Bonus
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 22: MoneySexPower
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Rachel Robertson
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Rachel Robertson's biography and other articles by this writer
I'm thinking of a long weekend in Margaret River, of a heater for the lounge room. I'm thinking of a new bicycle for Ben. I'm thinking of a visit to my favourite bookshop, dinner and an evening at the theatre, a new pair of boots. I'm having these thoughts because I've just been given $600. Fantasising is what you do. But I'm thinking these things also as a way of drowning out that small but persistent discomfort that has been droning away in the background ever since I got the letter. It's from the Hon. Jenny Macklin (Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs) and the Hon. Joe Ludwig (Minister for Human Services).
Dear Ms Robertson
The Government recognises the important role and contribution you make as a carer. Carers perform a vital role in our community in caring for the aged and people with disabilities. As part of the Australian Government's 2008-09 Budget, eligible carers will be provided with a bonus payment. You are entitled to the 2008 one-off bonus payment of $600.
Why is it that I feel slightly soiled when I read this? Is it the clinical tone of the letter, the fact that it confirms what we all know anyhow: that individual families must look after their own, that taxpayers and governments don't ‘perform this vital role'? Perhaps the bonus is a kind of gift or reward, not because I'm doing a good job (who would know?) or because I've chosen to be a carer, but just because I'm an ‘eligible carer'. The term ‘bonus' was originally Stock Exchange slang. It means ‘a boon or gift over and above what is normally due' and ‘a premium for services rendered or expected'. But at times it has been used to mean a bribe. Perhaps that is the more appropriate usage – not a reward for good behaviour (that is, accepting the caring role), but a bribe to ensure that good behaviour continues.
What did I expect? That society might suddenly value caring for the disabled?
Perhaps my discomfort is because this letter codifies my status as a recipient of government funds and officially classifies me as ‘carer'? It's a strange thing to be described as a ‘carer' of my own son. He is nine years old. I am his mother. This shift from ‘mother' to ‘carer' makes me profoundly uneasy.
To use the term ‘carer' about the mother of a young child is to mark her out as different from other mothers. Not that she cares more or less for her child but rather that her role is not the seemingly simple and socially valued role of mothering, but a more complex and invisible role of providing lifelong care for a child who may never become independent. That the lifelong care is limited by the mother's life expectancy, not her child's, is another anomaly of the role.
‘Carer' is a recently coined word, probably first used in 1978 to describe a person whose paid or unpaid role was to care for the sick, aged or disabled. But it carries the weight of six centuries of use in English of the term ‘care' to not only describe ‘taking care' but also ‘to sorrow, mourn, lament' or ‘be troubled by' something. There is implicit in the term ‘carer' a sense of burden as well as love.
Does the term ‘carer' imply that there is something unnatural in the mother's relationship to her son, that because the normal developmental path of the child has been disrupted the relationship must be redefined? What we find most appealing about children – their vulnerable dependency on us – becomes problematic and disturbing in adults. So much so that we have given a name to people who provide daily assistance to vulnerable or dependent adults. They are no longer mother, father, spouse, son or daughter; they are ‘carer'. And the person they assist is no longer a son, daughter, spouse or parent; they are the ‘care recipient'. The relationship is constructed and defined as unequal – giver and recipient – in the way that the relationship between parent and non-disabled child is not, even though the same dynamic exists.
We know that our society valorises independence over dependence, non-disabled people over people with a disability. I wonder if a similar privileging is happening in the distinction between mother and carer? Mothers of children with a disability are often told, ‘You're doing a wonderful job,' and ‘I couldn't do it,' and ‘I really admire you'. Although people mean well, the somewhat patronising tone suggests they speak from a position of assumed superiority as well as from a deep-seated fear of disability. I often sense that the mother-carer of a disabled child, like the child, is seen by other mothers as damaged.
I have never used the term ‘carer' about myself, even though I have ticked that box on various government forms over the years. I'm a member of Carers Australia and support the political and educational work that carers' associations undertake. My ambivalence is about the term ‘carer' as an identity tag.
I am reminded here of Althusser's concept of interpellation or hailing. The individual is hailed and, in recognising herself as the one hailed, she is interpellated or slotted into a particular role. To be hailed is to be encouraged or coerced into thinking of oneself in a defined way. The individual becomes both an agent of ideology and subject to it. Diagnosed with autism, my son was thus hailed by medical practice – he became ‘boy with autism' rather than just ‘boy'. At the same time, I seem to have been hailed as ‘carer', and my response, of course, is to accept that identification. Althusser's argument is that the work of the ideological apparatuses of religion, medicine, education, law, culture and politics is to make a particular definition appear to be self-evident. An individual internalises certain values and meanings and the identity offered to her, while still believing she is making a free choice. We do what we are expected to do; we do what institutions require of us.
I suspect that individuals both accept and resist this identification. Identity is plural and changing – a process of becoming that shifts throughout our lives. When I experience that dissonance between my role as carer and my own sense of myself as mother, I am renegotiating my identity. I may not be able to renegotiate my role – how many carers are going to abandon their loved one at the local hospital or police station? – but I am reworking my sense of how that role confines and defines me.