Purple Prose (8 page)

The next word which would emerge, straight after care, is
ambivalence.
In her award-winning account of early motherhood,
Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption,
Lisa Baraitser writes of how confused new mothers can be, while everyone thinks she should know what to do, and judges her closely and harshly if she does the wrong thing. Caring for an old person is very like mothering. The new ‘mother' of their old parent may feel every bit as confused about the ‘right' way to care. And caregivers can be ambivalent when they discover what the right ‘thing' is, because it may carry with it a dilemma: the moral imperative to swing their attentiveness, time and energy toward their parents in a way that makes cherished and financially necessary work impossible. There is so much heated discussion about ‘work and family' which exclusively concentrates on the so-called ‘baby versus briefcase' conflict. There is much less conversation about the ambivalence and confusion loving adult children might feel on hitting their stride in a career, and being torn away by the entirely legitimate needs of a frail parent. Instead the story is told in whispers among friends or siblings, ‘What I must do, what I can do, what I cannot do. Have I done enough?' And there is guilt over that ambivalence even as they act well, or guilt over the relief they feel when they arrange alternative, non-familial care, however satisfactory.

We make it up as they go along, constantly aware of cautionary tales of repellent examples of negligence and even cruelty by adult children to old parents. I hear one person say out loud she would like to take her elderly mother and dump her in another state. Several nursing home proprietors told me they had many residents who were
never
visited by any family member in all the years they had lived there. I hear a son talk of driving hours every Saturday for years, to sit in a locked dementia ward with a cruel father who had made it plain he never thought much of him. And everyone struggles with the fact that however good the alternative care, there are some aspects of a relationship which can never be commodified, where only love matters. No outside carer can ever
have the shared history nor the emotional salience of an adult child. An adult child, even if they are decidedly unlovely to their elderly parent, is irreplaceable. A paid carer, even a lovely one, is replaceable.

So much has been written about maternal ambivalence. But if the colour purple reminds me of fidelity, then it must also include fidelity to the truth, and if the truth of mothering contains ambivalence towards what is asked of us, then even more so does caring for an old parent. There is much greater pleasure and joy in small children, and their becoming, and the love they give, than watching an old person disappear, their unbecoming. In dementia, as the capacity to recognise the Other disappears, so too can their capacity for sensitivity, empathy, and even love. Old age, like early motherhood, too can be shrouded in pious sentimentality. People addressing an old person raise their voices a pitch or two, sounding oh so nice, just as when they are speaking to small children. And they can register shock if the carer is resentful. Gender norms again go into overdrive. Like the Good Mother, the Good Daughter is not meant to get angry.

But adult children do get angry. Partly grief and anger are indissolubly linked, and with dementia the process of mourning a parent begins long before the moment after dying. But it is not only that. It is also an anger at how they are treated by their old parent which would be so unjust if their mother or father was in full possession of their faculties. At first, they
look
alright. Yet a moral lethargy can settle over them like a dense fog preventing sight. Melbourne writer Fran Cusworth recalls her mother's indifference to losing her small grandson at a shopping mall. She looked like the same responsible adult she had always been, but now wasn't. The elderly parent may have a huge effort directed at their wellbeing and yet not notice, querulously finding fault like a needy and resentful child. People are awfully pious, and look shocked if an adult child expresses not grief but rage at the treatment they endure as their ‘loved one', as the well-meaning
government brochures likes to call them, attacks them verbally or physically. Sometimes people become sweeter in nature, more expressive, perhaps like the child they once were. But they can also become nastier or more rage-filled, or express prohibited desire. Part of the unravelling is the disintegration of the frontal lobes, responsible for social inhibition. A website explains politely what to do when the ‘loved one' masturbates in front of you. Or when the ‘loved one' (your father) wants to have sex with you. I know some good Catholic daughters who organised a roster to sleep each night in his house to care for their father; how lovely, you are thinking, how nice, except it wasn't nice at all. The father no longer recognised them and made sexual advances to them every night. The next morning they would be up and preparing his breakfast as if nothing had happened. Other times he smeared his name in his faeces on the wall, or screamed hate at them.

All this is easier perhaps if the parent has been loving, also easier if the child is unselfish … but what about giving care unstintingly, mobilising a whole family when the parent in question has been incapable of that kind of care themselves? Or treated their own old parents with indifference? The pleasing moral symmetry of reciprocity, the loving parent's care being repaid by a grateful child, can go seriously awry. A loving parent is neglected and ignored by an ungrateful, selfish child. Or a neglectful parent somehow manipulates children's guilt and has them flapping around him in ways he does not deserve. Frailty can make long-standing self-centredness finally justified. With small children they usually give love back in spades; a person with Alzheimer's often doesn't. Here the adult child has an enormous amount of emotional work to do, to disconnect the care they give from the treatment they get now, or the treatment they received as a child.

The next, rather unexpected, word my free association with the colour purple would produce, is
time.
Our relation to time changes,
Baraitser points out, in the maternal encounter. The mother is ‘a subject of interruption', and as a consequence time becomes no longer linear. Time slows, becoming, she says, using a lovely word, ‘viscous', thick, like treacle, slow moving. The arrow of time we follow frenetically, anxiously at work, ‘becomes a dotted line, a series of segments with breaks in between'.
¹
As a mother she is interrupted ‘mid-sentence, mid-mouthful, mid-thought and in the middle of the night,' and there is constant stopping and starting of tasks. With the frail aged person who becomes dependent on an ethic of care on the part of family members, being ‘a subject of interruption' is not so very different. A fall, a medical crisis and then another, cannot be planned for. The more hands-on the care is, as when the carer lives with someone with Alzheimer's, the more intense the experience and more similar the ‘interruptedness' and parallels with ‘maternal encounters', including the emergence of a new kind of self in relation to a vulnerable Other.

And just as Baraitser says, because there is so much ‘stuff' to transport with infants – the bottles and nappies and wipes and prams and changes of clothes – one's relation to space changes too. The same is the case with the frail elderly. Whenever we set off, there is lots of ‘stuff'. My mother's new frailty means there are hazards everywhere; once she almost falls at a small step in a cinema. The vigilance that I once needed with small children returns. I do a continual reconnaissance ahead of an outing as to where the bathrooms are and how disability friendly they are. To get to an art gallery is an expedition with pads, fluids, snacks, walking trolleys, and we need ramps and absolutely no stairs. We experience firsthand how few places cater for a disability, as even with a walker Mum can only walk half a block. We walk slowly, and stop every fifty paces or so. Sometimes she needs to sit on her trolley. Everything is done slowly.

I first really thought about cultural ideas of time forty years ago when I was sitting on my backpack on an Indian Railway station. It was long before coal-fired power stations could be seen from
satellites as India underwent industrialisation. A vast network of rail providing cheap travel since the British Raj was nevertheless run in a highly inefficient way. Trains never seemed to arrive or leave on time. Once I was sitting at the station for several days. We would wait until late afternoon, go back to our hotel and then wait again the next day. Western travellers would go over to the window and an angry conversation would start while the Indian ticket vendors shrugged or suddenly could not speak English. One man in particular was in a rage of frustration the whole time, a purple vein bulging and pulsing in his forehead. He walked up and down gesticulating and speaking out loud to himself, raging at the ticket man, pacing, his neck continually craned down the line anxiously waiting for the train. At one point I chatted to him, thinking he might be missing out on a meeting with a beloved in far-off Mumbai. He wasn't. He was just going to another holiday destination on a yearlong overland trip to Europe. He actually had all the time in the world.

It was an encounter with a different time zone, determined by culture. We forget in the West the astonishing change in our consciousness demanded by industrial time, deadlines, set working hours, lives no longer set by seasons, of light and darkness, of harvest and fallow. Western travellers responded to the vagaries of the railway in different ways. I would slip into a writer's reverie and scribble in my notebook, lost to the world around me. In truth? I was quite happy, and I admit that sometimes I was rather peeved when an ancient locomotive finally sputtered into view because it meant breaking up ideas that were flowing, sudden action, packing away my pencil and notebook, rushing to get a top bunk, and a window that opened.

Returning home I never felt quite the same about time. I began reading about how the working class and children were integrated into the discipline of industrial time, the factory sirens, the school bells, the endless measurement and disciplining of their relation to time. Submission did not come without struggle. My metaphor
of the Indian Railway often sustained me during childrearing, where plans are routinely capsized and nothing seems to arrive, career-wise, on time. You get there, I told myself, just like on Indian Railway, in the end, even if not on time. And there is a lot of pleasure along the way.

But I was younger, and time seemed an infinite expanse stretching out ahead of me. Now I have lived far more years than I have left so my relation with time is less dreamy. Moreover, a writer's life is full of deadlines, which last year were especially pressing as I had a new book out. It now takes me a little while, and no little moral effort, to relax and get inside the Slow Zone of Care. When I come to see my mother, a game of cards at first seems interminable. I find it hard not to check emails on my iPhone. Sure enough when I finally succumb and sneak a look, there are all kinds of work obligations, interviews or request to give talks I should immediately attend to. I pause shuffling the deck of cards and send messages back to my publicist with a satisfying sound of a whoosh like a rushing wind, as if to emphasise the speed of the device I am holding. But this device also traps me: I am expected to respond at once, in a mere millisecond, to never be away from work, an expectation of instantaneity. As I spend more time here, slowness gets easier and easier, and more enjoyable, just as it did on Indian Railway. The book tour is finally over and the imperatives of work slide into a fuzzier focus, they are no longer in sharp, hard outline.

Our relation to time is deeply hierarchical, and shaped by culture. Time is a status marker; anyone giving time to others is usually lower in social status. There is a subtle or not so subtle downgrading of anyone in the Slow Lane. Time is also deeply gendered in a way that is quite simple, with a profound, long-lasting impact on women. Women's time is still meant to be available to others, for care, with what's left over devoted to paid work. Men's time is meant to be made available for paid work, with what's left over available for family. The assumption is they are a care commander who has a female care foot soldier doing
all the care work. ‘Good' women are marked by their willingness to give time. Women have traditionally acted as time sentries and time wardens, preventing intrusions into men's time as wives, secretaries and assistants, and as conservers of the family time bank, able to be drawn on as needed. ‘Don't Disturb Daddy' is the name Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum gave the phenomenon of tiptoeing around men's time.
²
Women's time in contrast, seems porous, a door that is always open. Care of the aged still carries an assumption that a woman, this time a daughter, is not at work, has all the time in the world to attend to her old parents.

Even the oft-used word, ‘spent', to describe time passing, is not innocent of its impact on how we see care. It shows not only the irrevocability of time which has gone, but of new, exploitative attitudes to time; that it
ought
to be about
productivity
, and
efficiency,
all the opposite values of any ethic of care of the frail aged, especially someone who is losing any sense of the straightness of Time's Arrow. ‘Spend' also carries inflections of the domineering relation of the business world, of ‘time is money', of males at the top of the hierarchy whose attitudes to care go unchallenged. ‘I am too busy and too important to “waste” time on care.'