I have two daughters aged fourteen and two and a half. The youngest was very premature and she has had various health problems; Zeelah is around 70 per cent deaf. I have known this since she was around seven months old. Unfortunately, it took a while for a doctor to agree with me, as I think they saw me as the “panicking single mother”. I was told she was a late talker. It takes quite a lot to get doctors to take notice. Zeelah has her third hospital appointment at the end of this month. They have tested her ears and have found her to have fluid stuck behind her ear drums. She will need grommets put in. I’m so excited for her to have the operation, as I feel she is so behind and the sooner the better for her to catch up with her speech.

In an ideal world, where both parents are together and interested in their child’s welfare, it would be great to go to doctors’ appointments as a united front. Sometimes it is difficult to ask all the right questions, comfort the screaming child and take in all the information at once whilst sticking to your allocated time slot of around 15 minutes.

Being a single parent means that you are not allowed to be ill yourself. At the beginning of this year, we all had gastroenteritis. In between rushing to the bathroom myself, I also had to keep changing beds and nappies, wiping up vomit and giving comforting cuddles. You just cope. You know in the back of your head that nobody else is going to do it.

I didn’t choose to be a single parent. It has just happened that way. Although, saying that, I’m certainly not looking for a replacement father for my children either. In this day and age with more and more single parents, you wonder why there is still such a stigma about it. I live in a row of four houses. Three of the houses have single parents in them. My next door neighbour is a single mother with four children. Her husband tragically died last Christmas. Not only is she a single parent now, but she is a single parent trying to deal with the grief of her children as well as her own. Statistically, we are both single parents on income support. Single parents are single parents for different reasons – not because we can’t hold down a relationship.

In the normal day-to-day life of parenthood, you obviously want the best for your children’s health and well-being. I used to work full time at the local hospital and pay for a childminder for my youngest. This proved to be difficult and not as easy as you might think. If your child is ill, you still have to pay for the childminder. My childminder would phone me up at work and tell me that Zeelah was sick. This meant I had to leave work, pick up Zeelah and look after her. This means time off work. Employers do not stay happy with employees if you have to keep taking time off. Consequently, you don’t get paid at work and still have to pay a childminder for days they haven’t had your child and you’ve been nursing them yourself.

Up until last summer, I worked 40 hours a week while Zeelah was at the childminder’s, and I was also going to university to study towards a degree in radiography to further my career. I found myself getting into more and more debt. I went to the job centre and spoke to a single parent adviser whom I hoped would tell me about a benefit I could claim that would solve all my problems. With my NHS pay, a childminder who cost as much as my basic pay, rent and council tax, I just couldn’t earn enough to keep going, even with the help of the Child Tax Credit and Working Families Tax Credit. The single parent adviser told me that I would be financially better off on “the dole”.

I was shocked and very upset. I loved my job and had a real future as a radiographer. I was doing well at university and had to give it all up so that we could survive. I felt down and was treated for depression by my doctor. When I left work some of my colleagues were upset for me and others thought I was leaving to become a “lady of leisure”. On my last day, we had a conversation about taxes. One person actually said “don’t listen to her. She’s leaving to live off our taxes.” Too many people still think like this. I wonder if she would have said the same thing about my neighbour, or whether her being a widow makes her a better single parent than me in her eyes.

It’s difficult to make sure your children eat healthily. As I’m on benefits, my oldest daughter, Jazz, gets free school dinners. This is a token worth £1.65 per day. If you buy a hot meal, which is the cost of one token, then you cannot afford to buy a drink, which costs 65p. Salads are £1.50, so Jazz usually buys a sandwich and a drink. Free school dinners aren’t exactly a free dinner when you still have to provide them with one when they get home.

Dinners at home are cheap and cheerful. I love vegetables, but cost wise it is difficult to have them every day. It is cheaper to put some chips in the oven and baked beans on the hob. I try to have vegetables about four times a week, but to be honest, it’s usually less. It’s quite frightening when you get told that we should be having five portions a day.

That’s an ideal dinner that won’t happen. I buy a bag of apples a week and thank the Lord for supermarkets’ value/economy fruit juices. I think it is great that the government provides poor parents with milk tokens, but I wonder what happens if you are lactose intolerant or vegan. I personally would prefer fruit and vegetable tokens. Everyone would use those.