There’s a sitcom I listen to on BBC radio 4 called Cabin Pressure. You should check it out if you get a chance, it’s very funny. Anyway, there’s a line where one of the central characters complains that his main role (what he does in the sitcom) is his hobby whereas the thing he does in his spare time which he hates but gets paid for¹ is his actual job. Sometimes I sort of know how he feels.

I don’t mean to say that I hate caring. I don’t. Although, it’s not what I signed up for. Which is to say, when I got married ²it was about us spending the rest of our lives together. And yes, of course, I will always care for my wife whenever she needs me, and she would do the same for me, but it wasn’t the idea. Sometimes it can be all about caring and it gets in the way of all the other stuff. All the happily-spending-the-rest-of-your-lives-together stuff. It’s a pain in the neck. Sometimes literally.

So then there’s my job. I quite enjoy my job, most of the time. And at times, such as much of last week, when it really got on my nerves, I could enjoy having a good moan about work with my colleagues. My boss and I enjoy discussing punishments we might mete out on our area manager for all manner of crimes he/she has committed against the state in general and us in particular. And that is the great joy of work. When it’s fun, it’s fun. When it’s not fun, you can moan about it and hopefully have a bit of a laugh. There are rules that govern how horrible your employers can be to you, time limits set on how long you have to work, and you get paid.

Almost none of this is true when you’re a carer. When it’s fun, it’s fun, but then when it’s fun, it probably means you’re not doing the caring bit, you’re doing the marriage bit. You can’t moan when it’s not fun, because who do you moan at? You can’t really complain to your caree because that would make them feel terribly guilty, or tell you that you have no idea what it’s like to be them or something else which depends upon their personality but is unlikely to be good. ‘I find constantly caring for you a burden which I will continue to bear so long as I can tell you when I get sick of it’ is not a message it’s easy to deliver. It’s hard to talk to friends and family because they won’t properly understand. You could easily make the caree sound like hellish monster and have to spend half your time saying ‘No, you can’t say that, you don’t understand how much pain she’s in/how much he’s affected by the depression/ how long it is since she was able to move without help etc…’ and then you look like a heartless monster for moaning about your petty backache. I used to go to a carers group once a month. Depending upon who had had the worst month, one of us might do all the talking, sometimes we would share the floor. Either way, you were in a room full of people who did understand because they’d been there too. They knew that you loved the person, and that they weren’t as bad as you made them sound, they knew it was more complicated than that. Anyway, can’t go to that group any more. It lost its funding and had to shut down.

I know I’m being terribly harsh assuming that nobody else understands. Sometimes it feels like that, sometimes I’m afraid it will be, even if I have no good reason. And sometimes, of course, it just is. But then of course there’s the rest of it. There are no rules. People can get sick as often, as completely and as inconveniently as the whim of their illness demands. You can’t set a time limit, or accept a maximum number of illness periods, or rest breaks. You rest when you’re finished, and that means working overtime until you’re done - then you do it. That, of course, is because you’re not working for the money, but because you care. Which is a good thing, because you’re not getting any money. Oh alright, you can, in the UK at least, get carer’s allowance if your caree is bad enough (because anything other Government set limits is easy, and not deserving of any remuneration) but you have to apply for that. You don’t just get it, and plenty of people don’t get it at all.

So have I got good news to end on? I do try, you know. Well caring, like so much in life, is a labour of love. In any job you are guaranteed their labour. But from every carer, you are guaranteed the love.

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