Who Cares?
Earlier this year, I was fortunate enough to be invited onto Mary Bourke’s new Radio 4 show ‘Who Cares?’; a show about comedians who are also carers. Onstage we might be funny and charming entertainers, but offstage a lot of our time and effort is in caring for others with significant challenges. Loved ones get very old and very frail, have life-changing accidents, and/or must endure great physical, mental and emotional challenges for which they require someone to care for them as they cannot take care of themselves any longer.
Some do care work professionally, their entire day dedicated to caring for someone else and doing many things that someone who has lost their independence can no longer do for themselves. Some, like me and the other comics on the show, are carers alongside their main careers.
I’ve been a carer for my Mum for many years, and as aging and its accompanying problems compound independence, I’ve found myself in the ever-increasing role of parenting a parent, dealing with the realities of caring for someone who has endured a stroke and now vascular dementia. I’ve not spoken about it on stage before, but after sharing my experiences with Mary, I realised that this is an important subject to talk about and share with others. Sure, there might be material in it, but as comedy often shares a space in the venn diagram alongside philosophy, this was a great opportunity to have an informal podcast chat with Mary and write some new material about my experiences. I had about a week to prepare it all, so I cobbled together some ideas and ran it through at a few clubs before the recording date, and luckily it all paid off. What really stuck out to me was how universal the experience was, I could see people in the audience from different ages and cultures acknowledge my experience as their own. It turns out that we might look and speak differently, but mums are mums for everyone.
Good mums, that is. Not all mums are good mums, but for those of us who got a good mum, we may not realise it until we are tasked with their care. They, now at the mercy of our patience, long after we took theirs for granted. Real love is organic, it emerges naturally, and we discover who we really are. Some walk away, some never leave the sides of their loved ones, all of that comes to pass when the pressure of the crucible increases.
I’m going to post the whole set that was recorded, but for now check me out on Mary’s series for BBC Sounds – Mary Bourke: Who Cares?