Life in the Big Mother House

A year ago my son and I moved from our quiet little house in Manchester to a communal single parent household in London. There were good times, there were bad times, but overall it has been a brilliant experience. The house was made up of Jack (aged 11) and me, Lulu and her girls (aged 11 and 8), Andrew and his son (aged 4) and Marta our au pair (aged 21). I like to think we are an improvised family. Mums, dads, children, all living together but not related, with a raft of grandparents, aunts, uncles and friends who drop by.

In the beginning, to gender balance the house, we recruited a male au pair, but he seemed to think that single mothers needed to be bossed around – plus he vacuumed in the dark, boiled the lettuce and offered me olive oil massages.

This Saturday, Jack and I are moving to a new house. This isn’t because we don’t like our Big Mother House. Over the summer I have been promoting my first book Single Mother on the Verge, and have spoken and written about single parent communal living. A number of single parents responded to the stories saying they wished they could do the same but didn’t know how, or where to find people. So now there is a space for a single parent to move into our first single parent household, and I’m moving with another single mother and her three-year old into a house nearby. I’d like to think we’re spreading the love. That through my own experiences, and theirs, we’ll garner a real feel for how to make this work, and find solutions to the problems we encounter along the way. I’d like to set up my own introduction agency for single parents wishing to live together and thus share the cost of housing and the benefits of pooled resources. Recently a television production company approached me about making a documentary about this way of life – which I would love to do.

All this talk about broken Britain, youth crime, and single parent families being blamed for pretty much every negative aspect of society requires a positive attitude and to think outside of the box.

We’re in a new age: a modern society will only feel misguided if we keep looking towards historical ideals for guidance. One cannot prevent progress, and we cannot un-invent the likes of Xbox, Facebook, mobile phones, YouTube and Co. but instead recognise the place in our children’s lives, and work with what we have in the best way we can.

I say this in light of recent headlines that Britain has been named as the worst parent out of 21 countries in a United Nations assessment, it is stated that this is in part due to the high proportion of stepfamilies and single parents. The US wasn’t far behind Britain.

The topic was discussed on Nick Ferrari’s radio show on LBC on September 2nd, and I was lucky to be asked to contribute to the debate. You can listen to the podcast online. I wonder one day whether divorce will be illegal, they’ll bring back compulsory adoption, dunk single mothers in lakes, or burn them on hills. Will we eventually feel complete and utter failures in every aspect of our lives in modern day Britain that we sedate the grown-ups with anti-depressants and the children run amok?

Why not commission some feel good research that inspires a nation of parents? I for one am sick of the media moaning and the Elastoplast attitude adopted by the Big Cheeses.

Anyway… I digress, back to the new house: I’ll write next week to tell you how we’re getting along. Maria Roberts is author of Single Mother on the Verge (Penguin £6.99)www.singlemotherontheverge.comMariaclaire@rocketmail.com