The job my mum can never just leave

Jack Meredith

I want you to imagine for a moment that it’s the middle of the night, you’re in bed but wide awake, listening out for a call for help from the bedroom down the hall. You don’t know when this call could come, but you know it will, as it does most nights, at different times each occasion.

When you hear it, you need to get out of bed and become a nurse for two older people with complex health needs. Once you’re finished, you go back to bed, too worried to sleep in case you’re needed again, so you just lie there until the early hours, knowing that this feeling will follow you around all day, and the next day, and the next, with your responsibilities to provide care and support never ceasing.

This is what my mum experienced for more than a decade, as the carer for both my grandparents.

Following being made redundant from the Land Registry in 2009, she became the full-time carer for my nan, while also looking after my bampa, AKA grandfather.

Their health needs were too complex to simply leave to themselves, with my nan having multiple health issues: osteoporosis, a torn rotator cuff, COPD, scoliosis, and a colostomy bag, and my bampa having suffered from two awful blood clots in his lungs three years before needing care, along with suffering with spinal issues relating to his rugby playing days, and losing his eyesight to cataracts and glaucoma.

Someone had to step in to help them, and that’s what my mum did, out of her belief that family looks after each other.

Many people didn’t fully understand the complexities of being a carer. My mum would be told to view this as “a career break” and “a chance to slow down”. But that’s far from what care allows. It’s a round-the-clock vocation that puts the well-being of loved ones in your hands.

This wasn’t a career break, but a one-way door out of employment. While carers are allowed to take on some work outside their duties, for many, that just isn’t possible because of how intense their role is, just like my mum’s. The woman who was once a sociable and popular Facilities Manager was now in the house all the time; her life was no longer hers to lead but rather one dictated by the needs of others.

That’s not to say she didn’t want to care for my grandparents, of course not. While she was very open about how stressful the role of being a carer is, she also took comfort in the fact that my grandparents never had to go into a home.

That was a promise she had made to them years earlier, and she planned to keep it, which she did. The idea of hiring carers to come into the house was also floated, but two main factors prevented it. The first was money. It’s no secret that social care is expensive, and for many families, it’s why they take the responsibilities on themselves.

The second was a matter of dignity; my bampa’s, to be exact. He wasn’t comfortable with the idea of strangers coming into the house, helping him get dressed and undressed, washing him, seeing him at his most vulnerable. Now, granted, he wasn’t too pleased with my mum seeing him like that either, which is why my dad and I would help him out with these matters.

Carers’ allowance

Speaking of money, that is something which the state fails to support carers with, big time. Like my mum, millions of people apply for the carers’ allowance, a benefit the government provides to carers to help support them in their duties.

A lovely idea, in theory, but completely useless in practice. The current carers’ allowance rate is £86 a week; barely enough to survive, which forces a lot of carers to rely on elderly loved ones’ attendance allowance and pension to survive.

But between recessions, the cost of Brexit, rising bills, the cost of living, and numerous global conflicts driving costs higher, it isn’t anywhere near enough to keep their heads above water.

Instead of actively trying to fix the system, successive governments have showered carers with praise and empty promises, refusing to acknowledge that caring is, in itself, a full-time job and should be compensated as such. You would be forgiven for thinking carers don’t save the NHS billions of pounds a year from how they’re treated.

And here is where another problem lies: how the allowance actually works. A carer can claim an allowance for only one person, even if caring for multiple people.

For my mum, this meant claiming the allowance for my nan, as she was the first to deteriorate to a point where she needed care, and then taking on caring responsibilities for my bampa too.

But in the eyes of the state, only one of these people is receiving actual care, while the other just exists, acting as if caring is something you can only do for one person at a time, and you just have to ignore whoever else needs it.

In reality, my mum was faced with two people, with two different sets of needs, providing care on a 24/7 basis.

‘The carer’

There is another cost to caring, aside from a financial one, and that is the cost of the carer’s life. Once you undertake these responsibilities, people view you differently, as my mum found out first hand. You go from being who you were to becoming “the carer”. Your social life erodes, as you don’t have the time to meet friends as you once did.

For my mum, this was because my lovely nan’s scoliosis caused her to choke whenever she ate. My mum could never be too far from the house, or spend too long out, as she had to rush home whenever she saw “home” lighting up on her phone.

This sort of retreat brings with it mounting mental health problems; depression over losing the life you once had, anxiety over whether you’ve given the right tablets on the right day or, in my mum’s case, if she went to the shops and started to panic that my nan might eat something and choke while she’s not there to save her.

This is the side of caring that no allowance or assessment can capture, and it is often overlooked by public officials when they coldly discuss the care system in political jargon or as merely a process to be carried out.

Unlike in other jobs, you can’t just stop being a carer, especially if you haven’t got the money for outside support. But there is one exit from the role, and it brings with it no happiness or relief: bereavement. In January 2026, my nan passed away after a short stay in hospital.

After a heroic effort by the medical staff to bring her back from being clinically dead due to a cardiac arrest, we made the heartbreaking but ultimately right decision to let her go peacefully. The doctors gave her morphine to ease her pain, and she passed a few days after entering hospital in her sleep.

Some family friends, although well-meaning in nature, would say that while her passing was sad, this would at least give my mum some breathing room in terms of her caring responsibilities, when the reality isn’t that simple. A carer can’t wish for respite without it being linked to wishing for the unthinkable, especially when you’re caring for a parent.

Exhaustion

When my nan passed, it wasn’t relief my mum felt, but sorrow layered onto exhaustion. As she was my nan’s carer, it meant she had to deal with the DWP, who required her to ring as soon as possible following my nan’s death to stop any carer allowance payments from entering her bank account.

Just think about that for a moment. A day after your mother has passed, you’re expected to speak to the DWP, who offer no grace period to mourn before you have to contact them and, in my mum’s case, treat her passing as if it were a box to be ticked, as they don’t want to overpay you.

Bear in mind, of course, that when my mum applied to then become my bampa’s official carer, the DWP were 10 weeks late with her first allowance payment. But God forbid a daughter be allowed to mourn the loss of her mother, whom she had spent over the last decade providing around-the-clock care for.

While carers’ allowance isn’t a devolved matter in Wales, social care support is. One such form of support that local authorities can offer is a one-off £500 top-up to cover day-to-day costs.

While a great initiative, the Welsh government needs to properly fund this to make it a monthly top-up that all councils can offer carers. This improved scheme not only properly supports carers who are unable to take on employment but also dignity, and would go a long way toward easing any financial worries.

So what’s the solution for people like my mum? The reality is, while carers aren’t properly recognised for the work they do, which should be rectified, this is an issue that runs too deeply to be resolved by throwing money at it.

Not only are carers owed so much for what they do, but we must ensure we do not forget them when their duties come to an end. They’re left with no job, no income, and immense grief that they’re expected to handle themselves. The state and society at large owe carers a life on the other side of their obligations.

Care given so freely should never mean a life quietly taken.