Multi-dimensional Connections - 2024 02 09

With fall rains come a glorious growth of mushrooms. From one day to the next they burst into the landscape. Each day, every walk, there is new growth, colour, texture and composition. 

Storyfarm cultivation has been a very gradual process. I started this blog post on February 9, 2024.

It is now November 2, 2024. In early February I was realizing that I needed to change my approach to my situation. I could no longer continue living in a perpetual state of imminent death. Mom had surpassed expectations for two years. She wasn't going anywhere and I needed to shift out of a hospice orientation to a long term orientation.

At the same time, I needed to accept the realities and constraints of operating a long-term care bed in my home so that Mom could live out the rest of her natural life at home. This meant I needed to be extra careful about social engagements to reduce the risk of infectious disease, it also meant that my time was essentially proscribed by Mom's need for care twenty-four hours a day. If there wasn't anyone else coming to take care of her, the default fell to me. The reality of operating a long-term care bed that requires staffing 24/7 translated into my time providing care to Mom averaging and often exceeding 500 hours a month, including sleeping.

Any work that I might imagine needed to fit within the constraints of my caregiving commitment to Mom. We tried hiring paid external support when I was still fully employed, but the cost per hour of paying for external caregivers pretty much wiped out the money I was earning at paid work. It didn't make sense to run down our meager reserves when we didn't know how much time we were going to be operating our long-term care bed.

Out of this caregiving experience emerged a conviction that our society needs to value care, and the work of caregiving, as a core foundation to inspire our work in our families, neighbourhoods, and communities.

We are not going to understand the work of caring if we don't write it into our collective conscience. It won't get written into our collective conscience by those who have not experienced it. The majority of caring work takes place in our homes. For many of our frail elders, who do not have families and neighbours to fend for them, they will find themselves in institutional care.

The combination of my own lived experience of caregiving, and also my current study of research into cost accounting for long-term care has invigorated my commitment to storyfarming and the creative works that give stories life and meaning. I have been prototyping the use of Google to support storyfarming initiatives and I am happy with the results.

Set up a google email account for your storyfarming project about caring. Open up a Blogger blog account, Google Sites account, Youtube account, and whatever social sharing platform you choose to make it possible for other caring people to find you (LinkedIn, Facebook, Bluesky, Countersocial, Mastadon, Reddit, etc.) 

Think in terms of contemporaneous notes - what happened today and how that experience connected to something from the past or something you hope for in the future. 

It is through our contemporaneous notes that we provide 'evidence of activity'. It is this evidence of activity that we so desperately need written into history. It is evidence of what it means to live a caring life that is missing from the 'great man' historical narrative that has shaped our sense of what is possible and what is worth doing.