Christmas and the Single Mother or ‘Spank me Santa’.

Warning: explicit content

Before I qualified to be a therapist, and I was still struggling financially, Christmas and birthdays were two things I most dreaded thinking that I wouldn’t be able to provide my daughter with the presents she deserved or the ‘Hallmark’ picture perfect Christmas day spread that you see on countless adverts, normally from mid October onwards.

I mean who are all these people in these adverts (ahem, exhibit A above)? How are the families getting on so well and why do they have soooo much food? Just nuts really but boy does it make you feel like some inadequate failure if its just you, your kid, your cats and dog.

The year we spent Christmas on our own was worst. We had made plans to spend it with friends but at the last minute they cancelled due to ill health. It was the perfect end to a perfectly shit year really.

The run up to it hadn’t been good. We had moved to a lovely rented house in Tetbury but I was struggling paying the bills. My daughter’s school fees were crippling me and a particularly unpleasant bursar at her school was no help at all in fact happily handing out huge bursaries to families with two parents, but bugger all help for me. She said this was because I had decided to go back to University to get a degree and she maintained this was irresponsible.  It was pretty grim, I was very broke.

To keep my head above water I did a couple of things, firstly I claimed Tax Credits, and I have to say thank god for that. Secondly I ran a little Airbnb out of the house which later got us evicted, but still in the run up to Christmas there wasn’t enough money to buy suitable presents to attempt to fill the huge void left by it just being the two of us, a ratty little dog and a couple of cats.

Things were so bad at times my daughter would come home from school and ask me what was for dinner, I would look in the cupboard and say; ‘well this is exciting, I wonder what we can make from a tin of sweetcorn and some chick peas’. Sometimes it was beans on toast, other times just the toast.  There was a period when things were very, very tough.

With Christmas looming and a break from Uni I began to consider ways of making extra money on the side, something I am sure all parents single or otherwise often think about this time of year.

Unable to get any work locally I had to think out of the box and after a suggestion from a friend signed myself up to do telephone sex chat lines.  I can honestly say there are probably people I spoke to still traumatised by my outbursts, really I was truly terrible at this job.

I think I managed about ten calls before the company I signed up with fired me. I think it was comments like; ‘why the f**k would you want to shove your kids Tonka toy up your arse you f**king pervert, and don’t get me started on the hygiene aspect of that you filthy sicko’, and ‘what is wrong with you you deranged animal do you kiss your wife and children with that mouth’?  In retrospect I probably would have made an excellent Dominatrix but at the time was horrified at the filth people would volley at me.

The absolute end, the final call and the one where I realised I was far too outspoken for this sort of crap was the one where the ‘gentleman’ and I use the term loosely, on the end of the phone wanted me to pretend that he was Santa and I was a very naughty Elf.  Jesus Christ what next?

‘Call me Santa’ he rasped with a voice sounding like he’d gargled with razor blades after smoking 100 Lambert and Butler fags. 

‘Tell me what a naughty Elf you’ve been’.

‘Ooooh Santa, I’ve been soooo bad’ I managed to force myself to say trying to imagine what a sexy Elf might sound like and probably really sounding more like one of those Disney Chipmunks crossed with Jessica Rabbit, my voice wavering between a high pitch due to the stress of it all and a deeper tone as an attempt to sound, well, ‘sultry’ I guess.

I must have sounded deranged and the complete opposite of sexy. seemed to work though as I could hear a rather unpleasant squelching sound as it appeared he was masturbating at the end of the phone.

‘Tell me you want me to spank you’

‘come again’?  (oh god no, I don’t mean I want you to come again, I mean say that again)…

‘Tell me you wicked slutty little Elf that you want Santa to spank you’.

Oh god really? How the f**k did it come to this?

He persisted to the point where I had to capitulate.

‘Oh Santa, I’m so bad, I need to be spanked, spank me Santa, spank me Santa’….

So, you know when you have those moments in your life where it’s like you’re sort of watching yourself from above, this was one of those moments.

I was sat cross legged in M&S PJ’s with fluffy socks on and a cat on my lap in my sweet little cottage whilst my daughter slept upstairs, 10 days before Christmas whilst some complete werido asked me to ask him to spank me.

Wtf?

‘Fuck off Santa, I don’t want you or anyone else to spank me’ I said and put the phone down, only to realise that my mobile, which was next to me, was still on a call to a rather nice man I had just started seeing, which as you can imagine very quickly died a death.

I did lots of jobs during these early days of being a student, I Sous Chef’d in an on location catering truck peeling spuds in the rain, I typed up a friends excruciating novel, I opened up a remote assistant business and was asked if I could buy Cocaine. I tried so many different things and in the end nothing worked until I qualified.

In the end Christmas day was lovely, not because we had a lot or were surrounded by lots of people, but because we loved each other and were a little team of two.

Christmas is a tough time for single parents, we try so hard to compensate for depriving our children of a societal normal family partly due to the images thrusted upon us by the media, although I do feel this is really changing now.

In reality all our kids need is love, to feel safe and to be warm and well fed.  No one needs a naughty Elf or a parent who compromises their own morals.  I wonder sometimes what Pervy Santa’s life was like and now as a therapist myself I make no judgement on that phone call or what he asked me to say. Afterall he too could have been a single parent and that the only bit of joy and escape he had from his situation.

Christmas can be tough for all families, single parent or otherwise so here are some tips to get you through.

1.      Concentrate on what is important.

2.      Plan ahead and involve your kids in the planning.

3.      Have fun where ever you can.

4.      Manage expectations beforehand.

5.      Ask for help.

6.      Be creative.

7.      Check out local free events.

8.      If you can’t physically see family, arrange to video call them.

9.      Involve your children in the decorating and cooking, if they’re old enough.

10.  Visit local food banks if need be and ask what local community support is available.

11.  Buy your child’s father a gift or send a card.

12.  Be positive (well try to be).

13.  Start a new Christmas tradition (particularly if this is the first Christmas as a single parent).

14.  Share your stories with us!