Laughing in the Dark: A Novel About Caregiving, Resentment, and Not Completely Losing It ebook

What if the person who needs looking after most of all… is the carer? When her fiercely independent mother falls, Helen Cartwright's unnamed narrator does what so many adult children do without thinking: she steps in "for a few weeks" until things are sorted. A few weeks quietly turn into years. Overnight, her life shrinks to medication charts, continence pads, and endless calls with professionals who always seem to be on another lunch break. She becomes project manager of her mother's body: pain scales, mobility scores, care plans, equipment deliveries. The rest of her life-work, friends, sex, sleep-gets pushed into the leftover corners. On paper she is a Good Daughter doing the Right Thing. In her own head, it's messier. She loves her mother. She also fantasises about missing the bus on purpose, just to get stuck in traffic and not be on time for the evening shift. She googles care homes at 2 a.m. and then deletes the tabs in a panic. She discovers that resentment can sit right next to tenderness and that the only way to stay even vaguely sane is to find jokes in places no one thinks they belong. Laughing in the Dark follows one woman through the long, unglamorous middle of family caregiving: the years after the dramatic diagnosis, long before the neat grief of the funeral. We follow her through: - The Spreadsheet Years - where love is measured in colour-coded cells and medication timetables. - Morning shifts filled with bodily fluids, lost dignity and the absurdity of treating a parent like a toddler who can still remember your teenage mistakes. - Waiting rooms that feel like purgatory, where time is elastic and the magazines are always three years out of date. - Sibling dynamics that flip when the "responsible one" can no longer keep smiling nicely on the group chat. - The quiet panic of trying to look competent at work while hiding the