All year I do everything for my mother – even though I have two brothers. I just wish I could have ONE Christmas off KAREN MATHER

By 11am last Christmas morning I was ready to throw in the tea towel. The smoke alarm was shrieking, the potatoes had spat fat all up my arms and I was swearing loudly while dementedly waving the TV Times at the ceiling.

Mum, who’s 88, was shouting from the living room that she couldn’t find her glasses, even though there were four other adults in there with her perfectly capable of locating them.

Meanwhile, my elderly aunt had turned the TV volume up so she could hear the Christmas morning service over the alarm. Then the second that went quiet, she called out: ‘Karen, your telly’s blaring.’

My face was burning, sweat was running down my spine and my heart was pounding.

When my big brother John strolled in, I thought for a minute he’d come to help. Instead, he grabbed a half-cooked roast potato from the trayful I’d been about to baste, bit into it, announced they needed longer, then chucked it back in the tin – teeth marks and all.

My husband Michael came in to find me still clutching the TV guide, red-faced and close to tears. He took one look at me and hissed: ‘This has got to be the last year.’

He wasn’t having a go at me. It’s my brothers – one older, the other younger – he was mad at.

For Christmas – that joyous time of year, where families come together with love and bonhomie – simply throws into even sharper focus the enormous injustices and simmering resentment (mine) that exist in ours.

Every December there’s a message on the family WhatsApp, ‘We’ll see you at yours, shall we?’, as if it’s a done deal (posed by model)

Namely when it comes to family duties; particularly those relating to our elderly mother.

Yes, I’m the family dogsbody and care provider on Christmas Day. But then so am I for the other 364 days of the year, bar two negotiated weeks over the summer, when my brothers magnanimously ‘share’ the load of looking after their own mother.

It’s a story I’m sure will resonate with a lot of women with an elderly parent, particularly those who are the only daughter

Now 58, I have two grown-up children, two granddaughters and two brothers. Yet for more than three decades – ever since my eldest, Jenny, was born – Christmas has effectively been my job. Not once has anyone else in my family taken a turn.

In the beginning it made sense. My parents were only ten minutes down the road and I was the first one to have a baby. Once Jenny – now 32 and with two girls of her own – arrived, followed by her sister Sarah three years later, the whole family agreed it would be easier for everyone to come to us on Christmas Day.

It meant the girls could nap in their own beds and we didn’t have to drag heaps of presents in and out of the car. Dad would arrive with spare chairs and Mum carrying her trifle.

My brothers, who were still single, played with the kids, ate their dinner then headed off (before anyone mentioned the washing up) to whichever girl they were seeing at the time.

It felt noisy and fun – exactly what you want Christmas to be when your children are small.

The years passed and both my brothers found partners and had children, setting up their own family homes nearby.

Now 58, I have two grown-up children, two granddaughters and two brothers. Yet for more than three decades, Christmas has effectively been my job. Not once has anyone else in my family taken a turn (posed by models)

I always assumed though that once they reached this point Christmas would rotate but, somehow, the shift never came – despite them buying bigger houses than mine.

My older brother John, who is married with three children, has a huge kitchen with a triple oven and two dishwashers. But has he ever offered? Not once.

My younger brother, Peter, spent years in a large four-bed semi with his wife and their now grown-up son before they divorced and he eventually moved into a small flat. I don’t expect him to host now, but there were plenty of years he could have.

Every December there’s a message on the family WhatsApp, ‘We’ll see you at yours, shall we?’, as if it’s a done deal.

For a long time, I was too busy teaching full-time, raising my family and keeping a house running to notice how this huge duty had crept up on me. Christmas simply became another thing to manage between school plays and end-of-term chaos.

But then Dad died in 2019 and everything changed.

In the couple of years running up to his sudden death from a stroke, Mum had been showing signs of early-stage dementia and Dad had basically been her prop.

He reminded her about her tablets, checked the doors at night, kept an eye on whether she’d turned off the hob and all the various practical things she had started to lose track of. None of us grasped quite how much she was relying on him until he was gone.

Both the girls had left home by then, so I stepped in and took early retirement at 55 to look after her.

My brothers praised me endlessly, telling me how lucky Mum was to have me. John had retired too but it didn’t occur to him to restructure any part of his own life so he could share the burden.

Perhaps he doesn’t fully grasp the extent of what I do. But it’s a lot.

Since Dad died, Mum tends to stay with us for the whole of Christmas week, as it’s easier to have her here while I shop, wrap and prep, instead of constantly flitting between the two houses

Every morning, I go round to get Mum up, make sure she’s taken her tablets and help her shower, get dressed and do her hair.

While she eats the breakfast I make for her, I tidy up, sort her laundry and change her bed each week.

I also make sure, if she’s up to it, that she gets out for a walk or a trip to the garden centre once a week.

Before I leave – having left a sandwich for her lunch and something she can pop in the microwave for tea in the fridge – I check whether any bills need paying or meter readings submitting.

Then I go back again in the evening to settle her for the night and get her into bed. All that’s before doctor’s appointments and anything else that crops up.

Mum doesn’t have any carers. She’s made it clear since Dad died that she hates even the idea of anyone coming into her home who isn’t family. One day, we might have to consider it if her health deteriorates but, for now, even though it’s a strain, I cope.

But it means the only time I get a real break is when my husband and I go abroad for our annual holiday when my brothers, Mum’s sister and my daughters muddle through between them. In other words, five people cover a role I do largely alone. Usually, my brothers pop round to see her once every week but they stay for a cup of tea and that’s about it.

You might think that, given how I take the strain with Mum all year round, my brothers would at least say: ‘We’ll give you a break at Christmas.’ But they don’t.

If ever I venture the idea of someone else hosting, I get lines like: ‘Mum’s always most comfortable at yours,’ or the clincher: ‘It’s what Dad would have wanted.’

Although actually, I think what Dad would really have wanted would be to see his sons pulling their weight.

Since Dad died, Christmas for me has started even earlier. Mum tends to stay with us for the whole week, as it’s easier to have her here while I shop, wrap and prep, instead of constantly flitting between the two houses.

Then there’s my Aunt Joan, Mum’s younger sister. A widow in her late 70s, she’s a retired head teacher with no children of her own to go to and behaves as if she is a visiting dignitary.

One year she refused to eat a roast potato because it was ‘aggressively large’. She demanded someone remove it from her plate before she would pick up her cutlery.

Another time she stood in the kitchen doorway giving a running commentary on how my uncle used to insist on proper linen napkins and plated starters, while I was juggling three pans and pushing a roasting tray into the oven with my foot. My younger brother Peter arrives each year bemoaning his lot in life. His son, who’s 27 now, spends Christmas with his mum. There are moments in the day when I wish I could join them.

John’s children, now in their 20s, drift in and out too, leaving a trail of wrappers and half-empty glasses.

Maybe I’m a victim of my own efficiency; everyone assumes I have a well-oiled machine running and they’d be interfering, although no one ever asks if there’s anything they can do to help. I rely on my own daughters and my husband for that, who are, thankfully, good at seeing when I need a hand.

The work starts long before the day itself. The supermarket delivery arrives – last year that alone cost almost £400, and I never ask for contributions – and then I end up doing three more trips as I remember my aunt will only eat a certain brand of stuffing and John’s youngest recently turned vegan.

I seem to spend hours cooking, cleaning and preparing. By Christmas Eve the house feels like an engine room. My husband hauls chairs out of the garage, muttering that my brothers need to step up. He’s right but if I start agreeing too much, I’ll cry.

Everyone starts arriving around 10.30am on Christmas Day. By then, I’ve been up for hours. I get Mum up, washed, dressed, blow-dried and settled with a cup of tea in front of her favourite soaps.

My brothers’ contribution is always the same: they set the table. Then they stand back admiring their handiwork and congratulating themselves.

Comparing notes with friends, I hear similar stories.

The sons who arrive with dirty washing. The husbands who ‘help’ by stirring something while staring at their phones. The brother who drinks too much and leaves straight after lunch because he’s ‘shattered’.

I hear, however, that some have started fighting back.

One now only does Boxing Day. Another has a strict rota with her sister, one year each, then a year off where they book a restaurant.

‘You’re a saint,’ they tell me. Or a fool. They suggest I’ve trapped myself, having built a Christmas so comfortable for everyone else that no one is prepared to disturb it.

Last year, after my aunt announced loudly that the turkey was ‘a bit on the dry side’, I disappeared upstairs.

Jenny found me staring out of my bedroom window and said: ‘You don’t even like Christmas now. You just run it.’

She was right. She has offered to host since but she lives in a little semi and the thought of squeezing everyone into her tiny front room feels unfair.

Meanwhile, there’s another version of Christmas living in the back of my head. In it, my husband and I go to a small hotel on Christmas Eve.

We wake late, open a few presents and wander down to a table someone else has laid. I’ve hovered over the ‘book now’ button a few times. But guilt always wins.

Mum gave us so much when we were little. I can’t bear the thought of her sitting in one of my brothers’ houses, perhaps not remembering where she is, while I worry whether anyone will remember how she likes her tea.

The one thing I do insist on at mine is that everyone – old people excepted – mucks in with the clear up before they start making moves for home. They’re usually all gone by 9pm, leaving me completely exhausted but still needing to get Mum up to bed.

Each year I get to Boxing Day and vow that before next Christmas I will sit my brothers down and explain, calmly, that something has to change – not just about Christmas, but regarding the inequality of how we ‘split’ all of Mum’s care throughout the year. But, wimpy as this makes me sound, I never have. I hate confrontation and avoid it in the vain hope they’ll eventually realise they could – should – do more.

And so, here I am again with a week to go, back on the supermarket website, working out how many roast potatoes I will need to fit in the oven.

I do love my family and, most of all, I love my mum. None of us knows how many more Christmases we will get with her.

But I’m also tired. And I deserve one Christmas, before I’m too old to enjoy it, where I sit down at someone else’s table and feel like a guest instead of the hired help.

Karen Mather is a pseudonym. All names have been changed