Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Sixteen - Three Steps Back, Two Steps Sideways

The monk's bedsit was not the first gay man's residence that I had been invited to. The first was when I was a teenager, when I first sought respite and an alternative, to serial male promiscuity. I did not realise how universal it was and how habit forming it could become. Visits to that Gainsborough flat ended after an argument. Though there was a more mutual and empathic separation later.

A decade on from when I first attempted to breaking a cycle of want built on property values where I owned no property, and I had an imagination that it was beyond my means to fulfil, I maybe visited the Franciscan monk in his bedsit for a month, possibly longer. I probably thought that my visiting him was better than cottaging because the room was drier and more private than the public toilet. But the monk was no more a good housekeeper capable of home making with limited materials than the all male household that I lived as part of on Pierrepoint Rd. And he was as utilitarian in his appreciation of limited sensuality as he was in his housekeeping. Behind my bedsit door I did my best to make the room seem homely, if only to cheer myself up. When music, Radio 4, and my surroundings failed me I sought images on scheduled television, on the set Graham had given me, that were as near porn as I could pretend they were. The shared spaces of Pierrepoint Rd presented themselves as organised carelessness with no sense of aesthetic. Were I sensitised enough then I might have recognised how the place was organised was either the symptom or the cause of a sense of depression. But if I were that sensitised, then I would have to ask where the depression came from. That was a difficult question to phrase, never mind answer.

I could only take so much of the company of the monk sharing as little of himself as he did, before being with him felt like the blind leading the blind, where neither knew which led or followed, and both hoped to not fall and not to bring the other down when they fell. 'More consistent to be blind on my own and return to the intermittent cottaging.' was my thought. Better to own my own 'Catch - 22' situation to try to get out of, however I fell into it, than to have to attempt to get into and out of than somebody else's. That seemed to be the limit of 'being an adult'. 

After working for over six months at Windrush Nursing Home I was long past my probationary period but I was having similar thoughts to what I thought about the circular pointlessness with sex with regard to being a care assistant. I had presented myself to matron as I could do the job, untried as a care assistant as I was. I still believed in fuller employment and I did not want to be unemployed. But the longer I did the job the more I found myself reflecting that for my better work/life balance and proper rest I could sustainably work for only five shifts a week. The work was that consistent and intense that six shifts over seven days was one day over my natural limit. Perhaps inexperience was one of the problems: I could sustain the six shift week in the longer run but I was not yet trained up enough in how to sustain that. But I was not in charge of the economics, i.e. how many staff the nursing home took on, to divide the workload among them all and make it more sustainable. 

When I started as a care assistant it was with Nottingham Council, and my surface understanding was that in so far as anyone was fit enough to work, then technically nearly anyone could be a care assistant as long as the employee had a consistent enough sense of vocation for the patients. There was nothing precious about the work, mostly silently valued by the patients as it was. I had not factored in how shift work patterns and pay rates changed the sustainability of doing the job.

In fact I avoided thinking too much at that level. It was literally 'above my pay grade', below which - but not much lower - was income support where I would have had much more time to think but an uneasy frame of reference for any thoughts I had. Any comfort I drew from from my absence of thoughts about the management were interrupted by two events at the nursing home. The first was matron inviting the staff to book their statutory two weeks holiday. My main thought when matron made the announcement was that I nowhere I wanted to go, and nobody I wanted to see, so no reason to book anything. If I had wanted anything it could only have felt like temporary relief before a return to dissatisfactory sense of reward. An any discussion among us about how families we each lived, emotionally and geographically, from our families I would have won on the emotional scale by a country mile, however far away from their families the employees physically lived.

I was the last member of staff to choose my two weeks off. Matron had to call me into her office to ask me to choose when I wanted my time off, as if I had avoided the question. My tiredness from doing one shift a week too many for so many months showed in how I answered her question. Having been asked to book my time off I told matron I told that I wanted a shift less per week over however many weeks that gave me time off that made sense to me. She said 'You can't have that.'. She was frustrated with me, and in my insecurity her frustration felt like anger. But we trusted each other enough to let the subject drop and for me to get on with my next task in the nursing home.

The autumn brought matron closer a sense of crisis than I had previously seen her.  More elderly and infirm residents died faster then replacements for them could be found. Some of the deaths combined shock with surprise and relief when they happened. One particularly memorable slow death came about when one patient, Elisabeth, not only retained her dignity, but retained it by refusing to eat and only occasionally drinking. She had lost interest in life and had starved herself to death in a way that dignified her in a way we were not meant to imagine. When she breathed her last as skeleton tightly covered by skin, the dignity she maintained was at least as shocking as the means of her death. Another patient who never really settled from her arrival onward died of an infection incurred by the bed sores she sustained. The shock of being moved to the home froze her and the bed sores were the consequence. She died of an infection from the bed sores. In spite of these times I tried instil some humanity into my work heaving patients to and fro, feeding them, washing them, toileting them, changing their clothes and bedding, in one perpetual cycle of movements where we did not dare count how often we were  repeating ourselves. When on radio 4 I heard the news of the death wartime dance band leader Victor Sylvester,  I told one of the more sentient patients of his death as I was helping her to bed, and I saw her cry at being reminded of his life.

If I had hoped that with the staff/patient ratio lowering with the empty beds might give me some sense of respite so that I could restore my work life balance a little then I was disappointed. When the home in a show of sincerity 'let go' of one member of staff in a no fault departure from the job I was second in line such a departure and only one person was allowed to leave. Anyone else who left would have left with some black mark being registered on their work record, even if they had done nothing wrong. The member of staff they let go of said she was due to be imminently married which was a more creditable reason than anyone being allowed to leave simply for being very very tired. I should have asked to leave on mental health grounds, but I was too tired to put together an explanation of how tired I was that matron would have respected.

After the member of staff had been given an honourable discharge to marry I started having short blackouts mid shift. I'd be in the midst of completing three or four different tasks, all of which interlocked with each other, and all of which had an order in which to be completed and my mind would go blank. Then I would come to in the place I had gone blank not knowing how long I'd been inactive. I saw my doctor to talk about how the structure of my job exhausted me, and about these blank moments I kept getting where I could not think clearly about changing jobs. I felt sort-of-better for telling him about it all. He did not offer me any medication. 

He did better than than medication. He put me on a list for one to one therapy on the NHS. Meanwhile through unlikely circumstances I found a prayer partner for the first time in my life. I prayed for an hour a week in the home of an elderly lady who asked for a prayer partner. Celia's simplicity and honesty were refreshing, and I found her broad Sheffield accent funny, and a delight.

After the disconnected times with the elderly monk I enjoying a more wholesome and balanced reciprocity with one elderly person in my church and house group.

Please left click here for Chapter Seventeen.

might ,  I felt this engineered carelessness deeply, as depression or as  with me been longer. In his bedsit room we could have talked in attempted friendship but his pressing matter was always dealing with his being closeted in a way that did not disrupt his relationship with his church hierarchy. I could have empathised with him I felt trapped  ve. flat he made little effort to be sociable, but maybe his  With it's insistence on celibacy, the Catholic church that the Franciscan monk belonged to, and that had found his vocation in, was clearly the driver of the behaviours that had pushed him into that catch-22 place where firstly he was to make deny his masochism to himself, then secondly make him develop unrealistic behavioural strategies to accommodate his sexual tastes, tastes that he was officially not meant to have, so as to make faith and celibacy seem consistent and attractive. I was caught in a similar but different catch-22 because of my cottaging.

But where the monk had started to be open with me about his tastes for sexualised violence and a knowingly poor perception of what mutual consent meant with sex, I did not have the language or the courage to say to him 'You do not have to believe that sex always has to linked to violence begotten by the state and church, who you know will use it to falsely make people feel guilty.'. Just as I did not have the courage for him so I lacked courage for myself. Equally I knew nobody well enough who when I might have told them I had recently cottaged then they would be unembarrassed enough at what I admitted to that we could explore with me how such behaviour could be described by the mechanics of it, which if outlined would reveal a consistent secondary logic, and justification, of it's own which needed to be understood to be resisted. Maybe such person would have some inclusive jokes about the latent absurdities of cottaging that would bring about the most inclusive release possible. Jokes are sometimes good as enlightened short cuts through complex explanations. 

But alas no such person existed for me, and if I'd had such a person then the first thing that they would expect of me was that I somehow got my work situation in the care factory on a more sustainable setting than it was turning out to be. Several months into the job, and long past my trial period the was sustainable for the management-they set the terms on which I worked for them. But the work was proving less than sustainable with me.

The management had two key ways of measuring the work for either maximum profit or for optimum sustainability for the employees doing the work. They could vary the staff patient ratio or vary the patterns of shift work. If they set the staff patient ratio at one staff member per six patients then they made the work as intense as was possible to be whilst it remained sustainable. The ideal shift patterns for the such intensity of work I estimated to be a thirty hour week. The management calculated the best shift pattern to be a thirty six hour week, which wold have been okay for the staff had the staff/patient ratio been lower. But the management insisted on the full 35 hours of shifts with the maximum staff patient ratio, as if they could push that and nothing would 'give', the system was sustainable. They did not see the staff turnover, people leaving the job, as proof that they should ease back on the work to maintain the team work that there was, going better.12

With my doing one shift per week too many for the balance of my mental and physical health over the winter/spring quarter and beyond I continued to do the the job well enough but accumulated a certain depleted sense of self. This tiredness showed itself in a way that seemed unexpected when it came. I'd never imagined until it happened how a job could eat into person's life the way this job had eaten into mine.

Matron wanted all the staff to book their two weeks annual paid holiday. Everyone else, who could compensate better than I could for doing a shift a week too many with the support they drew from their partner or friends, booked their two weeks of holiday time, to have a have time out with their friends etc. I had nobody I wanted to spend any length of time with. With a sense of blankness that was creeping up on me slowly I did see the point of a week off. I was the last to complete my choice of holiday weeks, even now I am unsure I actually booked any.

What I remember more clearly is the open row I had with matron where my indifference to having a week off stretched to saying to matron that I wanted it in the form a a shift less every week. I did not get my shift less every week. Nor in my recollection did matron say anything to me about burnout in work, as being the reason we got our weeks off. For management to admit that they knew about the potential for burnout among staff would have been to close to them admitting that the way they ran the home could push staff towards burnout. Management was much more about creating plausible deniability for the consequences of some of their actions than they could let on they knew about.8