I overheard a stranger on her phone last week. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. She was waiting somewhere, talking to her sibling. Their father had just been admitted. She had somewhere else to be, and she was trying to hand things over. Gently at first. Then not so gently. I’ve done my turn, she was saying. Your turn now. I have somewhere to be too.
It reminded me of something old people used to say. One mother can raise ten children. Ten children can’t always look after one mother. It sounds harsh when you say it out loud, but it isn’t really about who loves who more. It’s just how these things work.
A mother with ten kids doesn’t sit down and plan who feeds who tonight. She just does it. Nobody has to remind her. Ten grown children looking after one old mother is a different story. Now everyone has their own house, their own job, their own family to run. Someone has to actually decide who calls the doctor, who pays the bill, who takes leave from work. And the pull a parent feels for a child isn’t quite the same pull a child feels back. Children are taught to look after their parents. Mothers don’t need to be taught to look after their babies. That’s the whole difference.
And when it’s ten people sharing one job, things slip through. Everyone thinks somebody else already called the hospital. That’s exactly what I was hearing on the phone. One sister making sure this didn’t quietly turn into nobody’s job.
What makes it harder now is that people are living much longer than before. Our parents aren’t passing away quickly in their sixties like they used to. Many are living into their eighties and nineties, and a good chunk of those years can come with illness, or forgetfulness, or just being frail. Looking after a parent used to be a short final stretch. Now it can go on for years, and unlike a child, a parent doesn’t get more independent as time passes. They get less.
I think that’s the part we haven’t really adjusted to here in Brunei. We still treat eldercare like something that just happens quietly at home, without much planning. That was fine when it meant a year or two near the end. It’s a different thing altogether when it might mean fifteen years, spread across brothers and sisters who are themselves getting old, still raising their own kids, and each one hoping someone else steps up first.
I don’t think there’s a clever fix for this. Families who talk about it early, who decide who does what before things get bad, tend to manage. Families who leave it until the hospital corridor tend to fall apart the way that phone call was falling apart. The old saying was never really about love. It was about what happens when one job gets split between too many people, and nobody quite believes it’s theirs to carry.
