A Little Give by Marina Benjamin

Author:Marina Benjamin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, BIO022000, SOC010000, SOC032000, SOC028000, FAM000000, SOC026010
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2023-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

More than anyone, I know that there is no virtue in the care I offer my mother. Every time I fail to conceal my annoyance at her slowness or bristle at a thrice-repeated question I am cognisant of how far I fall short of selflessness. It is one thing to tamp down the naggings of ego, setting your own aspirations and desires to one side on behalf of a loved one. But this temporary muffling of the self falls far short of its transcendence, a kind of liberation that Iris Murdoch seems to have been reaching for with the concept of ‘unselfing’.

Murdoch touches on this idea all too briefly in The Sovereignty of Good (1970), taking an example drawn from nature. She talks about being in an ‘anxious and resentful state of mind’ and then looking out of the window and catching sight of a ‘hovering kestrel’. The sheer beauty of the bird, wings outstretched, effortlessly suspended, lifts her out of herself. It fills her mind. Leaves her exalted. ‘In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel.’ For a brief moment the self is so porous it is subject to external override, a torrent of joy washing away the cloudy internal weather.

I struggle to find moments of joyful unselfing in the drudgery of daily care, though now and then I manage to absent myself from the task in hand and float away from my own concerns. If I wanted to dignify the experience I might invoke the Christian concept of kenosis, a kind of self-emptying that takes place not so that one can fill up the tank again with some higher thing, but so that one becomes transparent like a window or a ghost. You are functionally present and yet somehow profoundly absent.

But I do not particularly want to dignify my labours, which are more self-obliterating than transformative: I have to flatten myself into a two-dimensional being and rub off all my corners in order to be with my mother these days. And I am no saint. More and more I resent being her backstop.

A loving friend who eventually committed her own mother to a care home has been looking out for me. ‘This is only going one way’, she said recently, ‘and if you keep stepping in to cover for her trip-ups and failures she’ll end up eating you alive’.

The slide into self-oblivion happens by imperceptible degrees. That is what makes it so dangerous. The small ministrations, the constant vigilance, the endless availability easily slip from view, becoming part of the taken-for-granted fabric of things. This care slips under the radar because its aims are modest. Because it seeks merely to keep everything the same. The philosopher Ivan Illich was right in pointing the finger at care work as a chief example of the blunt end of the industrial economy: neglected, exploitative, largely non-monetised and incrementally ‘self’ eroding, he called it ‘shadow work’.

I have so well disguised my own labour that even my mother, its chief beneficiary, cannot see it.

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