Life is short, so fork out for that giant plant pot

Unless you snatch the time to decompress, you become angry, choked by resentment towards somebody who may be by turns charming, demanding, irrational, infuriating, lovable or nasty, but who is, 100% of the time, vulnerable and dependent. Someone you love and hate simultaneously.

I seek refuge in the bathroom occasionally, consciously relaxing my jaw, because it becomes clamped aching tight with exasperation and suppressed antagonism. In the middle of an interrupted night, when sleep has been murdered and I feel murderous, I find oxygen in reading.

All primary carers, especially unpaid family carers, have to be aware that relationships can become parasitic: you can be eaten alive by the needs of someone else. Sadly this is normal, not exceptional. And when primary carers do go under, devoured, the domestic set up collapses like a pack of cards.

I escaped briefly last week to our local garden centre. My mission was to re-pot two big, smart house plants, a gift that I have against the odds managed to keep alive. Nurturing them has become one of the daily games I play for distraction.

The significance of choosing new pots, though, came with a minor epiphany. Should I go for the sensible, quite-a-bit-bigger one? Or the dustbin-sized upgrade, a grownup home for an adolescent fig and olive? Comparing the pots, cradling them in my arms, I faced a weirdly specific test of how optimistic I was.

Given the reality of our situation, it seemed crazily presumptuous – and expensive: all those litres of John Innes No 3 compost – to go big. We wouldn’t live long enough. A waste, surely. But then growing plants is basically the quintessence of optimism; belief in the future. Why ever else plant an oak sapling?

Watching someone you love being claimed by dementia, watching them fight daily to the point of exhaustion, seeing their unspoken despair when in lucid moments they realise they are deteriorating – these things are the antithesis of positive. It must be the same for any terminal condition.

Somehow, though, it is the carer’s responsibility, among a myriad other responsibilities, to defy the situation by being as upbeat as possible. Cheery, that’s the word. We have to be as cheery as we can, banishing hopelessness with a treat to eat, a snippet of gossip, a suggestion for a good TV show. Seeking shiny nuggets among the minutiae of domestic life that will lift the mood; burrowing for hope in all kinds of tiny ways. It’s a kind of professional here-and-now-ism.

I am naturally an optimistic person, but the long haul is hard, a test of courage and emotional endurance. One thing’s for sure: I am not alone. According to Carers UK, using data from the 2021 Census, there are 5.8 million unpaid carers in the UK, 1.7 million of them providing more than 50 hours a week and 1.8 million of them looking after someone with dementia. Oh, and 1.4 million are, like me, disabled themselves.

Centre for Care, incidentally, estimated in 2024 that the value of unpaid care in the UK is £184bn.

So respect our prowess, us vital members of a vast invisible army, because although what we do isn’t easy,we battle on. We keep breathing. And we know the value of hopeful gestures.

I bought the bigger plant pot.

Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010

Photograph by poco_bw/ Getty Images