single mummy and proud...

As you'll know if you are a regular reader, I am a single mum. My children have different fathers, both of whom live in cities far away from my own. Fifty years ago my children would have been taken away from me; even twenty years ago, they would have been teased at school a lot more than now. But in the strata of society we find ourselves immersed in, we certainly stand out.

I do not mind standing out, which is lucky as I do not know many families like mine. Not that being a single parent is unusual: these days, so many children grow up in single parent families - something like 40% in the UK (don't quote me on that, but I remember being amazed how high the percentage is). It's just that there are not many around where I live.

I do have a number of close friends who are single mums (though just with one child, usually, or certainly by the same father). They all, in their different ways, bring their children up brilliantly, some more brilliantly than other mums I know of the more conventional variety.

Someone at the school gate said to me the other day 'I don't know how you do it'. Unsure whether this was a compliment or not, I stalled and said, 'well, I don't exactly have much choice,' and half-smiled. 'You're so brave,' said this acquaintance. 'Especially when you've been so ill. I just couldn't do it all without my husband, especially when things are hard. I rely on him so much. It must be awful to be on your own'. Now what was this meant to mean? She pities me? She admires me? She thinks I must be smoking opium out the back once the kids are in bed just to get through the terrible bleak evenings of husbandless existence?

This kind of comment is fairly normal, and I have toughened up. I tend to feel sorry for these women now, too scared, as one of my strong, feisty single mum friends reminded me today, to leave their men ('they would rather eat their own shit than fend for themselves,' was how she put it, and I couldn't phrase it better myself!).

Stigma against single parents is still rife in today's society, albeit more subtle than a couple of decades ago. You're somehow made to feel as if you're letting yourself and your children down; poor you; you're doing your best, but somehow it will never quite be any good.

In fact, it has been mistakenly suggested to me, either by the media or by people who don't know me or by ex-friends, that all of us single mums are most or all of the following (circle if appropriate): weak, stupid, depressed, selfish, attention-seeking, lazy, skint (this one is actually generally true, but it's not our fault), impossible to live with (or we'd have a man), victims of our own making, drama queens... the list goes on....

Being so pitifully inadequate ourselves, we are therefore wilfully bringing up children who are bound to turn out unruly members of dysfunctional groups of society, deprived as they have been of a patriarchal figure to instil on their chaos the order of early nights, discipline, safety and security ('just you wait til Daddy gets home'). Women who are too pathetic to even strive for the 'normality' of a 'proper family', but instead huddle in groups bemoaning our terrible fate, while our kids run down the road shoeless, eating McDonalds and wielding knives.

This bears no resemblance whatsoever to my reality, or to the lives of any of the single mums that I know. Even friends of mine who really are on the breadline still devote themselves to their children's wellbeing. Oh, and we prefer Morrisons cafe, so there.

I have been a single parent for almost all of the last decade. Even at the times when I lived with one or other of my children's fathers, I still operated as a single mum, making all of the decisions, doing all of the childcare, assuming all of the responsibility.

That is not to say that my Baby Daddies are not both ok/lovely/great/frustratingly charming in their own ways - of course they are. They are the fathers of my children, so although we frequently fall out, we frequently make friends again, and I count them both as family (albeit rather in the same category as some fairly distant cousins whom I wouldn't want to spend more than half a day with for fear of running out of safe topics of conversation and instead starting to tear each other's hair out just for the fun of it).

But I have always done it all myself, with back up (more at times; less at times) from my own family - my Very Welsh Mother, who has her good and bad points but loves my children almost as much as I do, and the rest of my tight-knit clan. I have always relied on close friendships for support, practical and emotional, but I am quite used to being both Mum and Dad. And I don't feel sorry for myself for this or feel like a victim; it's just normal, it's just the way it is.

I give the cuddles; I do the telling off. I am the soft one and the authority figure. I am the one who gives the tickles and the one who shouts 'enough!'. There is no 'what is Daddy going to say when he gets home from work?'. My household is the opposite of The Tiger who Came to Tea, if you know that story: if the Tiger came here, there would certainly be none of Daddy's beer to drink and I fear he would terrify my new kitten. And if he ate all of our food, there would be no food left, and no Daddy to take us all out to a cafe in our new red coats.

I do not tend to sit in the evenings wishing I had a husband to control my unruly children (sometimes I wish for a live-in nanny, but that's entirely different), because I think the likelihood is that I would be cooking his dinner, ironing his underpants and massaging his ego when I could be reading in the bath, writing my own words, or watching perfectly good episodes of Dallas or the X factor. I do not pine for a more 'normal' existence and my children are perfectly decent and lovely members of a brilliant primary school thank you very much.

Yes they are loud, yes they question everything, and yes I bet they sometimes wish they had a man here to run around with them and pick them up and swing them round, but they are bright, bubbly and full of life, they are so loved and nurtured, and importantly there are no big rows in my house (except when Pre-Pubescent Beauty picks them with me, and my poor Blue Eyed Boy retreats to another room to sit it out). There is no tension when parents think different things or fancy different ways of life or different people, but stay together 'for the sake of the kids', thus making those kids unhappy, insecure and mistakenly feeling guilty and responsible for their parents' unhappiness.

We have an open, communicative, warm, honest, direct and mostly happy family life, as anyone who knows us could confirm. It is bloody hard raising kids on your own, but it does not make you weak; it makes you strong.

You are on your own with it, so you have no choice but to toughen up. You become less selfish, less 'poor me', less naive; you certainly have no time to be lazy, between the cooking and the food shopping and the cleaning and the homework and the taxi driving and the amateur psychology and the pet-rearing (just about to arrive in my case) and the all-consuming needs of your lovely, amazing, beautiful offspring.

You have to give yourself time to recharge your batteries, or you run out of steam and collapse.

You have to learn to look after yourself, as nobody else will do it for you.

And yes, you have to be brave, because particularly at times of great stress or illness, such as the past year has been for me, it would be nice to have someone there every night to make you a cup of tea and chat about your day. It would be amazing to have someone else there to take over when the kids get upset or when I feel at collapsing point physically.

For the first time since having my children, I have this year, at times, wished that I'd done everything less unconventionally. Not because I think single parents let their children down, or because I feel sorry for myself. Simply out of pure fear. At some points I have feared that my little castle in the sand will come crumbling around me, because there is only one of me; I only have one pair of hands, and with my bladder as raw as it has been I have sometimes started to panic about how on earth I will get through the next decade.

But from what some of my married friends say, I think I'd still much rather be a single mum, hard though it is. Unless I one day marry my true love (which I hope may happen, though it is a long way off from where we're standing, but we have not given up on the dream) and we carve out some kind of life where we can actually be there for each other in this really honestly loving capacity, I'm better off living alone with my children and my new kitten and being true to myself.

Getting/remaing/wishing to be married just for the sake of it sounds like the worst, most claustrophobic kind of existence I can imagine. Being with someone because you're too scared to upset the children by leaving, too scared to cope alone, too scared to face the stigma of doing so... it sounds like hell.

Bring on the box sets and the just-me-in-my-blanket-on-the-sofa nights. Bring on the barbed comments. Bring on the hard work. It does not kill us; it makes us stronger.

I'd rather be lonely than be in a cage. Not even an Ikea-decorated, Cath Kidston-embroidered cage.