The HOUSE that SAVED three single mums from heartbreak
When Janet, Nicola and Vicki’s partners walked out, they and their six children found an utterly inspiring solution . . .
EVERY Sunday evening at the Single Mums’ Mansion, we’d sit around my huge kitchen table — three mums, a baby, a toddler and four kids — passing the roast potatoes and making sure no one hogged the gravy. I’d look around and think to myself: this is bliss.
That weekly meal together, every seat and high chair filled, was a tradition set in stone. A time to celebrate the life we’d built from the embers of shared misfortune — the fathers of our children having walked out on us, one after the other, all in the same year.
I always felt deep pride in this tableau of cheery domesticity. A stranger would have struggled to determine where one mother’s children began and another’s ended.
Kids cheerfully jostling over the last potato; us topping up each other’s wine glasses and soaking up the easy atmosphere; home cooked food, good conversation and a deep sense of family.
Forgive me if this all sounds a bit smug. But if any band of mothers deserved to enjoy a bit of uncomplicated happiness, I think we did. Not least because it was born out of a shared determination not to succumb to heartache when we each had every reason to be as miserable as hell.
We didn’t actually live in a mansion — it was a spacious terrace — but this moniker amused us all.
Especially considering that a year earlier this place had felt like an empty shell to me — a mere roof over my head, having ceased to be the safe haven it was when my then husband and I were raising our family in it. Soon after Danny, my youngest, turned one, his dad turned to me and said: ‘I’m leaving.’ Our daughters Lilla and Teya were five and three. It was entirely unexpected. I was heading out of the door one Saturday morning to visit a friend when this bombshell landed. This was my first night away by myself since Danny was born.
My ex immediately took back his words, saying he’d made a mistake and that wasn’t what he really wanted. But I knew he meant it. This was May 2008. We’d been going through a rough patch for the last couple of months; both wallowing in the sleep-deprived misery that having three children under five tends to force on a marriage. Neither of us were being our best selves. But until now it hadn’t occurred to me that our constant bickering might lead to this.
WHAT should have been a fun weekend was wretched as I spent it terrified of what I was going home to. He’d taken the kids to his parents’ house, which is where I met them all on the Sunday afternoon.
The despairing look on his face when I arrived made him actually telling me we were finished a mere formality. My in-laws played with the children while we sat in the same garden where, just six years earlier, we’d held our wedding reception.
We both wept as he said he was moving out. I stared at him aghast, desperately trying to summon the words that would persuade him to stay. But when he said he was looking for a flat and would be staying at his mum’s that evening, I knew they didn’t exist. He’d clearly been planning this for a while.
That’s when sorrow turned to anger as I wondered how my marriage could possibly be ending on the very spot it began. He hadn’t done it that way deliberately, but it still seemed unconscionable
As did the moment when, two weeks later, I had to wave off my kids when he took them to stay the night at his new place and pretend to look happy about it for their sakes. That was horrific. Determined not to be miserable, I arranged to meet a friend for dinner. I got ready on autopilot, completely numb, which had been my default mode for the last fortnight.
But heading into town on the bus it suddenly hit me that my children weren’t with me; that this wasn’t my choice, yet I was powerless to do anything but accept it. It felt like being punched in the stomach. I wept then, and again later that night when, after far too much wine at dinner, I returned to an empty house and wandered forlornly from room to room.
Sobbing into the silence, I ended up in the baby’s room. I’d only recently finished breastfeeding him and, in my distress at the sight of his empty cot, milk began to leak through my blouse. I fell asleep in the chair I used to nurse him in comforted by the smell of his babygrow which I’d laid across my face. This was the start of the blackest chapter in my life. The pain of my loss — I still loved my husband — was physical. My heart hurt.
One morning, on the school run, I felt so overwhelmed with grief I bent double, throwing up in gutter. Grief was the only word for it. I felt like my husband had died. I couldn’t eat or sleep and became black-eyed and emaciated. I thought I would never be OK. I trundled along in this wretched haze for the next seven months, until dealing with another woman’s pain suddenly became more urgent than focusing on my own.
My friend Vicki, whom I’d first met ten years earlier through my husband, had suddenly found herself in a horrendous predicament. Her fiance had left her soon after the birth of their daughter, Daisy. She, too, was bereft. On top of everything, when the home they
shared was sold she faced surfing on friends’ sofas until she found a new place, all with a ten-monthold to care for.
The answer was obvious. ‘Come and stay with me,’ I told her, pointing out my attic bedroom had an en-suite bathroom and wasn’t used. ‘I can help with the baby while you get your ducks in a row,’ I told her. ‘We can prop each other up.’
We talked about it being a threemonth arrangement. But within weeks both our spirits had lifted immeasurably.
The house had two parents in it again. Two people pulling together, wanting the best for their children and each other — this was what the breakdown of my marriage had stolen from me. Now I had it back.
Vicki and I took it in turns to cook, and if one of us couldn’t face the bath and bedtime shenanigans the other would simply take over.
We planned every meal; even doing the groceries felt like less of a chore because I was doing it with a friend. Long before the three months ended I said to Vicki ‘just stay’. At which point two mums suddenly became three when my friend Nicola joined us.
I’d met Nicola a couple of years earlier when I took Teya to a local baby music class and she was there with her youngest, Eliot.
SHE lived around the corner. I bumped into her one afternoon and instantly knew something terrible had happened. She looked so empty, lost and thin — my first thought was that someone had died. As she filled me in, I began to recognise in her what I’d been feeling myself — that inner souldestroying grief of not being able to persuade the father of your children to stay. Her marriage had fallen apart, and he’d gone.
I told her about my set-up with Vicki and urged her to come over for a meal with her kids. Her daughter, Martha, was seven and Eliot was three. Soon she was spending every afternoon after school with us and staying for dinner two or three nights a week. Each weekend they’d turn up on the Friday and not leave until the children’s bedtime on Sunday.
We loved this arrangement, which helped us all on so many levels. People may think we were militant men haters, but we were just three ordinary women helping each other through our heartbreak.
There was the practical, of course — we helped with each other’s kids, and there was always someone around to cover for you if you were ill, exhausted or needed to pop out.
Vicki and I are both extremely house proud, so we instinctively tidied up after each other and the children as we went around. No one expected a medal for doing it, and the house always felt tidy. School and nursery runs were done between us. The children didn’t mind which of us ran their bath, or whose mum read their bedtime story, as long as one of us did.
Then there was the companionship; the knowledge that you weren’t going to be spending the evening alone. We vowed that the breakdown of our relationships wasn’t going to be the thing that defined us in a negative way. To achieve that we had to keep each other in check when the pain and anger threatened to boil out of one of us.
None of our children ever heard their dads being bad-mouthed, or saw us rail against our sense of abandonment. However awful any of us felt, we knew that once the children were in bed we could vent to someone who would completely understand, because they were going through it, too.
It meant we could threaten to wreak havoc on our exes, and the new partners they went on to have, safe in the knowledge that two other people would listen patiently, then talk us out of it.
We even worked it so that, more often than not, the children would all be at their dads’ places on the same weekends. And then we could be three single women together, throwing fabulous parties and enjoying raucous nights out.
The best party we held was on the day William and Kate got married. We decided to hold our own wedding in celebration of the marriage of sorts Vicki and I had forged. We invited everyone we knew and the dress code was non-negotiable: you had to wear either a wedding dress or come dressed as a wedding guest.
Everyone obliged and we had a ball. I wore my actual wedding dress, which ended up destroyed, covered in red wine.
As I joyfully danced in it in the living room, I realised just how far I’d come. However much I wouldn’t have chosen this life, I was so glad I’d found a way to make it work.
We never talked about how this set up would end, and actually it simply came to its own natural conclusion.
TWO years after they moved in, Vicki and Daisy outgrew my attic bedroom. One evening Daisy decided she wasn’t going to get into the bed they were now sharing, and charged around the house instead.
Vicki immediately sensed my exasperation and said, ‘Oh, it’s stopped working’ and that was that. Without so much as a cross word between us throughout the whole time we’d lived together, she suddenly felt ready to move on.
And I was ready, too. I’d recently got a boyfriend, Neil, who is now my husband. He put up Vicki’s bed in her new house while we unpacked the boxes she’d had in storage and my kids helped Daisy set up her new bedroom.
We all cried, of course, as we left for home. But she’s only around the corner. Nicola, too, became more emotionally strong and the weekends spent at ours began to peter off.
The house felt empty when we got back to it, but happy memories echoed through the rooms — I walked through them thinking what a great job we did.
That was ten years ago. Soon after Vicki left Neil proposed. I said yes, despite being terrified I wouldn’t cope living with a man again. But it’s been fine.
Vicki also has a new partner, but she and Nicola still come round all the time — they only live five minutes away. We just don’t sleep under this roof together the way we used to. It’s a different kind of home now. But we all take comfort in knowing that the Single Mums’ Mansion will always exist in spirit: the place where three women pulled together and saved each other from the depths of despair.
AS TOLD TO RACHEL HALLIWELL
THE Single Mums’ Mansion by Janet Hoggarth is out now for €9.99