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Clarice, aged 35, during the second world war |
At home with mother, and all her care team
When Michelle Hanson ‘rescued’ her mother from residential care, nothing could have prepared her for what was to come, writes Peter Gruner
Living With Mother
by Michelle Hanson
AT 89 she is a mother from hell, the Queen of Anxiety, and, oh my goodness – she’s coming to stay.
Bossy, outspoken, irritating, embarrassing, and like a fool you have heroically offered to save her from residential care in Hove, Sussex, and put her up in your modest home in Tufnell Park. This is what Michele Hanson did, and her weekly chronicles for the Guardian newspaper of life with her tyrannical mother makes all the better reading chronologically complied into a brilliant new book.
Living with Mother (‘right to the end’) is hilarious and poignant and will be required reading for anyone considering rescuing an ancient parent from an OAP home.
From bowel disorders to stairlift breakdowns, and nightmares in the Whittington hospital’s infamous mixed wards, this is not a book for the nervous.
However, I was rarely able to turn a page without laughing out loud at her mother, Clarice Queenie Hanson’s, dogged determination to age, as they say, disgracefully.
Michele Hanson describes her mother as the Faultfinder General. Often there’s a huge “staff” in the house to cater for all for her mother’s needs including, homecare ladies to help with baths, a cleaning lady, physiotherapist, hairdresser, and mobile-library lady.
Michele writes: “Obviously, with so many people in and out, some may not come up to scratch. This morning I hear a roar of temper from the kitchen. A member of staff has used a two cup tea bag in one cup and then thrown it away.”
Then there’s sex. Er, at nearly 90 you would have thought it’s not a subject for discussion but, embarrassingly, she’ll talk about it. Mother has had a week off at the seaside with a 79-year—old woman friend who has a boyfriend. “My mother returns with a startling report. Not only does her friend have a sex life and speaks of it rather boldly,” Hanson writes, “but she also told my mother that recently it had not been up to the desired standard. She was not having orgasms.”
Taking mother out in a wheelchair to the Monet exhibition in the West End was not a good idea. “Make way for the cripple!” her mother shouts and the crowds part. Referring to the paintings, she declares: “I’ve had enough of bloody water lilies.” But the prices for drinks really get her goat. “One pound fifty for a drink of water!” she roars. “Bloody disgraceful!” And the tea? “One pound for a paper cup of piss! Disgraceful!”
There are entire chapters in the book on the workings – or lack of working – of the stairlift. Mother is marooned upstairs in the broiling heat. When the repairman arrives for the umpteenth time to repair the device mother roars from the landing: “Are you that bugger that ran in and out last time? Bloody cheek. Thirty pounds for nothing!”
Hanson, herself 63, gives her mother a hooter in case of emergencies. “Last Saturday I was woken at 3am from a divine sleep by my mother honking her emergency hooter. I staggered to her bedroom and there she was at the open window, hooting wildly into the night air. She had been driven to the borders of madness by a party raging behind our house and thought, in her crazed, exhausted state, that they might hear her hooter, and realise how annoying they were and shut up.”
Hanson decides to put her mother in care for a week while she takes a well-earned holiday. But suddenly mother develops a bowel problem and the holiday is in the balance.
Hanson writes: “There is nothing like a bit of body malfunction to lower the spirits, and in our house bowels seem to be the big problem. The cupboard is stuffed with Fybogel, Dioralyte, Preparation H, Beano, Gaviscon and such like to cope with any eventuality.”
Talking about her childhood Hanson reveals: “In our house, lavatories have always been high on the agenda. A bidet has always been a must. In Ruislip in the early 50s we were pioneers. We had the first bidet. Visitors assumed it to be an odd sort of lavatory or foot bath.”
Her mother suffers a stroke. Hanson’s descriptions of the mixed wards at the Whittington hospital are horrific. “How horrid, when one is trying to use a commode, protected from public view by only a thin, wobbly curtain, to know that there are strange men in pyjamas only feet away.
“And just diagonally across the ward is the occasional array of male genitalia. My mother is desperate to have her curtain drawn to shield her from it. The risk of a glimpse of gaping pyjamas, or bits and pieces with tubes attached, is a terrible worry for women brought up in more modest times.”
But Hanson also sings the praises of the hospital’s hard working staff. “At 95 my mother often longs to be allowed to fade away, but our hospital seems to pull out all the stops to keep her going. So this is a little hymn of praise to the Whittington hospital and the NHS. In the last few months we have been a tremendous drain on resources: my mother’s stroke, daughter’s mystery lump, me with my eye problems.”
When death finally comes Hanson’s mother doesn’t want to go gentle into that good night despite her body giving up. “She had wanted to go for years, so she said, but when the time came she didn’t fancy it at all. And we suspect she had another reason for hanging on until the bitter end. She was still sure we couldn’t look after ourselves without her.” Even after Clarice’s death Hanson is struggling, this time with the Post Office who are continuing to pay her mother’s pension. It seems that one department hasn’t told another department that her mother is dead. “As I haven’t taken the money, why can’t the Post Office just keep it? Because they can’t. I must take it, and then I must pay them back. Why? No answer. But to do this I need to get a deceased account form from the Post Office, fill it in, enclose relevant documents, take it all back to the Post Office and they’ll send it off.
“I have long suspected a secret plot to drive us all barmy. It’s been going on for decades.”
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