Should we be resentful about becoming a carer?

Sounds as though this person is under a lot of stress and just needed to vent. Unprofessional? Probably but we are all human. I hope you were not openly judgemental.

I didn't really reply tbh.

Yes being a Carer is hard work but the reason we do it is a four letter word called Love. A friend of mine has become a Carer to her Mother but as she puts it "I am caring for someone who never cared for me" She apparently had a very fractured childhood with both Parents being Alcoholics. Today she says she would probably have been taken into care. Unfortunately not everyone has a childhood where they felt loved, cared for and protected. I feel so much for her as she is struggling with this role out of a sense of some sort of duty rather than love. She has she says ended up like this because the hospital her Mother was discharged from and Social Services have told her in no uncertain terms that her Mother is her responsibility. I have advised her to talk to them again to see what care is available because she need support to.

It depends on the circumstances. My parents needed little care and support but I did care and support two sets of childless aunts and uncles. Both sets were particulalry dear to me. I did not resent either.

However, I can see that if someone's relationship wth parents orothers has always been difficult and the people being cared for are difficult and demanding, yes, then I can understand people resenting it.

I think it depends very much on the nature of the care needed. Helping parents with specific tasks they can no longer do is a reasonable ask I think, but not personal care, or a multiple visits daily scenario. I couldn’t bear the thought of my children being tied to me in that way and disrupting their own lives and commitments to look after me, that’s not why I had them, I want them to be independent and as worry free as possible.

But dying and caring doesnt tend to work like that.

Unless a family has oodles of money.

It has done in my experience fancythat, and I have some, having lost my husband to cancer and providing support now to my parents in their nineties, who still live in their own home. Pressure is put on the family to provide all the care, and it’s necessary to be strong and say what you cannot do quite adamantly from the outset, and as they become more dependent. I don’t think you do yourself or the person who needs care any favours by committing more than you can realistically provide, it makes you resentful and ill yourself. It’s very difficult, and you feel you are perceived by Social Services as uncaring, which could not be further from the truth. There is a difference between loving somebody and sacrificing your own life for them, and I don’t want my children doing that for me.

I am sorry for what you have been through.

Will it not come down to money though, as regards personal care? For you or others? If the State does not provide?
How else could younger family be still independent from the situation?
Assuming someone is not left to fend for themselves.

The person needing care has to have more than a certain amount in savings to need to pay, I think it’s £23,000ish this year, and my parents do pay for the Social Services carer therefore. The attendance allowance is used to supplement the care they receive, so they have a private carer at lunchtime. If they had less than that in savings, the state would pay, but they would still be able to use the attendance allowance to pay for extra input on a private basis. Social Services will provide up to four visits a day depending on individual circumstances.

I’m a carer for my mother , she’s 90 and housebound. I do her shopping , laundry, take her to appointments and home admin .after a spell in hospital due to a fall she now has carers twice a day for personal care and meals . At the hospital I had to be adamant about what I would and wouldn’t do , both to my mum and SS .
I’m there 3-4 times a week and now I’m retired , I really don’t mind caring for her . It can be stressful and frustrating as she’s got some cognitive decline . But I don’t resent it.
What I do resent is that my two siblings do very little for our mum , due to both still working and not being local . Brother in Ireland and sister a two hour drive .
But I have friends whose siblings are local and still don’t help with elderly parents.
OP it sounds like your FA was having a rant, and I totally understand that .
We’re all living longer and needing care , which my mother’s generation often didn’t need to do . I’d lost all 4 of my grandparents by the time I was 25 , so my mother would have been early 50s .

Judy54

Yes being a Carer is hard work but the reason we do it is a four letter word called Love. A friend of mine has become a Carer to her Mother but as she puts it "I am caring for someone who never cared for me" She apparently had a very fractured childhood with both Parents being Alcoholics. Today she says she would probably have been taken into care. Unfortunately not everyone has a childhood where they felt loved, cared for and protected. I feel so much for her as she is struggling with this role out of a sense of some sort of duty rather than love. She has she says ended up like this because the hospital her Mother was discharged from and Social Services have told her in no uncertain terms that her Mother is her responsibility. I have advised her to talk to them again to see what care is available because she need support to.

Daughters, especially if single, are often slotted into the role of Dutiful Daughter, ie: their life is no longer their own.

Are there such things as Dutiful Sons?

I cared for my very elderly Mum for 14 years. I don’t regret it at all but it was very hard work. Like Tenko I did all her admin, took her to hospital, doctors, dentists, hairdressers, opticians etc, took her on holidays. I simply could not do her cleaning on top of my own so got her a lovely local girl twice a week who was great. I arranged for a stairlift and a wetroom as her wish was to stay in her own home. She came to stay with us every Friday to Sunday night and loved it but had to stop that when she could no longer manage the stairs.

Now I am caring for my husband which is twice as hard as at least Mum had working hands and legs albeit very old ones!

People are allowed to talk about how they feel if overwhelmed, whatever the issue

You just have to listen

I think care from the SS goes on sliding scale once you are under £23000

MT62

I think care from the SS goes on sliding scale once you are under £23000

Casdon

We moved my Dad in with us and I spent 11yrs caring for him. There really was no expectation or resentment, just relief really that he was safe and looked after.
It was very hard physically and although I once sought help, a different carer was sent over the course of four days and it proved too distressing for Dad. So I didn't carry on with that.
I am so glad to have done this for him but would find it overwhelming to provide that level of care without a lot of help and support to someone at my age now.
Hugs and much love to GNetters who are in this position

I fervently hope my dds will never have to support me, or will feel the need to, and I’ve told them as much. There should be enough money to pay for carers, if needed.

Having had to do a lot of elderly parent care myself (Dm and FiL both with dementia) I most certainly do NOT want that for dds.

Might add, that I think parents who expect their adult children, who usually have very busy lives nowadays - to spend much of their time caring for them - if they can afford to pay for care - are very selfish.

As Witzend said, I hope that my daughters don't need to care for us. One daughter lives 5 minutes away, but is very busy with her work, and the other is 3 hours away, so caring for parents wouldn't be feasible.

We could, at a pinch, afford to pay for careers, but I hope we never need to.

JaneJudge

People are allowed to talk about how they feel if overwhelmed, whatever the issue

You just have to listen

Quite.
I shall care for my husband because I love him. I absolutely shall not be caring for elderly parents. My mother in particular was a terrible parent and I feel no obligation whatsoever. She has dementia and needs professional care, anyway. Stepdad hasn’t sought any because she’s been in denial since the beginning. His life is awful now but that’s up to him. He has money and choices, just won’t make them because of the ructions it will cause in the home.
I think we’re good parents, we have very close and loving relationships with our children and grandchild. No way on this green earth would we expect them to care for us. They have their own lives and we won’t burden them.
The idea that children, who had no choice in their creation, should be expected to care for elderly parents “in return” is beyond selfish.

Re Judy's friend - and, in those circumstances, that friend would have been very entitled to walk away - as those parents hadnt been "parents" at all in the way they acted by the sound of it.

There's all sorts of relationships between all sorts of people. Any child born before around the 1970s may or may not have been wanted - and I've been gobsmacked that there have been a lot of unwanted children still being born from the 1970s onwards (why?). Some of the unwanted ones born in order to serve as a "meal ticket" for Council housing/benefits etc rather than because they were genuinely wanted and planned for (despite the Pill and legal abortions - and there's always adoption). Some because there are people out there that take a very haphazard approach to contraceptive/abortion planning.

The other point too is that Society really does need a major dialogue about the fact that there are now many people (some of whom have lived long enough to get to retirement age) that decided never to have children and made sure accordingly that they never did have children. There are also people who would have liked children - all else being equal - but they couldnt find the right man and/or couldnt afford them and either way equalled they didnt have them then. In all that - the fertility rate is going down as our planet gets more and more poisoned - and I've certainly witnessed people badly wanting children/married etc and fighting a low fertility battle with their bodies to try and have one.

We have now gone into the era where - for one reason or another - there are simply going to be a LOT of people who don't have children that could be carers anyway. So the question arises as to "What happens then in those circumstances?" I see the occasional small group of female friends deciding then that they will all set themselves up living communally together just-in-case and will be each others back-ups if needed. But I think it takes a certain money level etc for those groups of friends to start up an arrangement like that. Otherwise there is those "retirement villages" - but many/most? people can't afford them either.

Society has given this zero thought - from what I can make out - and just makes the assumption that people who have always stayed single and childless (or are now divorced and childless) will simply not have health issues like that as they get older. A message comes over of "There is no way to cater for you - you won't be catered for - you're on your own. So you will have to stay fit regardless....whether you can or can't".

So there are people who would find themselves being carers at one end of that equation and no-one there at the other end of that equation if they needed it themselves. Talk about an issue that is shoved under the carpet - that has come from that outdated assumption "Of course everyone will have children" and it's ignored just how many of us havent done so. If things worked out that everyone who'd had children had planned and wanted them at one end of that - and then everyone went on to have children themselves = you have a neat circular path through life that goes "Out at this point - in at that point = evens out". But that "circle" literally doesnt exist for many - and it's going to be even more a case of many people do a "straight line through life - childless throughout".

Witzend

I fervently hope my dds will never have to support me, or will feel the need to, and I’ve told them as much. There should be enough money to pay for carers, if needed.

Having had to do a lot of elderly parent care myself (Dm and FiL both with dementia) I most certainly do NOT want that for dds.

Might add, that I think parents who expect their adult children, who usually have very busy lives nowadays - to spend much of their time caring for them - if they can afford to pay for care - are very selfish.

My mother didn’t expect me to take on a caring role . I do it out of love . But I was lucky and had two loving parents and a happy childhood.

I cared for my husband almost on my own for over 10 years.
He had Alzheimer’s, a major stroke and heart problems.
I did this single handedly with someone to get him up, shower and dress him daily.
I could manage to undress him and get him into bed.
This was very hard, I couldn’t leave him after a few years and life was lonely and physically draining.
I could not have done this for my mother, she was demanding, bitter and sarcastic, everything was an expectation.
I visited weekly and did what I could, she was physically fit and could shop and cook for herself.
Her problem was loneliness but she really had done that for herself by her attitude.
She eventually, to my immense relief, decided completely by herself to go to live in a residential care home where, for the most part, she was happy and content.
She lived there for seven years until she died.
I could not and would not have ever had her live with me and my family. I think it is horses for courses, if you can do it then do it, if not be fair to your family and yourself and live without guilt.

I have been caring for my DH for 2 years now. Fortunately he has made a massive improvement and is now pretty much back to normal. He went through a terrible time. Chemo, surgery, more chemo, infections, a feeding tube, a catheter and 2 other unrelated operations. It was a difficult time. I’m more than grateful for the support given by my AC and others. Even at the worst times I saw it as a privilege to look after him. I hope that doesn’t sound sanctimonious. Of course I’m thrilled by his recovery and the fact that we’re going on holiday next week! It’s so sad to look after someone who isn’t going to improve and worrying about how to manage when things get worse.