Gloriously Ordinary Sundays - 8th September 2024

In last week’s Gloriously Ordinary Sundays, I talked about my last couple of months adjusting to living on my own, now both kids are launched. The other thing that I’ve been mulling over recently is the identity issue – the ‘who am I?’ now that I’m not a day-to-day mum. I’m sure this is something that everyone with grown-up children experiences, but there is another difference I think, when your children also draw on support from social care. For the last 19 years, I’ve also technically been a carer. It’s a label that I’ve never embraced as it just didn’t feel like who I was. It felt like something necessary for social services to work out who I was, but it never felt useful to me. I was always very happy to be my mother‘s daughter and my children’s mother – end of.

I’ve tried to unpick why I hate the label so much, and I think it’s because it plays to so many power imbalances; you are either a carer or someone who is cared for, someone who is needed or needy. NHS England defines; ‘A carer is anyone, including children and adults who looks after a family member, partner or friend who needs help because of their illness, frailty, disability, a mental health problem or an addiction and cannot cope without their support.’

Most human relationships are much more nuanced than that. When I was experiencing my most acute mental distress and deeply entrenched in mental health services, I know there were times when my friends and family gave me far more than they might have expected to. I know that there were times when that support would have cost them practically, emotionally and sometimes financially. I also really do think that there were times when I gave that support back. I’ve checked with some people who were close to me at that time, and they unanimously said ‘100% yes’. I know that none of them chose to define themselves as my carer.

I’m absolutely not suggesting that, when someone you love needs support to live their Gloriously Ordinary Life, it's easy. I had times in the last year of Mum’s life when I cried tears of frustration, when I lost my cool and shouted at her for things that weren’t her fault, when I was exhausted. I’ve had (and continue to have) times as a Mum when I thought that my heart might break. I just can’t accept the framing that this can be reduced to a one-way street.

Given all of that angst about being a carer, what happens to that label when the person you care for (about?) no longer lives in the same house as you? I don’t think we’ve got that quite straight in Serviceland. When my mum died, after living with me for the last 13 years of her life, I was apparently no longer her carer but clearly still her daughter. Now my kids have moved out, am I still their carer? Can I offer my opinion as an expert by experience still or did that expertise die along with my Mum and my kids leaving home?

I was chatting about all of this to Neil Crowther during the week and he reminded me about the beautiful concept of Ubuntu – ‘I am because you are’. It’s a beautiful reminder that connection is everything, that the most important thing in life is our relationships with other humans – it's what makes us who we are. Relationships are messy and involve joy and pain, highs and lows, times when one person is giving far more and times when they are getting far more.

So, I guess my challenge for the week is how can our social care system work in ways that recognise and celebrate human relationships (love, friends, family, neighbours, wider communities) and offer support that doesn’t reduce relationships to that of cared for and carer.

PS - all this is one reason why Test Four is one of the Five Tests for Gloriously Ordinary Lives.

PS. Did you see? The Gloriously Ordinary Sundays Podcast episode 7 is here. I chat with ⁠Gary Bourlet⁠, founder of the People First Movement in England and co-founder of ⁠Learning Disability England⁠. Gary tells us all about the ⁠Good Lives⁠ framework and we discuss the links between Good Lives and ⁠Gloriously Ordinary Lives⁠.