This Carer’s Week as usual we will care for our little grandsons. One is obsessed with pirates, the other with crocodiles so YouTube videos come in handy. Spending time with them is one of the pleasures of our life. Being a carer of someone in our families is a role that few of us will escape.
For some caring comes as an arid duty but for many it can be an uplifting joy. It’s a critical measure of our health as a community but few of us are trained for it, other than through the example of our families. It’s a role you learn on the job. In Australia overwhelmingly, caring is informal and unpaid and predominantly provided by women; daughters, wives and grandmothers.
For most, caring responsibilities began with the suddenness of parenthood. For many it was a difficult introduction. Awake through the early hours with a sick child, reading over again and again The Very Hungry Caterpillar or listening on endless loop to the same Wiggles song, takes patience and a rare selflessness born out of the tender regard brought by parenthood. It brings a disposition toward kindness that some of us never knew we had. Caring for children can be intense, delightful and especially exhausting. It’s just as well that the role first arises when you’re young and energetic.
Eventually those children who trained us grow up but the responsibility to care for them never ends, it just changes. Taking on the burdens of an adolescent child tormented by bullying, counselling a heart broken adult daughter, or providing retirement savings to help support your newly married children; these are the acts of selflessness that you signed up to all those years before, the measure of the covenant you made as parents.
And then come the grandchildren. Those years when you thought that you were going to spoil yourself often end up being years spent spoiling your grandchildren. Over a quarter of the nation’s child care is provided by grandparents and it’s increasing. Again you’re changing nappies and rocking children to sleep, skills never lost but more exhausting than you recall.
And then again, too soon, you wander into the third age of caring; the time spent with your ageing parents. Being responsible for people who forever seemed responsible for you is a relationship change that you may never have expected or wanted. Now as their guide and guardian you face an irreversible change in your relationship. It’s caring that can be heart wrenching and frustrating and seemingly endless. Just ask a daughter dealing with a father who refuses to give up driving or a son coping with a mother lost to Alzheimer’s disease.
Once begun, caring never stops. And nor should it. It’s the cost of living a life with other people, the tariff we pay for the gift of loving relationships. And those of us who have had positive caring relationships would not have it any other way. Even so it can be a hard toll to pay.
The truth is that many middle aged Australians are feeling overwhelmed by the physical, financial and emotional cost of simultaneously caring for their children, grandchildren and parents. It’s hard not to count the cost; the interruption to careers, the holidays foregone, the weekends lost.
Burdened with such disparate caring responsibilities, this stage is often exhausting and expensive and the cause of resentment and guilt. For some the burden becomes a spirit altering experience. Carers may have to face the unyielding frustration of a relative with dementia caught in the endless cycle of repetitive questioning or deal with the perpetual demand of old age depression or simply the worry of a parent who is old and frail and falls too often. Carers here may live at the utter edge of exhaustion when another moment of caring without relief seems impossible to bear.
All carers deserve our respect and support, whether they are soothing infants, counselling adolescents or comforting the aged. We owe a special regard to those who are juggling all three. They are performing functions that enable our society to better function. But for them our taxes would be higher, our health care delays longer, our childcare centres more overcrowded and our consciences less clear.
But busy carers need and deserve our care. We should celebrate them but they also need practical help. First, we owe them proper respite choices so that they can get that most precious and desired thing; a break from the unremitting constancy of care.
But further than that, they deserve adequately funded carer’s leave provisions that allow mature carers to step away from their careers for a time. No woman now has to resign a position due to pregnancy. In the same way no one, male or female, should have to resign a position because they need to take up caring duties for an aged relative. As with paid maternity leave, a properly designed aged carer scheme would be economically beneficial, and allow our experienced and skilled mature workers return to the workforce, where they will surely be needed, when their caring duties are fulfilled.
The challenges facing our carers are played out every day every suburb, town and village across Australia. It is time that we recognised the value of their personal commitment to our public good.
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