Confessions of a Single Mum

I don’t very often use the single mum card nor do I get wound up easily but last week I reached the end of my tether.

If your reading this form outside the UK let quickly explain our system here. Basically all your working life just under a third of your wages is taken from your wage packet before it is even paid to you. It’s paid direct to the government for them to do with as they want. It’s apparently to pay for all the services we have. Police, fire brigade, pension to name a few, and to provide a National Health Service. Now this infamous NHS is there free when we need a hospital, a doctor and a dentist. But it’s not quite as simple as that. For example, if you go to the doctor and need a prescription most people still have to pay an additional fee for the actual medication.  

This is just a brief roundup of the system as if I went into it in more detail I would never finish this post. But the thing that has wound me up the most is the availability of a dentist. In short, there aren’t any, unless you want to go private. Now this would better if you could write to some nice government person and explain you pay for your stuff privately and they give you a refund for the parts of the system you don’t use. Oh no, you can’t do that. So for the first time ever I have written to two MP’s. They have welcoming websites that tell you that they are there for you to help you. They are supposedly accessible and care about you. Well below is the email I wrote and so far I have not heard anything back. Surprised? No. Fed up? Yes.

“Dear Mr MP – I am at the end of my tether and at a loss of how to explain this to my children. I have worked all my adult life, paying my contributions as I should and it is only now that I have found myself redundant. Not to be daunted by the situation I have taken the challenge to retrain and the New Year will hopefully bring a change of circumstances. I can cope with being a single mum and having to feed my 13 and 10 year old with just £20 a week. It’s not a hardship it’s merely a challenge to be overcome. What I do struggle with is trying to explain to my children why they have never been to the dentist or why one of their classmates who are from another country is able to have regular dentist treatment. Not that I hasn’t tried getting into a regular dentist in the last 9 years. I was brought up with the 6 monthly fear of the dentist trip. My two though have only seen a dentist in an emergency and then had to have teeth out. I too am unable to fix a broken front tooth as it’s not an emergency and I am not the sort to abuse the system, even if it’s failing. After 6 years of living with it I have resigned to the fact I will never probably get it fixed. It worried me at first but my self confidence in being able to smile went many years ago.

So please how do I explain to my children that despite them brushing their teeth every day they will probably grow up to have irreparable damage from not having regular checkups. I hope that things change and one day I will be able to go private as I think this will be our only option but in the meantime we have to just keep waiting on a waiting list that is never ending in the hope to see a dentist regularly.

If you have children you may be able to understand how hard it is to look at them knowing that something is effecting them now and will probably affect them into their adult life and there is nothing I can do about it, I am their mother but helpless. It’s not their fault I can’t afford private treatment, it’s not their fault there are no dentists but they are the ones that will pay for it in the long run.”

Since writing this post , I have since had a reply email from one of the MP’s. All it asked was if I had a contact phone number. No mention of anything else and so far no phone call.

Now this post may be a bit off subject but I’m a single mum and this has made me so angry I want to scream.

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