Purple Prose by Liz Byrski Page B

doesn’t think she can live independently. He asks whether she trusts me. My mother straight away answers an emphatic yes. Her trust makes it one of the worst days of my life. I feel that I have failed her. She expresses the wish to go back to her country town, where she still has strong social networks. After many weeks of searching, a whole family effort, we find her an excellent nursing home, the very best we can find.
    I have been researching her medications in case they are contributing to her confusion. One has sent up a red flag. I enlist her new GP, an unusually enterprising and attentive man who does not settle for her condition being simply old age. At my request he examines afresh my mother’s medications that all the GPs, geriatricians and neurologists we have consulted have okayed. He changes one that he thinks is contributing to the problems. The change seems miraculous; she is suddenly able to finish sentences and remember enough to make new friends and to start reading again. In a structured environment, Mum surprises everyone and thrives, improving in every way. She continually expresses relief at no longer having to be responsible for the things in daily life she can’t manage, as the carers whisk away dirty clothing and returnit freshly laundered. ‘Like Magic!’ she says as cups of tea and meals appear in front of her. Everyone here is in the same boat; there is loving kindness, solidarity and no judgement. She remains embedded in the family, and between all of us on almost every day someone is in contact, while old friends rally and she remains in a social network going back fifty years. Sometimes her fiercely independent spirit surfaces. When my husband and I take her out to lunch one day, she is concerned about being driven by someone she doesn’t know to a funeral of an acquaintance. Mum is worried about asking for help with her walker at the other end. My husband says that maybe she look at it another way; that people might feel pride in helping her, and that there should be a pride, not loss of dignity, in asking, that she has a
right to be looked after.
The right to dependence seems, in our independence-obsessed world, a radical but absolutely just idea. Perhaps ‘independent living’ is idealised more than it should be.

    On that imaginary analyst’s couch, the other words which would fly out in connection with purple, would be
suffragettes
, because one of their symbols was the colour purple in garments they wore. But also
care,
because for me a feminism worth having has always included
justice
and
equality
for the vulnerable who need care and for their caregivers, but also because inequality in caregiving remains at the root of women’s disadvantage. In reality, during all the years 2009 to 2015, I was struggling to do justice to my mother. If old age is a countryside, the care foot soldier’s population is once again largely female. Daughters, not sons, are expected to do the care work, although there are a few exceptions. There are female carers and domestic helpers, and predominantly female care workers in aged-care facilities. I know families of several sons and one daughter, where it is the daughter who is expected to do the caring for the elderly, no matter what her profession or whether she lives interstate.
    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