Catherine’s Case Study

We are looking for case studies to show just how hard it is for families and to highlight the challenges faced by those wanting to care at home. Catherine, one of our members, has kindly put forward her story in the hope that by changing how we support families other mothers will not have to suffer in the same way.

If you feel able to share your situation, either if you are at home or working but would rather be at home, please contact chair@mothersathomematter.com. By highlighting the challenges in real situations we can more effectively push for change.

Crises like ours don’t often happen in isolation. It took many months of hardship before reaching our rock bottom. So, in order to offer you a glimpse into our financial low point, I need to first give a bit of background.

My husband has a manual job and I previously worked for a charity. Before we became parents we had each worked to a position where we were pretty comfortable. Hardly high flyers in the career world, but comfortable. At the end of 2016 I gave birth to our wonderful daughter, M. Financially, we managed OK to start with - my employer’s maternity package was on the generous end of the spectrum and we’d prepared to an extent for this to gradually wane as I got further into my 12 months maternity leave, moving to Statutory Maternity Pay and then down to nothing before I returned to work. With hindsight, our attempt at preparation was not nearly enough - the reality was that we were ill-prepared for the financial shock that was coming because we had no idea how hard things would soon become.

In 2017 I returned to work part-time, dropping almost half my previous weekly hours (from 37.5 to 20, over 3 days). My husband also went part-time, going from 5 days a week to 4. To bridge the childcare gap we enrolled our daughter in a nursery for 2 days a week. This miserable solution cost almost as much as a monthly mortgage payment.

Taking on the cost of nursery, combined with the significant drop in household income (dropping hours, of course, means losing wages), with a young child to nourish and clothe, and on the back of weathering the financial slide of maternity leave was a huge shock to the system, and things quickly unravelled. We lived from month to month - getting by, managing, coping, but with very little breathing space in our budget.

Looking back, I would describe this time as one of emotional and financial trauma. After dropping my distraught daughter off at nursery I regularly cried in car on the way to work at the wrench of unwanted separation, and the wretchedness of the commute - cursing the traffic as the petrol gauge dropped. Sweating at supermarket checkouts became a regular occurrence, particularly towards the end of the month, fretting that I’d worked out the total wrong and my card would be declined. We couldn’t pick up a petrol pump without first working through calculations for the rest of the month. I cancelled haircuts as an unjustifiable expense, turned down social invitations that were out of budget, and felt - still feel - racking guilt over any outlay, no matter how small, that could be deemed as non-essential.

We always ended the month with very little in the bank, and no cushion for sudden expenses. Inevitably, one month such an expense occurred in the form of essential car repairs, when 2 tyres were punctured. It was a 5-week month, so an extra long slog to get to payday, and to make matters worse the previous month I had lost wages due to taking unpaid leave to care for my daughter when she was poorly. What remained in the bank after the tyres were replaced was not enough to buy food for the remainder of the month.

This realisation felt surreal - surely it couldn’t be happening? Somehow pragmatism cut through the disbelief and I found myself queueing at a food bank. I will be forever grateful for the warmth and support I found there; for the pure kindness and total lack of judgement when I was at my lowest point. Hot tears of shame and gratitude pricked behind my eyes as I left laden with bags of food to fill cupboards and tummies.

There are things I felt guilty about for a long time, blaming myself for the mess we were in, but really we weren’t living extravagantly at all. Family holidays were camping, clothing was bought in sales and charity shops (and so rarely for me that my office wardrobe became a running joke), meals out and takeaways were vanishingly rare. We were trying our hardest to do the best we could for our daughter, it was just hard. Guilt and shame only make it harder.

Scrutinising any modest but meaningful expense through which happy memories were made, I have wondered, should I feel bad for taking M on a trip to a farm, or for buying her an ice cream? And was it irresponsible to go to a toddler music group? Under the harsh gaze through which parents are viewed by some, this may seem to be the case; as though parents can never struggle enough before some enjoyment - some living - is no longer deemed frivolous.

It’s almost inescapable to internalise the cruelly blunt maxim of ‘if you couldn’t afford them you shouldn’t have had them’ as a stick with which to beat myself up, but really I think a kinder, more relevant, and altogether more human perspective would be to question the policies that families are existing under, and whether these are conducive to a reasonable standard of living.

In many ways, we are extremely privileged, and this is a sobering thought. We’re a ‘middle class’, two-parent household, are all fairly healthy, and we have supportive family. I’ve spent a long time - too long - berating myself over how we could have struggled so much given all we had going for us, but actually it’s not so unusual; it happens, it happens a lot, and it will keep happening unless something changes to stop it. The game is rigged.

Our story, by chance, has a happy ending. I write this as a full-time Mum in 2022, having been made redundant in 2020. This turned out to be a blessing - a welcome opportunity to spend more time with M - and through an unexpected change of circumstances our situation has improved since, making it possible to live on one low household income.

Though still upsetting to recount, the time I have described here feels far enough away now that it’s easier to open up about this dark and difficult period than it would have been when we were still ensnared in it. It almost feels like a bad dream, but I know full well that it’s actually a bad reality that so many other parents are still living. Our escape was a lucky one. That there are people less fortunate is absolutely no consolation - it just makes it more important to speak up about the difficulties that clumsily put together policies inflict on families - the effects of which impact both parents and children.

There are solutions, and the areas of inequality and disproportionate detriment felt by families that Mothers At Home Matter have identified can, and should, be addressed as a matter of priority.

The message is loud and clear - for families, it doesn’t have to be this hard. 

Catherine, MAHM member