I became pregnant at 21. It wasn’t planned. I was weeks away from my dissertation deadline, in the final months of a fashion journalism degree at the London College of Fashion. I was going through the fallout of a painful breakup (we are great friends now), and I searched for healing in all types of ways, including the brief fling that led to my pregnancy.
I want to say my decision to have my daughter was firm from the beginning, but that would be a lie. It took me a few days to realise that being a mother was something I wanted, and just because it wasn’t how I imagined – meet “perfect” man, marry said man, procreate on a predetermined schedule – it didn’t mean it wouldn’t still be fine.
I often find myself looking back wistfully on my pregnancy with my daughter, who is now 18 months old. I had a naive and fantastical outlook on parenting. We would be the best of friends, my daughter and me. We would cram our days with breastfeeding, singing, dancing, cooking and playing.
I never imagined that the first year of her life would be the loneliest of mine. The lack of freedom hit me instantly. I craved adult company; to chat to someone who was going through the same thing as me.
I am one of the roughly 2 million single parents in the UK; one in four families in Britain are headed by a single parent, and nearly half – whether in employment or not – live in poverty. New mothers feel pretty isolated regardless of their relationship status, with 43% of mums under 30 reporting that they feel lonely often or always. But as single parents, we face a lot of stigma and a particular kind of isolation.
There are apps to help with this – Peanut and Mush to help women make “mum friends” in their local area. As with the dating app Tinder, you swipe to “match” a mum you think you are compatible with. On Peanut, which has more than 500,000 users, you can tag yourself with your interests such as “fashion killa”, “strictly organic” or “single mama” (these are mine). But I struggle to put my identity as a single parent alongside my interest in organically sourced produce. My experience of isolation, of responsibility, is more than just a shared hobby. There are times when I only want to speak to my fellow single parents, those who don’t boast profile pictures of happy “nuclear families”. It’s not possible to find us on these apps.
Zoe Desmond wants to change that. Her app, Frolo, helps users connect with other single-parent families in their area. It is still in the trial stage, but she hopes to roll it out in the UK by September.
Desmond was inspired by her own experiences after the breakdown of her relationship. “When I became a single parent, even though I have lots of friends and family where I live in London, I couldn’t quite get over how hard I found the loneliness. It really hit me like a tonne of bricks,” she says. “I joined Peanut, I joined Mush and I couldn’t do what I was trying to do, which was to find other single parents in my area.”
I had very few single-parent friends, but they were my saving grace. Some of them I knew from school, some I met via Instagram and all of them I cherish completely. When my daughter was three weeks old, I took her to my best friend’s house for dinner with some other friends – none of whom had children. After projectile-vomiting up the milk that I had lovingly pumped for her, she screamed for the entire meal. I realised then that the cavalier lifestyle I had before my baby was born was gone. It was impossible to make plans with my newborn during the “witching hour” – a period when she was unusually “irritable” (ie absolutely terrifying) which lasted roughly from 3pm until 7am. Outside these hours, I spent a lot of time in a darkened room trying to get her to have a nap. I started texting friends with children and quickly found that those in relationships didn’t seem to feel quite the same way I did – and their replies came too slowly to help. They were busy with their families, and rightly so.
But single-parent friends understood. They were the ones up in the middle of the night with me, without the reinforcement of a partner when the baby wouldn’t go back to sleep easily; when exhaustion took over or emotions crashed. They were the ones I could tell when my daughter laughed or clapped for the first time because they knew that I couldn’t turn to her other parent and say: “Hey, look, we made this little genius.”
Even during the testing stage, Frolo has found a small community of single parents on Instagram, who converse with each other via the Stories feature. Nearly all the users are mothers, which is no surprise considering that nine out of 10 single-parent families are headed by women. Topics on Frolo vary day-to-day, from navigating co-parenting to drop-off tantrums and finding fellow single parents in your area who would like to share a house.
Sally Mcilhone, a single mother with a 14-month-old boy, has been a part of the community since November. Mcilhone’s relationship with her partner broke down when their son was eight months old. “I was in a really dark place; my son wasn’t sleeping. I was in the pits of depression and just knowing there was someone else out there gave me a bit of hope.”
“No one really understands what it is like unless they are in our situation,” Desmond says. “In my life, my friends try to be understanding and supportive, but I feel like an alien to them because none of them are single parents. What is so refreshing and comforting to me about Frolo – even the Instagram page – is that I relate to everybody so much.”
Gingerbread, a charity that works with single-parent families, has found that being part of a single-parent community can really help in difficult times. “We know that single parents face a particular risk of loneliness. This can be for a variety of reasons, but it is important to remember that whatever issues you face, you can be sure that there are others out there who are going through similar experiences and who would also find it useful to share their thoughts and feelings,” says Anant Naik, the charity’s head of membership. Like Gingerbread, Frolo organises real-life meet-ups to help single parents meet, share support and find out about other local activities.
“Frolo hosted a Mother’s Day event,” says Mcilhone. “We all sat at a table and shared our stories and there were tears; it felt like a big family … having people you can message and say: let’s take the kids to soft play, get a coffee or just go for a walk around the park – standard parent stuff you would do with your kids on a weekend with a partner. You don’t have to do that on your own and feel like the odd one out; you have someone to talk to who understands.”
Desmond is hoping to launch Frolo as a subscription service, and it is about to begin its second round of beta-testing. While she assures me that subscribing will be cheaper than the monthly cost of Netflix, I am worried that the payment may exclude those who need the app the most. “I do understand that there are some single parents for whom £5 a month is too much,” she says. “So that is something I want to look at … to see if there is a solution that can be worked out.”
In the meantime, I am desperate to download Frolo. I moved house this year from a busy town in Hertfordshire to a small village in Buckinghamshire, and have lost easy access to my single-parent support network. I am keen to rebuild it with local single mothers, those who understand the daily grind and the wonder of realising you have done this all alone.
