I RUN A BUSINESS – AND HELP MY SON
RACHEL Allen, 40, is a single mother to Lewis, seven, and runs a social media consultancy from her home in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. Her area is in Tier Four, with latest data showing a new case rate of 739 per 100,000 in the week to December 28. She says:
‘AS a self-employed single parent trying to maintain a business that was decimated at the start of lockdown, school is a lifeline for me. It gives me the space to concentrate on maintaining an income, while Lewis can be in the classroom with friends getting the education he needs.
‘I don’t qualify for any support and I don’t have any savings to fall back on so I have to keep the business running and fit that around providing some kind of education for my son, who is in Year Three.
‘As the first lockdown started... my existing business was almost annihilated overnight. Thankfully I was able to hold on, but I must have dropped £10,000 this year and to say that it has been a hard slog would be an understatement – there have been times where I have felt like my head was in a pressure cooker.
‘Despite that, we came up with our routine: fitting my work around gaps to help Lewis with his work, and then I picked up an NHS contract which meant I was a key worker and he could go back to school in June. But now it’s back to home school.
‘I’m very fortunate that Lewis’s dad lives nearby and is very helpful and involved. When the schools closed last time, we took it in turns taking Lewis and we will do the same again this time, but both he and his partner work full-time too.
‘Luckily, Lewis is very adaptable and takes everything in his stride, but I do worry about how all this will impact him long term. Obviously I don’t want my son’s education to suffer, but I have to prepare myself for the fact that it probably will.
‘As a single parent, and a selfemployed one at that, we are resilient – I simply have to knuckle down and get on with it.’