As soon as she hears me stir, she calls out, “I could do a wee”, and as I rise my heart sinks. My own day ends right there and I begin another day – as a carer to my 98-year-old mother – by heaving her on to her commode. I hear her use it and then, face averted, take it to the loo and empty it. I bring her teeth; she fumbles in the bowl and pushes them in with a shaky hand. I should help her but I can’t bring myself to touch them.

Later on I make her breakfast, handfeed her and try, in vain, to ignore the dreadful mulching noises as she chews. I look away to avoid seeing her eyebrows wiggle up and down as she sucks from her straw through sunken lips.

I dispense her medication, prop her up on her pillows and switch on the first of those bloody talking books that play throughout the day, blowing away my concentration, peace of mind and privacy.

When I have to move her, endangering my back, I handle her through a towel or her dressing gown because I cannot bear to touch her skin. Everything about her revolts me now and I am ridden with guilt and pity. It’s not her fault. So it must be mine.

How have I ended up like this? What is wrong with me? Why am I like this? At 58, I am one of those awful people who prefer creatures on four legs rather than two, who hasn’t got a caring bone in her body as far as people go. I even avoided having children because I didn’t want to take responsibility for another’s life and I couldn’t face the thought of all the mess involved. Why do I find it so impossible to nurse this needy, wreckage of a human being, who has taken over my life, with a genuinely selfless good heart?

I could do it for the dog. When the animal was old and ill, I tended her with love and kindness and gentleness and never minded clearing up after her; I held her as she died and I wept and grieved. I loved her.

I cannot say the same about my mother and it is the guilt of this that binds me in this living hell.

My mother does not see, with her failing eyesight, the involuntary revulsion on my face when I take her to the toilet. I hope she does not realise, with her still alert mind, how much I resent her for still being alive. She’s had her life and now she’s having mine.

Why not put her in a home? Because with what little remains of my conscience, I have not the heart to consign her with her failing hearing and eyesight and physical frailties to a strange environment that she cannot visualise and doesn’t know, where she will be handled by strangers who she can’t hear or see properly. It’s too late for all that.

District nurses breeze cheerfully in and out of the house, tacitly disapproving of me in my dressing gown at 9am after another disturbed night, dispensing briskness and asuming that I am made of the equal efficiency and ability as they are.

“Here you are,” they say, handing over yet another tube of cream, “you can rub this in at night.”

“No I can’t,” I want to shout. “Don’t you understand? I’m not a nurse, I haven’t got a vocation for this, I haven’t had any training, it revolts me to touch her.”

But instead I nod dumbly and thank them and remind myself to buy some more disposable gloves.

“She’s marvellous, isn’t she?” say visiting relatives admiringly as they depart back to their own normal lives. “No, she isn’t,” I want to shout. “It’s me that’s effing marvellous!”

Few people voluntarily choose to become a carer. For me, as for many, it happened by stealth. I was in denial, hopelessly unsuited to the role, but by doing a bit more and then another bit more for her, I suddenly realised that my life had been taken over completely. I had become, involuntarily and without realising it, a carer. The situation had chosen me; I had no option.

I am occasionally offered “carer away days” when I am given the chance to meet with other carers and take advantage of free (not my italics) “taster sessions” of various alternative therapies and freelunches and tea and coffee to go with it. Oh, wow! Is it only me who finds these offers patronising and insulting? Am I being ungrateful? I am lost in astonishment and real grief that anyone (my italics) can even begin to think that a relentlessly cheerful day spent with other poor exploited saps and being given free anything can in any way at all compensate me for the wreckage of my life. Because that it what it is. It is a self-imposed jail sentence with no time off for good behaviour and no chance of escape.

I have a confounded admiration for those carers who are interviewed, smiling broadly into camera with their charges, giving the impression that this is what they were born for, that this is their life’s work, and they are delighted to do it. A little voice inside me berates: “You should be like that, you bitch” – but I’m not and I can’t pretend to be. I hate it.

If you have a choice about taking on this demanding role – don’t. But if you are like me, it will insidiously creep up on you and you won’t realise you are a carer until it’s too late. And you can’t resign.

Hiding behind my outwardly calm, competent, caring face is the martyred guilt about all the resentment I feel towards this dreadful old crone – exhaustion, depression, isolation.

I am just one of the six million carers in the UK. I am the working wounded, financially, mentally, physically and emotionally wrecked – imploding in my impotent flounderings to stay afloat until I am no longer needed. And can see what, if anything, remains of my dreams and if I am still young enough to care – about myself.

Do you have a family secret you want to share?

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