My Pet Hate

Author: Laurence Clark

One commonly-used word really gets my goat...

All too often I find that relationships with disabled people are misunderstood. For example take a couple of mine:

- My personal assistant is the bloke who helps me dress, shave and get around.
- My wife is the woman who gives me love, support and regular hot sex!

Now I really don't want to get these two mixed up! Yet the same word will always get used by other people to describe both of these relationships... namely 'caring.'

My issues with the 'c' word have nothing to do with political correctness; it's just that I've always believed in the old proverb of calling a spade a spade and this word simply doesn't accurately describe my situation. I see my relationship with my PA as being quite straight-forward in that they are basically paid to support me by carrying out the tasks in their job description. Describing this role in terms of 'caring' implies that I need looking after or supervising or even protecting. It's also a very emotive word, implying an emotional attachment that isn't actually there.

But the bottom line is that, to my way of thinking, to be 'cared' for implies I'm not the one in control of my own life. Surely a social support service aiming to enable us to fulfil our potential would focus on independence, choice and control; not a paternalistic idea like care.

With this in mind, in the past I've played a little game with my social worker during community care assessments. You see, your average sentence from your typical social worker goes something along the lines of:

"Blah blah blah care blah blah care plan blah blah blah blah carer."

It was as if someone had bet them they couldn�t mention a care-related term at least once during every sentence. This is no mean feat, although I suppose it takes three years of rigorous social work training to become really good at it!

So to really mess with their head, the game I played was to tell them at the start of my assessment that they were not to use the 'c' word in my presence as I found it highly offensive. This had the effect of robbing them of the power of speech, since they cautiously had to think hard beforehand about each and every word they uttered.

The positive outcome of my little game was that the social worker would always readily agree to whatever support I wanted just to get away from me as quickly as possible.