I’m forever searching for TV that makes me laugh out loud. It’s a hard thing to find. Joab and I recently tore through Motherland for the second time and I don’t remember laughing so hard the first time around, but maybe my tired old brain is easier to please these days.

All the characters are spot on but Kevin’s my favourite. I also love Liz, played by Diane Morgan. She’s the nonchalant single mum and I look at her and think: I wish I could have a little bit of her zero-fucks-given attitude. She’s also no victim, as I find so many single-mum characters to be. I think screenwriters often get lazy – there’s so much opportunity for creating more realistic, more nuanced single characters in general, that challenge stereotypes in a world that still, sadly, favours couples.

Anyway, this post is dedicated to all the single parents out there. Current, previous, future; through choice, or not. I was pretty much on my own when I had my first daughter, although her dad and I tried to call ourselves a couple for about a month in the summer of 2001.

I’m not sure I ever really thought of myself as a single mum, because I always had loads of support – most notably from my mum and dad, my sister and my best friend.

They had their own lives though, and I didn’t want to take the piss. I know I probably did, at times. I remember staying longer than I said I would at a party one night when my mum was babysitting. She called to say that she wanted to go to bed, and asked me to come home.

I was annoyed that my mum was dragging me away from the bustle, sweat and music of that party, even though she’d actually done a really nice thing and given me an evening to myself. My daughter was still a baby and didn’t really like taking a bottle. No doubt my mum had done her fair bit of rocking and soothing, and was ready to sleep. I selfishly just wanted to stay at the party, to flirt, dance, and forget for a sweet few hours that I had a baby at all.

Without a partner, getting up in the middle of the night with my newborn daughter was always my responsibility. Waking at 5am when my toddler daughter would physically try to peel open my eyelids for Teletubbies and Weetabix, was always down to me. Making a last-minute Easter hat (who has time?), and rushing to do all the nursery and school drop offs and picks ups, even when I ran over at work, was down to me.

This is, I believe, what parents who are in a partnership, but without a partner temporarily because of a work trip or something else, call ‘flying solo’. But when you’re a single parent, there’s rarely someone else in the cockpit with you.

The thing is, I did sign up for single parenthood with my daughter. I didn’t want people’s sympathy. Just their understanding. When I found out I was pregnant I knew that my daughter’s un-pindownable, unreliable and unpredictable father was probably not going to be the dad that was there for her, or me. But I knew I wanted my daughter so much.

We went on adventures that we didn’t have to share with anyone else. I was able to give my daughter the attention she needed in the evenings without having to split my time between her and someone else. I even enjoyed having 5.30pm suppers, and going to bed at the same time as she did. That might sound sad, but it was part of how I handled the seriously early starts in the seriously early years, with not a single guaranteed lie-in on the horizon.

When I did get married a few years later, there were certainly bits of single-parent life that I really missed. There was something very special about the relationship that my daughter and I had when it was just us. She was strong-willed from the get-go, and she fought me, hard and often. But for the most-part, we both had this unspoken understanding that it was us, together, in the world. And more than we fought, we fought for one another.

My husband worked weekends, and regularly through the night. When we went on to have two more children together I didn’t really get the break or the help that I’d imagined I’d have with a partner around. That’s just how it was, and to his credit, my husband was doing what he had to do to pay the mortgage, as I only worked part-time then.

But at the weekend, I was always the boss at home, even when I didn’t want to be. I may not have had to negotiate or compromise on plans, but, also, Saturdays didn’t sparkle with the possibility of what we would do as a family; in the park I often looked around at mums, dads and kids hanging out together and felt very much like a single parent once again.

So today, when I woke at 8am alone in my bed, after Joab had soundlessly taken Ray from his crib at 6.30am so that I could have a lie-in, I thought, wow. WOW. This is massive. This is great. I don’t think I’ll ever take this for granted, because I’ve known what it’s like to wake dog-tired, day after day, and think: here we go again.

I am grateful to be with someone now who takes on half the responsibility; who wants to do stuff for me, his son, and his stepchildren, because he appreciates that the more scaffolding our family has, the better everything feels.

When I see Joab quietly going about his duties as a new dad, I can sense that it all feels like a massive privilege to him. He signed up for it, and he’s here for it.

Sometimes parenting alone is the only option. Sometimes it is a choice. But single parents don’t need pity. They need support. And they need to be acknowledged, positively, in society.

How many times in this pregnancy was I told, in appointments where Joab wasn’t present, that I should enlist ‘my partner’ to help with certain duties during labour? Even though I had not mentioned a partner, the assumption was that I had one. And these doctors and sonographers were right: I didn’t need to correct them. I did have a partner, and he would be by my side.

But when I was pregnant with my daughter and I was asked what my partner did, or how long we’d been together, or where we lived, I had to kindly set whoever had asked straight: It’s just me.

And sometimes I felt alright in those moments, but often it just made me think that I couldn’t wait to find a partner, so that I could answer strangers’ questions with a certain confidence that only couples seemed to be afforded.

And perhaps, also, a partner would have meant that I could have walked around without having carrying all the responsibility for every dinner time, every holiday plan, every parent’s evening, every problem.

Of course, I don’t think that now. I think I could have been happy on my own, with my kids. But I’m also so glad to be with Joab now.

I have read books on being single. Most recently this, which I loved so much.

And I have read books about a marriage ending, and single parenthood beginning. Most recently this memoir(which I really liked it for its honesty).

It made me think about my earliest days of motherhood, when I was alone. It was a pure time, a beautiful time, but an exhausting one. And because I’m doing the new baby thing now, 24 years later, in some ways it has resurrected certain memories, brought definition to their faded edges.

The ferocity of love for my daughter when she was born, and the uncomplicated feeling that I would put in the hours, days, weeks and years to raise her, was uncompromising. It was also complicated, because I didn’t always do a great job.

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