Sick to death of gendered assumptions/judgements around my care of DM

[bringincrazyback]

I just really need to get this off my chest. Elderly DM has Alzheimer's plus one or two physical health issues, and lives with me and DH. I wfh 4 days a week and my health is poor (chronic pain/fatigue mainly, though there are other things in the mix). This means that I need to rest a lot and can't always predict how my health will be from day to day. Not to the point where my mum's health/safety are compromised - her care is never neglected - but enough that I'm not able to do it all myself. So my mum has carers for an hour morning and evening to get her up/to bed and help with personal care. I do everything else.

DM has had a raft of appointments recently, doctor/dentist/podiatrist. Pretty much all routine/recurring stuff but not always with clinicians I've met before. And time after time I am seeing a look of puzzlement (sometimes tinged with judgement) come over people's faces, both male and female, when I tell them that although my mum lives with me, paid carers handle her morning/evening routines, most of her daily personal care and provide additional companionship alongside the time DH and I spend with her.

There are myriad reasons for this - it's mainly down to my work/health and the fact that my conditions make me pretty useless in the evenings which is when she needs the most support (she suffers from sundowning, where I never seem to manage to reassure her very effectively but the carers are markedly more successful with this). But also partly that left to her own devices she won't wash/brush her teeth/take care of herself generally and I just don't have the mental or physical bandwidth to address this, nor the time on work days.

I've seen the puzzlement-tinged-with-mild-judgement look numerous times over the past couple of weeks and it's grinding my every last gear now. This has been going on ever since I first put the regular care in place, including from the carers themselves on occasions. I'm already carrying a lot of guilt for not doing it all myself, and this really doesn't help. Pretty sure I'm not imagining it either - I've seen it happen often enough now. I also see it from friends/acquaintances sometimes if the set-up happens to come up in conversation. Ditto if it ever comes up that DM has her own separate living accommodation within the houser (by mutual choice including DM's, so we're not living all on top of each other 24/7) meaning that I'm not with her every waking moment as people seem to think I should be.

And what really pisses me off about this is that I seriously doubt there would be any puzzlement/judgement in the mix at all if I was a man. In fact, I'd be applauded for the simple fact of having DM to live with me. It's so tiresome the expectations that are still placed around women in this area of life.

Just to give some backstory, I've been caring respectively for my dad (now sadly passed) and then my mum now since 2017, not always single-handed, but I've always been where the buck stops, so to speak. No siblings. No family where we live now. Due to some of my mum's problems worsening (mainly extreme passivity to the point where she won't tell me or the carers when she is in pain/unwell in any other way or needs practical assistance) I'm not even sure how much longer this arrangement is going to be practical/safe for her even with carers in the mix. I'm trying to keep her out of a home as long as possible because I honestly believe she would just decide to die - she is an extreme introvert with social anxiety who most of the time doesn't really seem to want people around her at all. Since losing my dad she doesn't really have much will to live, I sympathise deeply and do what I can do keep her spirits up, but nothing seems to help much. She swears blind she isn't depressed, I personally think she is very deeply depressed (and has been since my dad passed in 2019) but she flatly refuses any suggestion of this or any treatment for depression.

I know none of this is DM's fault, and I'm aware gendered assumptions are far from being my main problem here, but I'm only human, I'll be 60 in a couple of years, I'm not well and there is only so much more of this I'm physically going to be able to do. And yet people judge me as a woman for not doing it all.

Apologies for the rant but it's 2025 and this issue is really not helping my mental health, and I figure aspects of this might be relatable to some on this board. Is it just me who thinks I wouldn't be getting any of this if I was a man?

Some things that have risen to the surface while I've been thinking about all this.

My father (much as I loved and miss him) was terrible about not respecting my work when the 4 of us lived together - I was self-employed at the time, so together with me being female and wfh, that just wasn't work in his eyes. He never properly seemed to accept I worked at all. I remember DH once offering to return a mobility aid for him, knowing that I get nervous driving into the city near where we live. My dad told him not to put himself out, he was busy and 'bcb can do it sometime', not having actually asked me or anything - that was pretty much the norm. He did admit in the end that he forgot I worked and just saw me as a housewife at home and that he thought it was his age and upbringing - I understood that, so I did my best not to get irked by it, but it was hard sometimes.

It does, however, mean that he would absolutely have been expecting me to do every single thing for my mum at this point. I think this is where most of the guilt I'm carrying stems from. I'd have definitely been expected to stop working too, because he never accepted that I 'needed' to work in the first place. (DH is a high earner, so once I got married my parents thought I should just live off him and be a housewife despite our not having DC. I'm Gen X and I think a lot of people of my parents' generation thought along these lines, tbh.)

Actually, reading some of this back, I wonder if I've become conditioned to expect people not to take my work seriously because so many people over the years haven't. The fact that it seems to have been happening again lately (and I do think it genuinely has, on at least some of the occasions I mentioned upthread) does feel quite triggering, maybe I need to be mentally compartmentalising better. I dunno.

As a HCP i think you are imagining things here.

Maybe, maybe not. Just to be clear, my intention is not to accuse or disparage HCPs generally. But surely different HCPs will have different outlooks, just like everything else in life?

Now that you have been able to reflect on what you think is happening, your next objective is to get out from under your conditioning. Doesn't matter what your Dad might have thought or said.You have a perfectly good care package for your parent.
It is no-one s business if you work from home, or have poor health. Next time you are asked an inappropriate question, just ask WHAT'S PROMPTS YOUR QUESTION?...with a raised eyebrow!
You are not wrong, while there are thousands of good carers, there are some who are quite inappropriate in what they say.
Be proud of what you are achieving. Society places a heavy burden on women. Don't secumb to it. Stand tall. X

Good on you for rebelling! Sounds like you were put in a completely unfair and untenable position. I'm glad it all worked out in the end.

Thanks. I think I needed to see it put as bluntly as that! (I think I need to also finally get that counselling, but that's a whole other shitshow 😄)