Well in the studio listening to that is Jackie Highe, so where did I go wrong Jackie? HIGHE Well Peter I think probably what you did was not talk about enough of that stuff that you talked about later beforehand. If you'd sat down with your mum and said look we'd love you to come and live with us, we want you to be there but we have to set out how it's going to be, you do understand don't you that this will happen and that will happen. And you should have as well really talked to your wife about it a bit more because really what it needs is for everybody to look it from everybody else's point of view. From your point of view you were doing what you thought was right, from your mother's point of view this was her home now, this was where she was living and she didn't want to feel like a visitor. So I mean I spoke to somebody who actually - her mum was quite active and had a little bit of spare time on her hands and so she liked to clean so she gave her mother a cleaning job, in the sense that she said can I do your cleaning for you ... WHITE And she paid her? HIGHE And she paid her. WHITE So dignity was preserved. HIGHE Exactly and she said the result of it was that I got a great cleaner and me mum got a part-time job, which is fantastic. It's all about self respect. WHITE Are there though sometimes, especially if you do what you say I should have done, we talked, at other times when, tough though it may seem, you should say no because we're getting themes from the message board - guilt and space - one poster says currently in a one bedroom flat caring for a partner - there's only so much I can do and only so much I can fit into limited space. This is someone who clearly wants to care. HIGHE Yes, sometimes you have to actually suppress what you think are your best intentions and be sensible because in the end everybody will suffer if it's the wrong decision. Sometimes you have to be strong and take a decision that maybe the world and you yourself feel I ought not to be doing this because really it's for the best. I mean it depends on your individual personality and your circumstances. WHITE But people do feel that there's a moral - I did, I felt that there - and also I suspect maybe you worry what other people with think. HIGHE Yes you worry a lot about that and one of the things that I feel very strongly about is you shouldn't worry about what the rest of the world thinks. If you know you're doing your best and you're talking to your parents about it and they're talking to you then actually it doesn't matter what anybody else thinks, it's just between you. WHITE Can I just ask you very briefly, because some of the people who've contacted us are talking about parents with dementia, is that - presumably that's very different or there are other things to take into account? HIGHE There are a lot of things to take into account there, you have to think about it really, really seriously before you go into it. And talk about it with your family and your children, which is another important thing because they live in the house too and if someone with dementia is going to profoundly affect how you live your lives it's like having another child in the house or even a pet that you can't control. WHITE Jackie Highe, thank you very much indeed. Much more to say on this and I understand you've promised to log on to the Radio 4 message board this afternoon and respond to some of our listeners' posters and points. You can access the message boards via the Care in the UK website, follow the links from bbc.co.uk and then to You and Yours where you can also find more details on our social care season and download pocasts of this and every other item throughout the month. Jackie, thank you very much. HIGHE It's a pleasure. Back to the You and Yours homepage The 成人论坛 is not responsible for external websites |
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