Over the last couple of months I have noticed Emma feeling more and more stressed. Looking back I should have seen it coming.
Getting the family budget agreed was fantastic. Now we are busy making sure that all the actions within the support plan are happening. The only person who can make this happen in the family is Emma. One of the reasons for going for a family budget is to enable Emma to keep supporting her sons living at home - rather than the hugely costly and potentially devastating out-of-county placements that the social worker says are the only other option. Building Emma’s reliance is central to the success of the family budget. Yet, at the moment it seems to be having the opposite effect. Life is more stressful, trying to co-ordinate and implement the actions from the plan.
So last night, we met in the pub with another friend, Suzie, to see what we could do together, to help Emma manage what feels like an endless to-do list? Like most of us, her ‘to-do’ list has a multitude of ‘small’ tasks that it feels impossible to find the time to get round to (for example, getting a cleaner once a week and booking onto a yoga course) and some bigger ‘projects’. The ones that are keeping Emma up at night are the ones about transition – looking at college placement possibilities, finding out about disability benefit, finding out whether a medical report will be done on time.
We explored whether having some personal assistant hours, to crack the ‘little’ jobs would make the difference, or whether it was tackling the bigger issues that would make the difference to Emma’s stress levels.
“What I really need,” said Emma, “Is someone who can do what social workers used to do.”
I couldn’t believe it, here we were thinking about buying in ‘old fashioned social work’, which is still so much needed by families, but simply no longer available where Emma lives.
So that is what we are doing. Emma is sending me the list of tasks that need to happen to make transition go smoothly for the family. I am putting this into a ‘job description’ for someone with social work skills, to start off doing about 15 hours a month ‘freelance’ work, so support Emma.
In the meantime, Suzie and I are sorting out a cleaner, and looking at yoga courses, so we can move ahead with the smaller jobs too.
