Mother's Day

I didn't want to find Mother's Day difficult. 

I knew I wouldn't see my children and as my Mum died in May last year it would be my first Mother's Day when I didn't have to apologise for forgetting.  We've never been a family to over celebrate things.  A wilted bunch of daffodils on Mother's Day, a packet of peanuts on Father's Day, a card on Valentines day.  We did Birthdays with gifts and parties and Christmas with bells on but never quite got into the other celebrations.  As a child, I didn't even like Easter and would end up with eggs I didn't want to eat.  Even though we've never been that into Mother's Day it doesn't mean I don't like it.

It's a celebration of women.  A chance for Dads and children to thank the women in their lives for all the unpaid work they do.  I love seeing all the pictures of women together on social media.  I'm not sure if it's just because I follow mostly women but Mother's Day does seem to be celebrated by Mothers and daughters.  Three or four generations of women eating Yorkshire puddings, drinking Prosecco, indulging in afternoon tea, or just posing in their best dresses and heels or comfortable clothes on a walk have filled my timelines today and it's just lovely.  Gushing praise for everything an adult daughter is grateful for, or a mother thanking their  teenage child for the bottle of Parma Violet glittery gin, or noting that their toddler ate the chocolates they gave them for mother's Day before they'd even got out of bed have all made me smile today.  People have also been able to share their sadness.  They have put pictures of mums that are no longer with us, or written on their timeline, or just been able to say how difficult they find the day. I've done enough of this and was hoping that today I would just be able to get on with cleaning the house and enjoying other people's photos.

However, a new thing seems to have happened this year.  People are prefacing their joy with a recognition that it will be a hard day for some and suggesting that those of us who are going to find it bittersweet look away now.  Other people might feel differently but I can't understand why you would begrudge other people's happiness.  I kept seeing these posts and wondering if there was something wrong with me, maybe there is but I don't want to be sad all the time.

Maybe if we had more ways to celebrate women and didn't define them just by their reproductivity then it would be easier.  I'm sure Father's Day won't make men who haven't had children, or who have lost their Dad feel like failures.  

Someone on my timeline posted a quote: "Mothers are like buttons.  They hold everything together."

I laughed and thought, "And they pop off, unexpectedly." 

My humour is too dark for all this sentimentality.  Here is a nice picture of my me with my Mum and our dog, who had her puppies in the coal shed, which I offer in compensation.

Indicative Notebooks

My brain decided to have a bit of a wander yesterday. I’ve been doing so well; hardly any panic attacks or stress thoughts. I thought I’d got to a place where I’d decided to just be happy but you never know what silly little thing could set you off. The worst bit of all this, for me, is how silly it makes me feel, not least because I can’t really explain what is going on. Pulling yourself back together each time your brain sets off on a private adventure just makes you stronger.

Feeling stronger, I wrote about indicative stoats and it made me happy. Then I went to bed and my brain decided it was time to continue processing all the things I didn’t understand, that stop me being able to breathe properly and make me make a fool of myself in public. Luckily, I have a notebook by the bed, just for those moments.

By 3am I was almost back to my old self and started to write down all the words that rhyme with vote: stoat, goat, moat, throat, boat (oh, how I love a rowing boat), note, bloat, promote, refloat, misquote. The indicative stoat could be the new Gruffalo.

Then I started thinking about notebooks. Notebooks are brilliant. Without mine I would be a blubbering mess, rocking in the corner, barely able to mutter more than, “B...ber...ber...b...ber...berr...b..Brexit.” I have an every day book so that I know what’s going on, the by the bed book for random midnight thoughts, the family history book because you never know when that might come in handy, the get my head around going to Japan book, the books what I’ve read book, the Elephant book where I write about death and cancer, the password book because I can’t remember anything now, and I’m sure there are others. I need a notebook to keep track of the notebooks. This should probably be called the indicative notebook.

All notebooks, I suppose, by their nature are indicative. When clearing out my parents belongings we found lots of notebooks. We looked in them to see if we could grasp an essence of the people we had lost. The funny thing was that there wasn’t one full book. Most had writing on only the first two pages. I wondered what my children would find in my notebooks if I still have notebooks when I finally die at the grand old age of 42. (It will be 42 because that’s the number I decided to stick with). Will they look at the page of indicative stoats who live in the moat and conclude that everything wrong in their life is suddenly explained?

My mum had one book that briefly told the story of her life with her own illustrations. I say briefly because it took the first two pages and the rest of the notebook was blank. It is beautiful and I will treasure it forever. She wrote about the things she had wanted to be when she grew up and how she also wanted to be able to fly.

There was also a small unused notebook, with a silver cover and black pages. I took it home, thinking that I could use it to leave the kind of notebook I’d like my children to find. I bought some white ink and wrote, “Learning to Fly,” on the first page. That’s as far as I’ve got, which seems quite appropriate for one of my parents’ notebooks.

Indicative Stoat

When the older children in the school study Victorians I always think it's a good opportunity to look at the National Anthem and decide if it's still a good representation of British values and use it as a composing stimulus.  Children need to learn to be creative and can often surprise you with their understanding and knowledge of the world. 

When we looked at the words to all the verses of the National Anthem they were surprised at how brutal (in their words) it was.  Usually, when I do this lesson someone will question whether the Anthem needs to be about the Queen.  There is nearly always one person in the class who thinks that we shouldn't have a monarchy. 

Children have changed.  One child said, "But if the Queen doesn't rule us, who does?"
When I said, "Our MPs represent us and the Queen just gets to oversee what they agree," the children actually snorted with disgust.  In their eyes MPs were so useless that we might as well go back to a feudal monarchy.

This is the fault of the mess that is Brexit.  Whether the children were for or against it they had very strong opinions about the people who are supposed to be delivering it.  Our government has lost the goodwill of the next generation and that is worrying.

Almost every group has included a Brexit reference in their National Anthem composition.  It's not all politics, though, as food features very highly.  Fish and chips, tea and biscuits, scones, full English breakfasts (and a confusion between Brexit and breakfast) have all been mentioned.  One of my favourites includes the line, "I saw Treza Mae (sic) in the cadbury shop, she turned round whilst eating a lollipop." That kind of rebellion is almost as wicked as running through a field of wheat.

Children are sponges and are absorbing everything that they see and hear on the TV, internet, at school and at home.  Most adults are finding the subject difficult.

Even if you are politically engaged you have to concentrate.  Journalists are finding that if they have a day off then they are confused.  Jess Brammar, Head of News at Huff Post tweeted, "Took a day out of the news yesterday for a long weekend away and have completely and utterly lost the thread of Brexit, does this mean I can just leave it and concentrate on something else until it's done?"
Normal people (not news journalists) replied that they lost interest a while ago, or that if they went to Yoga they lost the thread.

I have still been reading as much as I can (it's what I do) but I still miss things.  The other night I came back from the swimming pool and the Long Suffering Husband said, "What is this indicative stoats thing?"  I still had pool water in my ears and hadn't looked at any news for at least 90 minutes.
How was I to know that I'd misheard votes as stoats? 

As far as I can work out, indicative votes means that MPs are going to vote to indicate what they would be prepared to vote to accept.  Unfortunately, I don't think many of the suggestions are available but as the idea was put forward by Oliver Letwin, whose last big idea was the Poll Tax, we probably shouldn't be surprised.

I don't think the idea of an indicative stoat is such a bad one.  We could get a stoat into parliament and see which way it points.  It could be the new way of deciding everything, like Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog who decides whether the people of Gobbler's Knob can have Spring early.  We could take her out of the box and put the proposals on two signs and see which way she points.  It couldn't be any worse, could it?

The only problem is that it is often difficult to tell a stoat apart from a weasel and there are enough of those in the House of Commons already. 

As a mother

When Andrea Leadsom tried to become the Prime Minister she used the phrase, “as a mother.” It was odd at the time because she looked more like a grandmother and it was hard to comprehend the logic. To use that as a reference for running a whole country in a society that doesn’t value the unique skill set of a good mother seemed deluded. The suggestion that she would make a better prime minister than a woman who hadn’t had  (or couldn’t have) children backfired on her and she had to withdraw. She is still in an MP and has recently been made leader of the house. However, she hasn’t learnt her lesson and is still saying stupid things.

As a mother, she thinks that parents should be able to stop their children learning things like tolerance and compassion at school. She particularly against anything  that can make society more tolerant of anyone who doesn’t get excited about the kind of relationship she is in. In her opinion, parents should be able to withdraw their children from “exposure” to LGBT people.

Like Mrs Leadsom, I’m rather conservative in my relationships. I met the Long Suffering Husband when I was 16 and we have been very luckily happy ever since (except for a moment when he asked for his blue plates back). When I was at school, it never crossed my mind that I would have a relationship with anyone other than a man who was about my age. If I had been taught about lesbians I wouldn’t now be living with a woman called Suzie and eight cats, wearing make up and dyeing my hair purple, because that’s not who I am. However, if I was that person and I’d never come across people like me I would have thought there was something wrong with me. There are all sorts of people in the world wouldn’t it be nice if some of those people weren’t made to feel wrong?

I have never really understood why we are so keen on binary representations of the world, where one  thing is good and the other is bad: male/female, white/black, straight/gay, Christians/other religions.  Actually, I lie. I understand it perfectly well. It’s a fear of loss of power. If you are in the ‘norm’ group you are also in the group with the power. There is a strong fear that if you let the others in, the power will be lost. The people with the most power put a lot of time and money into convincing people that those not like them are bad and to be feared and most of us are silly enough to fall for it. Even those of us without power want to believe that we are superior because we fit into one of these categories.

It’s the otherness that makes us fight. We are scared of it. Understanding that people who aren’t like the ‘norm’ group are no different from you makes you more tolerant. Education is as much about exposing a child to others as it is about teaching them algebra and possibly more useful.

All this talk of ‘norm’ groups has made me think of my Dad. He was a Norm: White, male, straight, Christian. Although he grew up in extreme poverty his chances in life were better because of his  Normness and he did alright. Mostly, he was tolerant of otherness but homosexuality made him irrationally angry. We had an openly gay MP and although Dad would have never agreed with his politics he was most affronted by the man’s sexuality and was thrilled when the newspapers performed a sting to ‘expose’ him as a paedophile. He was so cross when Boy George appeared on the telly that he had to turn it off. My mum was similarly distressed by the thought of lesbians.

When I was in senior school we had an openly gay head of year. He lived with his mother in a house at the end of the road and carried his books to school in a whicker basket, held in the crook of his arm, like a modern day red riding hood. School kids were horrible about him but he was the smartest man I’ve ever met. At the time when there was an advert about real men being able to eat three shredded wheat, someone graffitied a wall, “Hope-Simpson can only eat 1 1/2.”

He loved it. If there had been Facebook at the time he would have made it his profile pic. He gave an assembly about shredded wheat and being absolutely thrilled that he was never going to be someone that ate three, not least because he would never be fat and he didn’t think anyone should waste their life eating cardboard when they could have a cream puff.  He was also concerned for the artist’s handwriting, which he said, “needed practice.”  This exposure to people who are different from you at school is important. It’s even more important if there’s a chance they might be the same as you.

As a mother, I can’t know the sexuality of my children. I know their biological sex but I don’t know how they are going to feel about that. Controversially, I don’t think how they feel is a choice. I don’t think seeing a funny lesbian playing a piano on the TV is going to make me want to be a lesbian just because I’d like to be a funny person playing the piano.  Just as, seeing a straight  woman in full make up, high heels and a dress without pockets is going to make me want to be in a relationship with  a woman because I will never again wear a dress without pockets.

As a mother, I want my children to be happy and confident with who they are.

As a mother, I want them to see that all sorts of people can have happy successful lives.

As a mother, I want all this nonsense to stop.

Right Shower

You might think that with that title I'm about to continue on a political theme and talk about politicians or the March to Leave, which only seemed to prove that there wouldn't be riots on the streets if Brexit was stopped and made me want to visit the amazing sounding clock museum.

However, I do actually want to talk about showers. 

Showers weren't a thing when I was a child.  Sometimes, I can't believe what I write in my own blog. Had showers not been invented? I don't know but we didn't have one.  Today, houses are built with several bathrooms, nearly all of them with a shower and most people have a shower every day.  I can't quite believe how fast bathing has changed just in my lifetime.

When I was small, before my Nan and Grandad's house was condemned and replaced with crowded three-story 1970 terraced houses, they lived in a Victorian house with huge high polystyrene ceilings that had holes in where Mum and her sisters had pinned balloons or stuck their fingers, just for fun. That house had no bathroom.  There was an outside toilet, a pot (or 'gazunda' , as my Nan called it) for nighttime wees and a tin bath that lived in the room that smelt of washing powder, damp and rat poison, and was put in the living room on a rug in front of the fires for the weekly bath.  I have a memory of my grandad sitting in the bath singing to opera and pushing his tiny round glasses back onto his nose.  This was East London, with a football club at the end of the road.  I can't remember my other grandparents' bathroom facilities, except that they had a cesspit but I somehow doubt they had indoor plumbing. We lived in a modern bungalow with a nice avocado bathroom suite.  But bathnight was still Sunday, only.  If we wanted to wash our hair, without getting too many bubbles in it then a jug was borrowed from the kitchen.

Later, a gadget was invented that pushed onto the bath taps to spray water at you.  This worked well until one of the rubber ends fell off and you suddenly had boiling hot or freezing cold blasted at you. It didn’t help that the rubber ends were round and our bath taps were square. 

When my Nan died Mum had a small inheritance of £5000.  I'm not sure why I remember the amount but I also remember that she used it to buy a new carpet for her bedroom and have an en-suite shower installed.  Dad did the plumbing, so it always leaked a bit but it was new and modern and Mum was thrilled with it.

I hated it. 

"I'm just not a shower person," I would complain to my friends, "You can't read a book in the shower."

Over the years I've persevered in trying to like the shower. It's not  just that you can't read a book, the shower has so many other problems.  You bang your elbow on the wall, there's no room to avoid the water while it's getting to the right temperature and when you leave the shower you step into a cold room (or a hot room if its a heatwave and you are cooling off).

Our en-suite needs updating but with all the changes that are happening at the moment we have decided to put it on hold for a while, which means our old leaky shower is out of commission. The children have left home so there are no queues for the bathroom and we can use the shower over the bath.  

What a revelation!

I like a shower in the bath.  There's room, you can avoid the too hot water, the whole bathroom gets warm from the steam and I suddenly am enjoying showers.  You still can't read a book but you can't have everything.  

Political Journalist

It would be wrong to have a personal blog and not comment on this incredulous stuff that is happening at the moment. My daughter is a journalist, of the variety that tells you about closures at your local swimming pool, how the wind is going to lengthen your journey to work and strange things your neighbours like to do in their spare time, like dress up as a rubber-clad dog and sleep in a cage. There was a time, early in her career when she seemed interested in political reporting and seemed to spend most of her evenings at the local council chambers. Yesterday, I sent her a text and said, “I bet you’re glad your not a political journalist now.” She agreed as it is all too confusing. How can a journalist explain it to anyone else if they don’t understand it themselves?

Everyone you speak to thinks the BBC is biased.  They hate Laura Kuenssberg and her wonky mouth.  The funny thing is that leavers and remainers both think that she is biased in the other direction from what they believe. I hadn't noticed a particular bias but maybe that's because she's saying what I think.

No one is going to sack me if I’m wrong. I might get death threats on social media but it’s unlikely because very few people read my blog but here is my attempt to get straight in my own head what I think is going on. I’m going to do it as a list because lists always make things clearer.

1. The public were asked to vote on whether the country should stay in the EU by David Cameron in 2016 because he naively thought they would vote yes and the anti-EU element of his party would be quiet and let him continue to use  PM expenses to upgrade his kitchen.
2. Some people with money managed a very dodgy but effective campaign to explain how awful the EU was and how great we were.  
3. David Cameron was an idiot and completely mucked up his campaign because he couldn't confess that people were struggling because of his policies rather than the EU and so he tried to frighten everyone instead.
4. The public narrowly (yes 48:52 is a narrow margin) to leave the EU. People made their decisions for a variety of reasons and no one should assume what they were.
5. Cameron swanned off humming a little tune.
6. The political system fell apart. All it could think of was how to extricate the country from the EU. Funding schools, hospitals, libraries all stopped and two years later MPs only get into their constituencies to see their Chiropractor. (Yes, I did bump into my MP at the chiropractor last week and you can see why: all that sitting and tension will wreck havoc on your spine)
7. The conservatives handed the poisoned chalice to Theresa May because no Leaver wanted to do it and the Labour Party fought with itself. The Lib Dems didn’t take any advantage of recruiting the people who voted remain.
8. Theresa May saw herself as Saint Theresa Deliverer of Brexit and announced that Brexit means Brexit, triggering Article 50.
9. Once Article 50 was triggered they had two years to negotiate a deal.  After that time if a deal  hasn't been reached the law says we leave anyway.  This is what is being called a no-deal Brexit.  No one really knows what effect leaving in this way will have but there are enough predictions to make me believe it will cause several very difficult years at least.
10. Parliament spent two years taking their regular holidays and talking about Brexit but not to each other. Nobody really shifted their position and when there was no clear agreement on how to leave the EU all they could do was fight.
11. Theresa May has been to Brussels 23 times to negotiate a deal for leaving.
12. She finally got a deal called the withdrawal agreement (which I read and blogged about at the time). Most people didn’t read it but decided that it was awful, or according to the headlines “The Worst Deal of All Time.”
13. It can’t have been easy to get 27 countries to agree on something as big as this but it was all for  nothing because she forgot to check what her parliament would agree with.
14. To leave with the deal parliament had to vote to accept it.  Theresa May called this The  Meaningful Vote.
15. The EU had been working on what happens if we leave without a deal, which will be bad for them too, and published some very clear documents, which I read. If we have done the same work then we’ve kept it secret.
16.  Parliament voted against accepting the deal.  The prime minister decided that there would be another meaningful vote, making the first one meaningless.
17.  Theresa May told the EU that she needed to renegotiate the deal but as she had forgotten to ask parliament what it wanted she couldn't really answer when they asked what she wanted. Many of the 27 countries laughed.
18.  After a while, she read the Daily Mail and decided that what people didn’t like was the backstop. I’m not sure anyone really understands the backstop because backstop means backstop but it has  something to do with the Irish boarder, which has a very funny Twitter account. People worry that this protection for Northern Ireland will cause the UK  to never be fully free of the EU, which may be true if our negotiating skills don’t improve.
19.  St Theresa and the EU has another little all night chat, emerged smiling and thought they had added a codpiece (I think they probably meant codicil but I saw one funny autocorrect and from now on I will call it the codpiece) that they thought would keep everyone happy, even though they hadn’t actually asked them what they wanted.
20. Parliament got a second meaningful vote and still decided to reject the deal. Who could have predicted that? Even the DUP decided the bribe wasn’t enough.
21.  People got angry. Not politicians but real people. They are bored of the fighting and the confusion and because no one ever changes their mind - EVER  their positions just became more entrenched. They stood outside Westminster and shouted.
22. A load of MPs brought amendments to the bill. They like doing this because their name gets  attached to something and they gain brief notoriety.
23. Everyone got confused, including the chief whip, whose job it is to tell everyone in his party how the government intends to vote and then draw lines under it to tell them how important it is they vote with their side, drew three lines and then abstained (so he should probably sack himself) . The Brexit secretary voted against the deal he had negotiated and people who had called for a second referendum voted against that. The main thing they agreed on was that the  wouldn’t leave without at a deal (although I’m not sure how they plan to make that happen. You can’t take something off the table if it is the table)
24. In private Theresa May went ‘batship crazy’ and lost what little voice she had left.
25. MPs went back to their constituencies to see their chiropractor, children tried to warn MPs that they were missing the most important things by marching and refraining from eating the last gluestick in the school.

So, 25 points later and I’m still no clearer. I think the law says that we leave on the 28th with or without a deal regardless of how much shouting MPs do. I think they might have spectacularly messed up. This is comedy you couldn’t write, except that,  if you think about it, whatever your views, it’s just not funny.

The Seventies

The other day The Seventies tweeted that they were looking forward to getting the British Kite mark back.  I was confused.  First of all, who knew a decade could tweet? Also, I was pretty sure that although we use the CE (European mark) for most things the kite mark is still on things like door locks, where our standards are different although I'm not sure if they are better or worse.   Anyway, these are the delights we have to look forward to in a post Brexit world after the MPs have their second meaningless vote tonight and we leave the EU with a deal or something else happens.

Just as this vote is happening there will be a documentary on the TV where someone tells Jacob Rees Mogg that his investment company has earnt him £7 million since the EU referendum and he looks genuinely surprised.  I wonder how much money you have to have not to notice £7million extra in your bank account. His response to tonight's vote is to quote from Mozart's Requiem (it probably means something in Latin but I'm a musician). You can, though, see why he's not worried about a 'no-deal Brexit'.

The world is seriously bonkers at the moment.  I think it needs therapy.  I could recommend a good therapist but I don't think it would be fair to her.

Even the weather is confused.  We had summer last week and now we've got those storms we normally get in October.  This one, we are calling Gareth, which I think is a proper Seventies name. He probably has a moustache, has hair down to his shoulders and a tight curled perm.  His flares are blowing in the wind and he is thinking about pulling his sheepskin coat over his chest, which is currently exposed as his flowery shirt has the top four buttons undone to reveal his hairy chest and medallion.

When people first voted for Brexit they were excited about returning us to a post war era of rationing, drab clothes, women in the kitchen in their pinnies and men wearing bowler hats to work.  The 1950s seemed to be the decade we hankered after.  Maybe someone pointed out the lack of curry or pizza but suddenly we've conveniently skipped the swinging sixties and landed in the Seventies as our dream decade.

I had a bit of a flashback to the Seventies at the weekend.  The last storm, Freya, caused some damage and the local newspaper reported "Freja blows off roofs."
"Ummmm," I thought, "Someone's going to be in trouble.  Wait til teacher sees that.  That'll get a smack." My nine year old inner child was torn between being a goody-goody for spotting the error and being horrified at the future fate of the journalist who had written the headline.  When I was at school the plural of roof was rooves.  I've checked and it's not now.

I particularly remember the set of spellings that it was included in.  We had to learn the singular and plural.  Elf/Elves, Hoof/ Hooves, Shelf/Shelves, Dwarf/ Dwarves, Loaf/Loaves.  On an early date with the Long Suffering Husband the plural of roof became a hilarious part of the evening. We were sitting in a pub with one of his friends; a man who I remember as looking like Leo Sayer.  He was trying very hard to be funny and made me snort my Bacardi and coke through my nose with a joke about seven dwarves in a bath (my spell check tells me it's dwarfs now).  Anyway, Leo was telling us about his former girlfiend, who he said was called Ruth.  He told us that Ruth had a best friend, Miss Topps who was also called Ruth.  We laughed about whether they would be two Ruths or two Ruves.

I wondered what my slap happy teacher would have made of this.  Or I didn't wonder, I could hear her loud booming voice bemoaning the dumming down of the English language and incompetents who couldn't be bothered to read.  I wanted to ask her if the rule applied to all words that ended in f? Although, I wouldn't have asked because I was too scared.  I could imagine her calling us all lazy Oafs for getting less than ten out of ten for our spellings.  I'm also sure it was never Chieves, when she went on a rant about how some people had to be Indians.

The Seventies was a decade with terrible patterned wallpaper when we spent our time in school, learning the rules of spelling and how to thread a needle with fear as a motivator.  I'm not sure I want to go back.

Since I starting writing the MPs have voted against the deal.  It's quite a mess.  Maybe the Seventies weren't so bad after all.

Giles Fraser is Wrong

I was beginning to relax about Brexit: I had Brexitigue.  "It'll be fine," I said to myself. As you know (if you read my blogs at the time) my main objection to the idea of asking us to vote on leaving the EU was that we were not qualified to make that decision and that I wasn't entirely sure it was possible because we we had 40 years of entwined laws.  Those objections still stand but I wasn't entirely sold on whether the EU was good or bad for our country.  In the last few weeks I have been reminding myself that we will never know if the other option was better because we can't do both things simultaneously.  We can guess but there is no certainty.

Then I read an article on a platform called Unheard.  I hadn't heard of Unheard, which I suppose is the point and maybe it's a site that publishes views that shouldn't be heard.  I'm not going to link to it because I don't want you to read it and make them think that this is a popular view that they should publish more of.  The title was something like, "EU destroys family life." As I read, the room fell away. I felt like I was falling backwards into a very dark hole.  The edges of my world blanched and I could feel a fury like a knot of burning snakes rising from my solar plexus.  

The author was Giles Fraser, someone I had heard on the Moral Maze, usually saying kind things. He is opinionated and never someone to say, “I see your point of view,” which is why he’s chosen for that programme but I want to write down why he’s wrong so that I can feel less angry.

His article is arguing against George Osborne’s Evening Standard headline, “Who will look after our elderly after Brexit?” His answer is simple. It’s us women in our fifties. His article starts like this.

I have issues with this on so many levels.  Firstly, I wonder if the male doctor would have said the same to a male patient.  Also, what about the dignity of the woman's father?  I'm not sure I would want my children to have to change my nappies.  I think I would much prefer a qualified care worker from an EU country.  Not everyone would but shouldn't that be a choice people can make?  Being old doesn't stop you being able to choose. 

There is an assumption in this article that what this woman's father is experiencing is normal but where do we draw the line?  As health services dwindle will we be expected to give injections, enemas, prostate exams? "You came through your mother's cervix, the least you can do is perform her smear test." The man in the story that the article is based around is dying.  He is dying in the slowest way. He has dementia and is messing himself for reasons that possibly haven't even been diagnosed yet, or maybe never will if they think it's normal for a seventy year old to be confused and soiling themselves. His organs are failing; slowly; one by one.  It might take years for him to finally die.    How much of her life is the woman supposed to give up?

Giles Fraser argues in his article that dying is normal and that the stages of death are normal and that caring for death should be the responsibility of the family.  He argues that this is what family life is.

The thing is that dying isn't normal in our society. We pretend it doesn’t happen, so we have no idea what a normal death looks like. Also, it is different for everyone.  It affects the whole family and in different ways. Even doctors don't study what happens to a body as its organs fail.  They don't look at a person in a holistic way and recognise patterns of organ failure that point to death.  The argument for them not doing this is that the human body is too complicated and so even these incredibly intelligent people can't know about everything but Giles Fraser seems to think that this woman  is qualified to take on that care without even seeking guidance and reassurance from her GP.
 
So, if we accept the idea that dying is normal and it's the responsibility of the family, who are we  actually talking about? Does it have to be the daughter?  Should male MPs or radio journalists be  expected to give up their positions to clean the shit from their dying parents pyjamas? What about people who have no children? And if the person who is dying is a bit younger and their daughter is still a child then should they be doing this work?  I'm sure I've heard Giles arguing on the Moral Maze that children caring for their sick parents in our society is a moral outrage.

Because we don't talk about death we don't know how long it will take.  I guess some people have a clue.  People tell me that when their relative is in an old people's home reassurance is given in whispered tones that,  even though they never get  out of bed, need a nappy changed every hour, can't see, hear, or recognise  their own name,  they're 'not going yet'. Even the people working with the dying don't always understand the process and fail communicate it to the relatives doing the daily caring.

Giles and society expects that it is the job of women in their fifties and sixties to look after elderly  relatives.  Never mind that some women of that age are running the Met, or the country. We are collateral damage.  And the damage is huge.

It has taken me all week to write a measured response because I just want to shout and swear.  The reason for this is that I did care for my mother when she died and it fucked me up. I didn't have to do it alone because I have a sister and it fucked her up too.  We also had some support because it was a death from cancer, which still has special status and entitles you to care if you want it.  We didn't want it though, because we live in a society where we came to believe it was our job.