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