At least once a month, someone remarks that being a solo mum must be terribly difficult. My standard reply is that motherhood can be a pretty hard job no matter who you are or what your marital status.
Besides, I have never known any other way. I am also luckier than most solo parents in that I have a house, a supportive family, a flexible job and a neighbourhood where people help each other.
But, yes, there have been some dark moments.
Now and again, in between cutting the firewood, paying the bills and combing for nits, I pause long enough to read what the various political parties are saying about us. Single parents, that is.
Everyone is wringing their hands over the fact that New Zealand has one of the highest rates of sole-parent families in the world, but no one, it would seem, has any answers.
The problem is just so huge - nearly 30 per cent of families with dependent children are headed by a single parent.
By the time they reach adulthood, 57 per cent of Maori children have lived in homes without one parent, usually their father. And around 110,000 people are on the domestic purposes benefit, costing taxpayers millions of dollars every year.
Somehow the DPB has grown from a mole into a melanoma, from small and quite attractive to aggressive and unstoppable, sucking the life out of way too many people.
Suggestions abound as to how best to treat the problem, especially at election time: encouraging women off the benefit and back into work; taking more money off them for not naming the fathers of their babies; increasing childcare subsidies; raising the benefit; lowering the benefit; and so on.
I don't have any definitive answers. But after nearly seven years as a solo mum, with the first five on the DPB, I've come to a few basic conclusions.
For a start, and this may sound overly simple, single mothers and fathers do need support.
There are those who insist that if you make your bed or roll around naked on it you should lie in it.
I agree in principle and, as I have said previously, I like the idea of being tougher on beneficiaries, as they do in places such as Wisconsin, helping the long-term unemployed, for example, to get back to work.
But not for parents on their own with little children. Forcing a single mother into the workforce is surely not in her baby or toddler's best interests. In Wisconsin, solo mothers are expected to work once an infant is 3 months old.
Of course, if a single mother wants to work and feels she will be a better parent because of it, she should do so.
But if she wishes to stay home and look after her child, she needs support.
That support has to come from one of two places - the state or the community.
Either the Government gives a solo mother money, or the community cares for her. And by community, I mean families and friends and churches and charities.
Sadly, although there are a few outstanding exceptions, most churches seem to have lost the plot when it comes to social justice.
Few of them are really getting their hands dirty helping the poor and needy. Charities are struggling for money and volunteers, and the rest of us, for the most part, are usually too busy, apathetic or selfish to do much for those less fortunate.
And so, for as long as the community doesn't front up, it falls to the Government - and that means the taxpayer - to continue supporting single parents.
The only other way to significantly lower welfare spending - and this is at the heart of the issue but rarely addressed - is to somehow slow the tide of women such as myself becoming single parents in the first place.
Because, as I see it, the problem is essentially cultural. We have created a society where it is quite acceptable to leave your marriage if you're no longer very happy and where it is completely normal to have sex outside a long-term, committed relationship.
In fact, as far as the latter is concerned, in most circles, you're decidedly weird if you don't.
Although the Sunday Star-Times' survey on morality last week found 35 per cent of people disapproved of sex outside marriage, I suspect that in a more random survey the figure would be a lot lower.
We fully expect teenagers to be sleeping around and that's okay with us, just use a condom.
Yeah, right.
Abstinence barely rates a mention, and if someone admits to it, such as Brooke Fraser or Ben Lummis, it makes magazine headlines.
And so it is entirely to be expected that if lots of people are having sex outside committed relationships - as I did - then there will be lots of abortions and lots of babies born to single women.
And if lots of people are bailing out of their marriages, then lots of children will end up in households that depend on welfare.
Party policies that seek to tighten or tinker with existing welfare payment schemes are all well and good, but they are still addressing symptoms, not the cause.
Surely, given the cost of single parenthood - to the taxpayer and to the children raised in broken families - it is time to take a big-picture approach.
<EM>Sandra Paterson:</EM> Tinkering at edge of cultural change
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