JANE LABOUS

I can tell you first-hand that no one wants a single mother at a dinner party. I never planned to end up a divorcée, or to bring up my daughter, now ten, alone. But my short, lonely marriage ended in 2018 and now, in our house, I am the only parent and breadwinner.

 

​A few years ago, I dated a man – let’s call him the Rat. Having a boyfriend improved my social prospects considerably. Invitations from school parents rolled in, a barbecue here, a drinks party there. ‘I’d cross the world for you, Jane,’ he declared fervently. As it happened, he couldn’t even come down the A35. After eighteen months, he disappeared just before Christmas, without a goodbye, dumping my belongings in a sealed plastic box on my parents’ drive in the December drizzle.​

 

The invitations dwindled. Three years on, they have stopped altogether. I suppose the school-gate couples don’t know what to do with a solo mother. Where would they put me at the table? Am I allowed to speak to the husbands? What if I complain about men IN FRONT OF THE MEN?

 

At school events, I talk only to the wives, anxious not to be mistaken for some sort of ruthless man-hunting predator. After all, Victorian novels were full of women like me –unattached, unsupervised, a little rebellious. To some, perhaps, a threat; to an unhappily married woman, an illicit glimpse of freedom. One mum seems positively envious. ‘My time will come,’ she remarks darkly when I mention the apparently inexhaustible supply of men on Hinge.

 

Sadly, I’m an unlikely femme fatale. I wish I could take a megaphone to sports day: Attention, please, ladies. I don’t want your husband. I’m sure he’s perfectly nice, but no thank you. What I do want, sometimes desperately, is company, adult conversation, someone to put up a shelf, make a cup of tea. I’m so tired of holding my own, on my own. Sometimes I wake up and tell myself, ‘Come on Jane, you can do this.’

 

The other mothers are friendly enough. I don’t think they’re particularly cliquey, or smug, or plotting my exclusion over their coconut lattés. It’s just that friendships are formed over coffees and play dates, kitchen suppers and couples’ drinks. The school gate has its own unspoken rules, and there is a great deal of talk about holidays and husbands, kitchen extensions, ski trips and the Year 3 Vikings assembly. Nothing too deep, nothing too real. I can forgive almost anything except the old chestnut, tossed out with surprising frequency: ‘I’m a single parent this weekend, my husband’s away.’ Ohhh, babe, if only you knew...

 

As far as I know, I’m the only solo mother at school, living a different life, to a different timetable, on a different budget. I’m either working or looking after my daughter, sometimes both, and so I can’t nip out for coffee or pop out for an evening glass of wine or yoga class. In six years of school runs and thousands of ‘how are yous’ and ‘how was your weekend?’, I’ve met only two women with whom I can dispense with the small talk and talk raucously about life and politics and books and feminism and love. And yet I can’t shake the feeling that I don’t really want to fit in. I would love an invitation, but I don’t necessarily want to go. My time is precious and I am so accustomed to my own company that now, most of the time, I prefer it.

 

Married women tend to romanticise my independence. ‘Look at your girl house!’ exclaimed Caroline, a former colleague, stepping into my tiny bungalow. ‘My husband hates cushions!’ At least he shares the bills, I thought. If we swapped lives, how many days of splendid freedom would it take for Caroline to want her old, cushion-free life back? I suppose my dating life must seem a foreign country to them. Ghosting, love-bombing, situationships – how can they conceive of the hell of modern dating (and why would they want to?) when they’re busy arguing about tennis drop offs?

 

Anyway, my outcast status may have nothing to do with being single. There are my geeky ways, my tendency to hover awkwardly at parties, panicking about who to talk to, where to stand, what to DO. I marvel at Camilla Frost, an alpha mum who circulates PTA events in six-inch stilettos and leopard skin, air-kissing the headteacher. But I am no Camilla Frost. At this year’s summer fête, I sat alone on a picnic blanket, pretending to read my Kindle (thank God for books) while my daughter perused the cake stalls with her friends. ‘You looked like a lonely sea bird,’ she said afterwards, pityingly. ‘Can’t you hire someone to come with you?’

 

She’s always been my brilliant little sidekick. From the moment she was born, I talked to her properly, never in baby talk, about everything and nothing - the beauty of conjugating French verbs, how hummingbirds fly backwards, giant cheese plants, reading books as an act of intellectual rebellion, and why every girl should know how to change a battery. She’s grown up watching me tackle the practicalities of life alone. Only last weekend I was swearing at the petrol mower – the blasted starter cord defeats me every time. Sometimes I teeter on the ladder in my transparent eye-protection goggles, wielding a pole pruner. There was the afternoon I spent assembling twelve Perfect Fit blinds for the conservatory windows, armed with washing up liquid and some truly disgraceful expletives. My God I was proud, the other day, when I found her with a palette knife in hand, filling a hole in a skirting board with Polyfilla.

 

After my divorce, I dated on and off without looking for anything serious – which was fortunate, given the men I met. These days, my romantic ambitions remain modest – some would say, highly achievable: a decent man who, in the words of Whitney Houston, sees right through to the heart of me. Alas, men on Hinge are more interested in when I’m ‘child free’, as if I clock off at six and pop my daughter in a cupboard. But she isn’t something I need a break from; she is the heart of me. Our house is full of joy. We walk along the beach until our legs hurt, bake warm, wonky cakes, outwit each other over Cluedo and sing at the tops of our voices in the car. We plant squash seeds that straggle over the lawn and watch the roses change colour in the sun.

 

Spontaneous weekends are all the rage on Hinge, along with last-minute trips abroad – ‘have your passport ready!’. But there are no weekends off in my world, no alternate Fridays, no alternate anything. Even a drink requires weeks of planning. ‘Don’t you have friends, a network?’ asked one man, incredulously. ‘Somewhere to leave her?’ Screw you, I thought and deleted him. Mostly, my romantic life takes place between 2.30 and 4.30pm weekdays, after work, before the school run. Then I turn into a pumpkin.

 

My daughter hacks my Bumble feed, perusing my likes with a series of yucks. One match thought I was a catfish because I replied at 7.30am. Another, on a date costing £40 in babysitting fees, gripped the scruff of my neck as if I were a kitten as we walked along the seafront (was he flirting? Was this a new form of holding hands?), then made me buy my own drink. I came home and cried at the babysitter. Admittedly, I’m fussy. I’ve been known to get the ick because a man ran away from a seagull. Another blew his nose with a little cotton handkerchief. A third said ‘tenderstem broccoli’.

 

We spend much of the school holidays at my parents’ house, where they enthusiastically take charge of my daughter while I work. With a little more time on my hands, and London nearby (rather than deepest Dorset), and my trusty resident babysitting team at the ready, it’s also when I tend to arrange my dates. Yet there is a unique humiliation in being a grown woman of 49, a mother yourself, getting ready for a date while your own mother worries about what time you’ll be home. Last time, my father picked me up from the station. ‘How was it?’ he asked hopefully. ‘Fine,’ I muttered, fifteen again, turning to my phone.

 

The men I date, meanwhile, seem bemused by my very adult responsibilities. ‘Good morning beautiful,’ they text, ‘how’s ur day’, and I wonder what they’d make of the 5.50am alarms, twice-daily school runs, endless cooking, money worries and existential despair at the news headlines. Yet I’m still supposed to be the woman on my profile: serene, alluring, with evenings free. So I reply ‘good thanks’ with a smiley face, as though I rise late, slip into my feathery velvet dressing gown and prepare myself cubes of baked apple and eggs – as one man told me he does at noon every day, followed by a leisurely stroll in the sunshine. By noon I’ve been awake for six hours. I cannot imagine having time to cube an apple. Occasionally – the horror! - a man suggests an evening video call. Sir, I’m asleep by nine, at the latest.

 

Fortunately, online dating involves a great deal of correspondence. A friend observed that its epistolary nature suits me rather well, and she’s right. My inbox is positively Balzacian: ardent suitors, tender billets doux, giddy declarations of love. Lucien de Rubempré would have been quite at home on Hinge. This morning, a rose bloomed on my screen from Richard, 42: ‘I’d totally give you my last chicken nugget.’ Dee, 45: ‘When r you free to get married?’ And TJ, 34: ‘Ur resplendent!’

 

In the summer term, I spotted my daughter’s PE teacher on Bumble. I scrolled past in a panic, only to discover him among my likes. Oh God, I thought, what if we dated? Three hundred pre-teens gossiping about my love life. And what if it didn’t work out and we HAD TO TALK AT PARENTS’ EVENING? So I ignored him. Sorry, Mr Walker. You were hot, but it would have been awkward, you know it.

 

I don’t want other people’s husbands, but lately I’ve caught myself romanticising them. At swimming pick-up, I watched a burly man in winter boots beside a blue Volvo, holding a swimming bag as his damp children rushed back inside for a lost shoe. Volvo Man made me wistful, though I’m not even sure I want a husband, with their stray socks, complicated cooking – herb crusts, racks of lamb! – and late-night Netflix watching. Still, what must it be like to have someone to rely on, someone there? It’s been so long, I can’t remember.

​

The last man I dated, over the summer, was as intense as the August heatwave. We lasted eight weeks. He reckoned only ‘freak men’ and the unemployed would bother with me. ‘You’re undateable,’ he announced. ‘You’re, like, in the lowest one percent on the apps.’ This, he ranted, was because ‘Jane, you don’t have any weekends free, and you live in Dorset. When would we have our romantic time?’ Sorry, Romeo, but I’m not choosing between being a mother and having a man in my life.

 

‘You need to change your type,’ my daughter scolded me last week. ‘I challenge you to swipe on someone short.'

 

'What, shorter than me?’ I exclaimed in mock horror. She giggled as I reluctantly promised to make an effort. Then, for all my bravado, I wondered aloud why no one had ever properly loved and cherished me. ‘But I love and cherish you, you buttock,’ she said.