Single Mothers: The Scourge of Society?

On The Wright Stuff the other morning they were discussing Ian Duncan-Smith’s latest plan, to cap Child Benefit for people who have more than two children. A lady called in saying that “single mothers are the biggest problem, they have as many children as they like, nobody caps their benefit.” The presenter asked her, why pick on single mums when their Child Benefit is not going to be making a big difference to them, and she responded “that’s not the only benefit they get, is it… they get plenty of other benefits, and they can get anything they need as single parents.”

One of the panellists, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, replied, “I hope you’re never reduced to the point where you are a single parent, because then you’ll know… I was one, once, and I find it quite offensive that you’re talking in this voice about people who never asked for it, most of them.”

The woman responded that yes, most of them are asking for it, they go out and deliberately have children and live off the state. Obviously this woman is bonkers and talking from her behind, but she represents what a lot of people think when they see “single mother.”

I was talking to a friend earlier this week, who was telling me about a couple she knew. The boyfriend had a son with an ex partner, who he used to have on weekends, but would usually just drop off at his parents’ house until it was time to take him back to his mother. He no longer sees this child, and doesn’t seem bothered by it. He has a new partner now and they have a daughter together who seems to get about the same amount of attention from her father as her half brother. Both parents seem more interested in going out getting drunk or stoned, and the daughter is palmed off on whichever friends or relatives will have her. And yet, to a large portion of society, a couple with a young child looks better on paper than me, a single mother with a baby.

I am lucky enough to still look fairly young, and when I walk around with S in the pushchair I am sometimes aware that people are giving me that look, that I’m one of those mothers, a pramfaced teenager who’s had a child to avoid work and live off their taxes for the rest of my days. Especially when they see me walking back towards this particular estate, which has always had a bad reputation. They don’t see that my child is clean, well dressed, happy, developing well despite having been born early, and most importantly, safe whilst being cared for by a single mother, in a council flat, receiving benefits. They don’t see that I spend 24 hours a day with her, that she is never left to cry, my money goes on buying things for her or making the house nice so that she has somewhere homely to grow up. They don’t see me spending whole afternoons sitting on my living room floor playing daft games and pulling faces, giving myself a headache from shaking my head so much because I know it makes her laugh. They see the label, they judge, and they carry on with their days.

Why do people have this opinion of single mothers? Is it really the case that single mothers are any less capable, any more feckless, than a couple who are having children and not bothering to raise them properly? Surely the problem lies with the parent, not the situation, or how many parents are there (or not there) doing a good or bad job? Surely if a woman is a single mother, for whatever reason, we should want our taxes to go toward ensuring she is able to afford to bring her child up well, with clothes on its back and food in its belly?

I am a firm believer that all mothers should have the choice as to whether they go back to work. In my lifetime we seem to have gone from women having to leave their job and never go back if they had a child, to women getting 6 months off and then having to go back to their job, whether they want to or not. Can we not have anything between these two states? If, as a single mother, I choose not to go back to work, am I a scourge on society and a sad indictment of the way the world is going, where my married friends who have not gone back to work are wholesome stay-at-home mums raising well-rounded, happy children behind their white picket fence?

Incidentally, the panellist from the show, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, is my new role model and hero. She responded to that caller with “I am a tax payer, and I don’t mind my taxes going to the poor. I mind them going to the rich.”

Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends using the buttons below.

Seven Months On

S is seven months old tomorrow. Things have changed a lot since Easter Sunday, when I woke up at 5am thinking I’d wet myself!

Seven months has gone so quickly, and I feel like I missed the first couple of months because I was so busy panicking, so busy struggling to just keep my head above water that I didn’t enjoy having a beautiful, tiny little baby.

S at 2 weeks (notice massive babygro)

When she first came home from the hospital, S was so small even the “tiny baby” clothes swamped her. While we were in hospital she wasn’t even dressed a lot of the time; she was either wrapped in a blanket, or snuggled under my t shirt. When we came home a friend posted us a bag of baby clothes her daughter had grown out of; they were lovely but massive, I couldn’t imagine S ever growing into them and assumed my friend’s daughter must be a lot older than S. She was three months old before any of the 0-3 months clothes fit her, but by the time she was 4 months old, she was starting to grow out of them! Now she’s growing so quickly I never know which size clothes to buy!

Until I had S, the fact a baby is born completely unaware of the things we all take for granted had never occurred to me. It’s been so lovely to watch her learn she has hands and feet, and that she can use her feet to kick things, her hands to grab. She has gone from a tiny, silent little bundle whose only noise was the occasional cry if she got hungry, to a burbling, grabbing, punching little monkey who has the best grin I have ever seen. She wakes me up by chattering to herself in the mornings and I go to sleep listening to her soft snoring next to me. The last couple of days, she’s been trying to stand as much as she can, which is worrying!

I’ve not had a full, uninterrupted night’s sleep since the middle of my pregnancy – and I don’t care! Don’t get me wrong; I love my sleep, and am exhausted in a way you would not believe, but over time I think I’ve just gotten used to it. Someone said to me early on that I should cherish those night feeds because they will stop all too soon. That person was so right. There is no feeling quite like being woken by S poking me in the ribs because she is hungry. On the nights where she sleeps a little longer between feeds I often wake up before her, wondering what’s going on and why she’s not hungry. I know that eventually she will stop feeding at night, and stop sleeping next to me too. That will be a sad day.

According to a Cow & Gate magazine that came through my door the other day, in their first six months a baby’s weight will double. The last time S was weighed, her weight had more than trebled since she was born. She’s currently on the 50^th centile line, which makes me stupidly proud, even though it’s just some stupid statistic. When she first reached her due date (she was 5 weeks early) her weight put her on the second centile line.

Yesterday when D (my Home Start lady) was here we were talking about the neighbours and she asked if I knew the people downstairs. I replied no, they’d moved in when S was still very small, and I was not particularly sociable at that time so didn’t really speak to them. D commented that often when we’re talking and I mention things like this, it’s as if I’m talking about someone else. She told me she finds it hard to reconcile this image of a depressed person sitting alone in the house and not speaking to anyone, with the confident single mother she sees every week. I was a bit gobsmacked to be honest. I spend a lot of my time with barely a clue as to what I’m doing, and hoping I’m not making huge mistakes on a daily basis. The fact I come across as confident was a completely alien concept to me; I’ve never thought of myself as a confident person. But then, after she left, I thought about it a little more. Although I don’t have all the answers, and I do make a lot of mistakes, I am confident when it comes to being S’s mother. I know when she is tired, when she is hungry, when she is bored. I have very definite ideas about how I want to raise her, what values I want her to grow up with, what I do and do not want to do. So yes, perhaps I am confident.

I was watching a phone-in show on TV earlier this week, where they were talking about cutting Child Benefit for families with more than two children. They commented that it tends to either be the very rich or the very poor that have a lot of children and a journalist on the panel made a very interesting point. She said that quite often young women coming from an underprivileged background have always felt worthless, as if they don’t have a place in society, and when they have a baby they finally have a purpose; they have produced a child and they feel worthwhile. Although I wouldn’t say I’d really grown up in a terribly poor family, I have always had a bit of an issue when it comes to self esteem and feeling like I was worth a great deal or good at anything. Now that I have S, and am over the initial total and utter shock of becoming a mother, I find that I completely understand what that journalist meant: for the first time in my life, I have a purpose and my life has a meaning beyond “if I don’t go to work today the other people in my team might get a bit swamped.” And yes, when I stop and think about it, I do think I’m quite good at being a mother. As much as you can be, when your child is only 7 months old, that is. When I was pregnant I would worry about how I could possibly fill the days of my maternity leave once the baby came. Now she is here, and I often look up at 5pm and wonder where the hours have gone.

 

The photo on the right shows one of S's first babygros (she is wearing it in the photo above: see how big it is on her!), against the one she wore to bed this evening. I remember being given that small one and thinking, gosh it's so big it'll be ages before she grows into it. She was completely lost in it. Now I look at it and wonder how she ever fit into it!

My tiny little premature baby in her teeny-tiny too-big babygros has become a big bruiser of a bouncing baby, laughing, burbling and grabbing at everything in sight. I know that all too soon I will look up and she will have become a toddler, a schoolgirl, a grumpy teenager, an adult. Seven months has passed in a flash and I am so glad I’ve taken a million and one photos to look back on and remind me of every single moment.


Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends using the buttons below.

The Benefits of Being on Benefits...

One thing I’ve had to learn about fairly quickly over the last few months is benefits. I’ve never had to know about them before, as I was never entitled to any when I was lucky enough to work full time at a reasonably well-paid job. I am bad with money at the best of times, and now that I have S I keep a close eye on my finances, keeping a spreadsheet to show when my regular outgoings are due, what money is expected in, and what my current bank balance is. I am petrified that one of these days I will run out of money and not be able to feed my child.

When I got pregnant, I was suddenly beset with panic about how I would afford things, where I would live, how I would manage to move there. I was living in a shared house, and although I had always assumed I would move in with S’s father, that turned out not to be a practical idea fairly early on, and so I filled in forms to be on the local council’s housing list.

I will spare you the details of the process, but I received a phone call when I was 32 weeks pregnant: I had been “matched” to a maisonette locally. If I wanted to take it, I had to pay my first week’s rent and collect the keys the following week. When I explained to them that I had to give a month’s notice where I was, and had little spare cash floating around, I was told I had to sign the contract next week, or because of the council’s empty homes policy, the maisonette would be given to somebody else. They suggested I apply for housing benefit to pay my rent in the new place. When I called the housing benefit people, they looked into it briefly before informing me that because I was a single person earning above X amount, I was not entitled to housing benefit until the baby was born. I asked if there was any sort of help available for moving, or acquiring furniture or white goods once I’d moved; they asked if I was on any benefits already. When I said no, they said that there was probably no help available in that case.

Much as I dislike him these days, I could not have moved house without S’s father. He paid for removals, and got me several items of furniture for the flat, including a cooker and a microwave. My brother managed to get me a fridge and a washing machine and several friends and family members donated various items. I moved into the flat when I was 33 weeks pregnant, with dodgy hips and no energy. Once the removal men had left, though, it was up to me to put my bed together, move the furniture from where it had been dumped in the centre of various rooms (wardrobe in the living room), and generally attempt to make it look like home. When I first moved everything in here, paying that first lot of rent had cleared me out financially, and I had no money for gas or electricity, much less cleaning supplies. I spent my first week and a half as a council tenant living at S’s father’s house, catching the bus to the flat every day to try and do some unpacking. Because I was technically still employed (and on maternity leave), there was no financial help to be had. I had not been in any position to save up for this before it happened, as I’m sure a lot of single pregnant women are not. If S’s father had not paid for the removal men, I could not have moved. There was nowhere else I could have got that money from, in order to pay them. And how else would a 33-week-pregnant woman move all her belongings across town?

I gave birth prematurely, at 35 weeks, and then spent 2 weeks in hospital. When I came out, I began the hilarity that is applying for benefits. Various people had told me, “Oh, once you’re eligible for one all the others kick in as well…” What they didn’t tell me was the fun and games that would ensue. I had made applications for Housing Benefit and Tax Credits before S was born, knowing that I wouldn’t be entitled to anything, but that also if I had an open claim it would be more straight-forward to just update my circumstances once the baby was born. Tax Credits was simple; I called them and told them I’d had a baby and they sent me a backdated payment of Child Tax Credit within a couple of weeks. 

For Working Tax Credits it’s a little more complicated: normally they go by how much money you earned last tax year. Last tax year I was in a different, better-paying job, and earned a lot more money, so that precluded me from any entitlement. This year, I had only had full pay for one month before maternity pay kicked in, and I expected to earn a great deal less. They wanted to know how much less. Exactly how much I expected to earn during this tax year. I had to produce a calculation for them. And then there was a lengthy discussion about the “first hundred quid each week” which confused matters further. They started my payments, but they decreased in the middle of July, and then at the end of July, because of some weird confusion over my earnings, they stopped and I had to make a panicked phone call to get them reinstated.

The Housing and Council Tax Benefit is an ongoing farce. I took them a wad of documents, including payslips, S’s birth certificate, bank statements and a letter from my work confirming my maternity pay. They updated their records and started paying me a laughably small amount each week. Each month, as my pay decreased, I was to submit my payslip and wait for them to back-date my recalculated entitlement. Meanwhile, the people in charge of rent payments needed my account to always be up to date. I ended up paying my full rent each week, and then calling to request an updated statement at the end of the month to see how much benefit had been paid. The letters the benefit people send to confirm such things are written in some sort of code. I am convinced they make them deliberately hard to understand, so that if they make a mistake you will probably never notice. They also somehow take two to three weeks to arrive, so it was quicker and easier to just ask for a statement of my rent account. 

A month or so ago, I received a letter informing me that they had miscalculated my entitlement to Housing Benefit, that actually I had no entitlement, and they would be invoicing me for the amount they’d already paid. I called to ask what had changed, and to remind them that although I may not be entitled to benefit at the moment, I probably would be when my next payslip arrived. I was told they had closed my case because I was not entitled, and I would have to make a new claim, which could not be backdated – so I would lose out on any benefit for that month. I had to write a letter begging them to please reopen the original case, so that my most recent payslip could be taken into account. Eventually I received a letter stating I was entitled to about a third of my rent each week. And then another letter, stating that they had adjusted the amount I owed them from their previous miscalculation, by the grand total of 60p. When I called and spoke to them, they told me not to worry about the invoice they had sent for the previous overpayment; they were taking it gradually out of my new entitlement. This meant I had (yet again) no clue as to how much rent or council tax I should be paying each week. I now call up to get a statement of my rent account every other week, to ensure I am not in arrears. This has made it impossible to budget, since I never have any idea how much rent I will need to pay each week. The situation is ongoing; when I get my payslip at the end of this month, and every month until January, I have to take it in for them to send off. 

The act of submitting my payslip is, in itself, something of a nightmare. If you can get to the office when it opens at 8:30am, you may well be in and out within the hour. Quite often though, they take your name and have you wait in a waiting area with several other disgruntled people, all waiting to speak to people in different sections of the office, so you’ve no idea how many people are ahead of you. The last time I went in there, I lost an hour and a half, and my daughter’s remaining goodwill for the day.

Child Benefit is supposed to be fairly straight-forward: they give you the form in the hospital, you fill it in and send it off with your child’s birth certificate, and they plonk the grand total of £20 in your bank account each week. I am lucky, in that it really was this straightforward for me, and I know that however skint I end up over the weekend, I will have £20 on Monday morning if I'm desperate for food or nappies. I have a friend, though, whose baby is now 18 weeks, and she has still had no Child Benefit. Apparently there has been a mix-up somewhere because, although being British, and born in a British hospital, she was not actually born in the UK. And it’s taken them 18 weeks to understand that, and sort it out. Meanwhile, she just has to make do without her Child Benefit. They will backdate it, and when it is eventually paid she will have a nice little lump sum paid – but that doesn’t stop it being hugely inconvenient when she needs to buy nappies or formula at the moment.

The other financial gripe in my life is maintenance from S’s father. When he had been gone a month and a half, he texted me to say that the most the CSA could make him pay me was £135 a month, so he would pay me that directly in return for regular contact with S. I told him that paying maintenance was nothing to do with contact; you are responsible for a child and therefore obliged to pay maintenance. That first month, he paid the money straight into my bank account. By this time, though, things between us were less than pleasant, and my health visitor urged me to go through the CSA so that I did not have to have any further contact with him. I had already warned him a month previously that if he did not contact me with a concrete plan for maintenance I would contact the CSA as he had already left it long enough. When he didn’t come back with much other than the usual tirade, I filled out the form and sent it off. The following month, when he did not pay any money into my account, I contacted him to ask if he intended to pay it. His response went along the lines of, the CSA called me last week, they are sorting it out and I won’t have to pay them anything until next month so you will just have to wait, it’s your own fault for contacting them. I responded, if you’re happy to see us struggle for money until then, that’s fine. The following day he put some money into my account. It was less than he had agreed to pay before, but I wasn’t complaining. Since then, the CSA have been less than helpful, and I’m fairly sure his employers (being his friends, and sympathetic to his cause) have dragged their heels with sending money. The payment that covered July did not arrive with me until last week, and the August payment has yet to surface. It’s hard to budget when you know you’re due a payment on a monthly basis, but have no idea when in that month it’s likely to turn up. It’s easier to just not include it in the budget – but then it becomes difficult to fit all my outgoings onto the list without my account going into the red, something I cannot afford, what with the bank charges that go with such an occurrence.

Does every single mother have this problem? From the times I have complained about the CSA on Facebook, I’m inclined to believe that in most cases, they do. From the number of people I’ve met grumbling their story at the receptionist in the council offices, most people claiming Housing Benefit do as well. On the news this morning I heard that the way Council Tax Benefit is paid is changing from a national scheme to a local one, meaning the local authority will have “up to three and a half million pounds” less to spend on it, from next April, and will have to make “some tough decisions” as to who will receive Benefit. My Council Tax is currently around £30 a week; if I turn out to be one of their tough decisions, it will make a big difference to my life.

Next year, the government intends to introduce Universal Credit, a single monthly payment which will replace most benefits, including Housing Benefit, Tax Credits, and Income Support (which I will be on if I decide not to go back to work). This fills me with dread purely because a month is a long time to budget for when the goalposts change as often as they have thus far. At least with weekly budgeting, if something is missed or an unexpected outlay of cash occurs, I know I will get my Tax Credits next week, so will not starve. Also, with the number of mistakes, miscalculations and non-payments I’ve already experienced in my brief encounter with benefits, I don’t hold out much hope of Universal Credit being rolled out without a lot of low income families being made a lot worse off, at least in the short term while they iron out the teething problems that don’t affect the pockets of the people doing the ironing out. Martin Lewis (he of Money Saving Expert fame) was on the Daily Politics today arguing the toss with Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi and made the valid point that many families relying on these benefits budget on a weekly basis, and don’t have the ability to budget on a monthly basis. That might sound as if he’s patronising people on benefits, but personally I am terrified of having to budget monthly, and I think Universal Credit is a bad idea for that very reason.

I know the idea of me complaining about the handouts I get from your taxes might make you want to punch me, but really they are my taxes as well. I have paid tax since I was 18, and am still paying it now – being, as I am, still employed and on maternity leave. I get angry about people playing the system, being dishonest and spending my taxes on flat screen TVs and foreign holidays, but as I have previously mentioned on this blog, I believe the taxes I have paid thus far (and intend to in future, whether I go back to my current employer or get another job further down the line), coupled with the fact I am a single mother of a small baby, entitle me to those "handouts". I never intended to be a single mother; when I got pregnant I believed I would move in with S’s father and live in Brady Bunch bliss with him and his children. The fact that didn’t happen was probably foreseeable, and I was probably stupid to ever believe it would; but I didn’t set out to get pregnant, get a council flat and sponge off society for the rest of my days, and do not feel I should be treated as such.