When your husband or wife becomes your carer

Most writing about family carers assumes the carer is a son or daughter. A great deal of caring in Australia is actually done by husbands and wives, often in their seventies and eighties, often with health problems of their own, and very often without ever describing themselves as a carer at all.

“I’m not a carer,” people say. “I’m his wife.”

That is true, and it is also part of what makes this kind of caring hard.

It is a different kind of caring

When an adult child helps a parent, there is usually some distance. They go home at the end of the day. When you care for a partner, there is no end of the day. The person who needs help is also the person you used to turn to when things were hard.

Roles shift in ways that can feel unfair to both people. The one who always did the finances can no longer follow a bank statement. The one who did the cooking for fifty years cannot safely use the stove. Each change is small, and each one is also a loss, and nobody holds a farewell for any of them.

There is grief in that, even while the person is sitting across the table. It is allowed.

Accepting help is not failing

Two things partners say again and again are “I should be able to manage” and “she would hate having someone in the house”.

Both are understandable, and both tend to hold on until something breaks: a fall, a hospital stay, or the carer becoming unwell themselves. Help arranged in a crisis is help arranged in a hurry, with less choice and less say.

Bringing someone in early is not handing over your marriage. It is protecting the parts of it that matter. If someone else helps with the shower three mornings a week, you get to be a husband at breakfast instead of a carer who is already tired.

Staying a couple

A few things worth protecting:

• Time that is not about care. A walk, a programme you both watch, the crossword. Even half an hour a day that nobody calls “care” keeps you in your old roles for a while.
• The private things. Some couples would rather a support worker helps with showering precisely so that it does not change things between them. Others would rather do it themselves. Neither is wrong.
• Decisions made together, for as long as that is possible. Ask, even when it would be quicker not to.
• Your own friends. Carers drift away from their own lives without noticing. A standing coffee once a week is worth defending.

Looking after yourself

You are not a back-up system. If you become unwell, there are two people needing care, not one.

Keep your own GP appointments. Tell your doctor that you are a carer, because it changes what they look for. Take respite before you think you need it, not after. And be honest with yourself about how you are going. Signs of carer burnout is a short self-check worth doing every few months.

Carer Gateway offers free support for unpaid carers, including counselling and help planning for what happens if you are suddenly unable to care. For in-home support for your partner, the starting point is an assessment through myagedcare.gov.au.

How we think about it

When we work with a couple, both people are part of the picture. The partner at home knows more than anyone else about what a good day looks like, and they are usually the first to notice when something is off. We write what they tell us into the One Story record once, so they are not explaining it again to every new face. The same small Care Circle comes each week, which matters a great deal to a person who never wanted strangers in the house in the first place.

The aim is not to take over. It is to take enough off the load that you can go on being married, not just managing.