Comedian Jean Kittson on caring for her 'unusual' parents
By Jo Abi|
This is Jean Kittson จC or, as people of my generation know her as, 'Nurse Pam Sandwich' from 'Let the Blood Run Free'. The cult Aussie TV show began as a theatre show in the early nineties before being picked up for TV, with 26 episodes airing between 1990 and 1994.
Kittson is now 65 and lives in Sydney with her husband and two children. She's a media commentator - you can see her each Thursday on Today Extra on Nine - a comedian and an author, having written a book about menopause called You're Still Hot to Me: The joys of menopause.
With her new book, Kittson is discussing how to "parent ageing parents" - something she has been doing for the past few years along with her siblings Rachel and Bill.
"I started realising that I had to help my parents more and more," she tells 9Honey. "They still live independently, but they have people come and help clean and do things they can no longer do."
Kittson's beloved parents Elaine, 95 and Roy, 92 are in their twilight years, and Kitson is determined they live out the remainder of their lives on their terms. When you learn a little about her parents, you quickly realise they'll settle for nothing less.
"He's her toy boy," Kittson says of her mother's marriage to her father. She speaks about them both glowingly, and it's clear this is a family that talks about everything.
The family was based in Lilydale in Melbourne's Yarra Valley, where they were surrounded by paddocks and empty roads, until Kittson was 12.
"We had a lot of liberty, a lot of freedom. All the neighbourhood kids had bikes and you could go off into the country and creeks and all that sort of thing," she recalls.
The comedian's father worked as a mechanic and owned and operated his own garage. Her mother worked with him.
Eventually the family moved to Sorrento, a coastal town in Victoria, an experience Kittson describes as "life changing".
"We went down there for a holiday. You know how when people go on holiday and say, 'We should stay here'? We did. We never went back," she recalls.
"We just loved it down there, so my parents decided they would move down there and we never went back to our family home. I assume they did and packed it up."
Kittson joined the local high school จC Rosemount High จC and thus her formative years commenced.
"It was an eye-opener. I was a 'country kid' really and Rosemount High was a 'surfie' school so it was very out there and very knowing," she adds.
Despite the bumpy transition, Kittson says it was a "fantastic lifestyle" for them.
"We had beautiful beaches, it was just stunning, and we all got jobs because it's a holiday area. I got my first job when I was 12 working in the kiosk near the beach."
Kittson's parents gave their children a lot of independence, and because they all had jobs, they also had a little money with which to enjoy that freedom.
"I feel my parents were different from a lot of parents," she says. "My mum was a feminist. She was one of the early members of the Women's Electoral Lobby, and when started she and only one other woman went to the meetings. When they'd go back to work people would say, 'How was your lesbian meeting?' and things like that."
This was in the 60s, and Kittson says her mother was "very strong", always encouraging her daughters to be educated so they could work and support themselves when they were older.
"She knew that would give us freedom and opportunities," Kittson says.
Kittson's mum married later in life than most women who grew up in the 50s and 60s, waiting until she was 32 to settle down and have children.
"My mother went overseas after the war and got a job and learned to drive and travelled," she explains.
The author says her father was also a feminist, and had to be because her mother couldn't stand the sight of blood or poo or vomit กช all three of which come hand-in-hand with raising kids, as any parent will tell you.
"Every time we needed to change our nappy or came off our bikes, it was my father who did all the nursing and caring and patching up and the cooking," she says.
Kittson says her parents were both "unusual people" who instilled a sense of worldliness in their children.
"They never said we had to be this or we had to be that. They just went along with whatever we ended up doing." Kittson recalls her ascent into comedic acting as "slow", adding that her mum was always surprised she went into performance because she was such a shy child.
"They never said we had to be this or we had to be that. They just went along with whatever we ended up doing."
"I didn't wake up one day and say, 'I want to be a comedian'," she says. "My father and mother have a great sense of humour, so they always turned anything that happened into hilarious stories. Anything that was difficult for us ended up as a funny story. That was our therapy."
Her mum's aversion to bodily fluids made it difficult for her to watch episodes of Kittson's show 'Let the Blood Run Free'.
"My mum would get so nervous when I performed. My first play in Sydney, she got so nervous she spent the whole night in the bathroom," she recalls.
Kittson was in her mid to late thirties when she had her children Victoria, 28, and Charlotte, 21. She and husband - cartoonist and satirist Patrick Cook - met on another Australian comedy show called The Big Gig, which ran from 1989 until 1991.
She had never really thought about meeting someone with whom to settle down until she met Cook.
"I never had that hanging over my head, because my mother never put that pressure on," she says.
Now Kittson is at a point where her parents are of an age and require help from their children, which is what inspired her to write her new book We Need to Talk About Mum and Dad: A practical guide to parenting our ageing parents.
She says her sister Rachel is "much more knowledgeable" about how best to access care for their parents, as she works in disability, and has shared sage advice at every stage of what Kittson describes as a "complicated" and "frustrating" process.
"My mum would get so nervous when I performed. My first play in Sydney, she got so nervous she spent the whole night in the bathroom."
It was Rachel who told the performer to be patient when dealing with organising care for their parents, and the advice has proven invaluable.
"For a while with the providers it was really frustrating me because I felt that there was a churn," Kittson explains. She wanted to find people who could help her parents cook and meet their specific needs, not just accept whomever was sent to them by the local aged care service.
"When I first started, I didn't know that you can actually take your 'package' and you can ask the providers to just oversee it, but then you can choose your own carers," Kittson says.
"If we had known that right from the beginning, I think we would have taken the time to pay people directly and then just have a minimum fee taken from the package, so the government has to send the package to a registered provider or recognised provider, but they don't have to manage the money. You can manage your own money."
While this works for Kittson and her family, her point is that it's about making a choice, and in order to make a choice, you need to know what the options are.
This is where her book comes in; it aims to empower Australians to make choices that suit their parents' needs best.
"This is one of the longest living generations and you feel like the decisions you make are really critical, and that if you make a wrong decision about where they live or anything else that it's going to have a huge impact on them," she says. "You want them to have the best life possible right to the end, and not just be stuck away somewhere lonely."
Kittson visits her parents once or twice a week, while also raising her own children กช including her youngest who is living at home during the current semester of her studies. Kittson is still also working.
During visits with her parents, her dad still likes to cook for them and Kittson will usually bring a cake.
"He can't bend down to the oven, so he cooks roasts in the Sunbeam fryer," she says. "They're delicious. There's about two inches of fat and lamb and every vegetable and it's all sort of crispy."
Both of Kittson's parents are vision impaired, so the thought of buying her father a more modern appliance is out of the question.
"It's about familiarity. He knows exactly where to set the dial, and same with Mum," she adds. "That's the other thing about moving people when it's later in life, especially if they have eyesight problems, just getting familiar with. Or dementia, then the move creates other issues."
Jean Kittson's book We Need to Talk About Mum and Dad: A practical guide to parenting our ageing parents, is out on March 10 at your favourite book retailer.
