The road less travelled

clearingout

I agree people should make financial contingency for the 'what ifs' such as death and illness. But I'm not sure that the 'what if my husband has an affair and runs off and leaves me' contingency is one that any of us find palatable in marriage! It certainly never crossed my mind to build my CV or keep my CV going for that purpose anyway! It is fair to say that a number of good friends of mine have reconsidered their options since my ex upped and left - a realisation that if it happened to me, it can happen to anyone. I am the first of my friends to divorce so had no experience to learn from, really - and come from a family with a long history of long marriages.... but you know, even if I had seen a close friend or family member go through a divorce like mine (which was horrendous), I still think I'd have seen it through rose-tinted glasses and assumed 'that wont' happen to me'. Even now, 3 years later, I struggle to comprehend the levels my ex went to (and still goes to) to make life difficult and unpleasant - it is not something that I could have predicted.

You live and learn, I guess. A second marriage would be very different, that much I can say!

claire16c

clearingout wrote: »

I agree people should make financial contingency for the 'what ifs' such as death and illness. But I'm not sure that the 'what if my husband has an affair and runs off and leaves me' contingency is one that any of us find palatable in marriage! It certainly never crossed my mind to build my CV or keep my CV going for that purpose anyway! !

Isnt it the same thing though?

If me and my dh are lucky enough to have children, then I will be making sure that I go back to work in some form as soon as I can after mat leave, because of any potential bad thing like that happening.

The reason why your partner could possibly one day not be there anymore, doesnt really matter.

claire16c

Marisco wrote: »

But there aren't many full time jobs! My friend is working full time at a job she hates, (I worked in the same place and couldn't retire quick enough!!!) she has been trying desperately to find another one. It has to be full time as part time is no good to her. I had a quick sqint at the job centre plus site (on the retail section, couldn't be bothered trawling through them all!!) and there are about 6 full time jobs, and the rest vary from 2 hours to 15, and before anyone says get two part time jobs, unless your hours are fixed you cannot!!

Most jobs are wanting people "between x hours and y hours a day", it could be anything between those depending on the business needs. So it would be virtually impossible to get two jobs if one has "floating" hours, even more so if you have kids! If jobs were as easy to get as some reckon, I don't think we'd have nearly 3 million unemployed somehow!!! Or are they all "benefit scroungers"?

No but just looking on a job centre website is not going to show you all the jobs in your area by any means. Most employers dont even use it including retailers. You need to walk round a town centre and look in the windows and/or give your cv into the shops. The ones you seen on the job centre website would only show a fraction.

Looking on the website for my area in retail jobs, I counted 97 sales assistant jobs. And there are more for supervisors and managers. So there must be a lot more if you were to look for companies who dont advertise on there.

Ive worked in a few retail roles in the past and the jobs were never on the job centre websites. Wed just put a sign up.

And I found the jobs I did by handing my cv in when I saw something advertised, and another time just handing one in anyway. Id never even think to look through the job centre.

Person_one

at no point did I suggest that girls are getting pregnant for benefits. I suggested that it's about social status, about 'being someone' as opposed to no one.

This is so true, I think the kind of life that some teenage girls live is just so alien and unimaginable to some people that they just can't get their heads around it enough to empathise.

Imagine yourself as a relatively uneducated/low achieving 16 year old, looking at a working life consisting of low paid, utterly un-stimulating drudgery till the age of 70, with no ambition to do better, no idea how to access further or higher education and no family support to do so, your family home may be a thoroughly unpleasant environment and all the families and young people you see around you are in pretty much the same boat. Nobody you know has ever or will ever go to university or travel or own their own home or be successful so it seems as though those sorts of things happen to other, alien far off rich people.

Now, if you have a baby, you can escape your family home, you can have enough money to live off and while its not a luxury lifestyle on benefits you've never known more so that's ok. You can have somebody in your life to form a lasting relationship with who will always love you unconditionally, you can have a title, a place in society, being a mother is the most important job there is, this is the only way you'll ever have anything resembling an achievement or a success.

I'm not saying this is the situation for every young mum, but its not at all uncommon in my experience, even if the thought process isn't always a conscious one.

There are of course teenagers who just have contraception failures and are anti-abortion and teenagers who think they've fallen madly in love and that parenthood will be like a montage from a feel good film. But for sensible teenage girls with their heads screwed on, with uni, college, careers, success, an independent life on the horizon, being a single mum on benefits is not remotely appealing.

determined_new_ms

dirtysexymonkey wrote: »

can i just ask, in all seriousness why do you think it was wrong for those people to judge you?

they went out to work to pay taxes and saw you, never worked, having kid after kid and getting everything paid for. would that not annoy you?

also - unless you were visited by an angel you didnt fall pregnant - you willingly and actively became pregnant twice. on benefits. you were irresponsible and for a long time you were f e c k less. you might not be now, but you were then and nothing will erase that.

wow I'm going to take this in the best possible light and believe that you meant this without the sharp (and judgemental) edge that comes across in reading.

I take my responsibilities and acknowledge that I was foolish. f e c k less definition:

feeble; weak; ineffectual; irresponsible
[from obsolete f e c k value, effect + -less]

well I was irresponsible but I was none of the other things. I worked hard to get a first in my degree and then took low level jobs and worked my way up.

I was also a damaged care leaver of 15 who met up with a 22 year old man who did not meet his responsibilities to our children or me.

And I have to point out that you have made a huge value judgement about the people who treated me and my children appallingly (I once went round to speak to one family because their children were bullying mine and was told that I was such an awful parent it was to be expected). While you have placed your values on these families you are mistaken, they were not working, or at least on the books, several of the families had 8 children and at least 2 of the families in the street never worked in the 8 years I lived there.

I would like to say that your value judgement has been hard to hear and the old adage "you should never assume as you make an a s s out of u & an a s s out of me" fits well here

clearingout

claire16c wrote: »

Isnt it the same thing though?

If me and my dh are lucky enough to have children, then I will be making sure that I go back to work in some form as soon as I can after mat leave, because of any potential bad thing like that happening.

The reason why your partner could possibly one day not be there anymore, doesnt really matter.

'in some form'....that's the point. Many women give up good careers to look after their children, or put their career on the backburner for a few years. Getting back in can be more difficult than you'd expect - I certainly hadn't worked full time for a number of years and was behind in developments in my field, although I had worked part-time between having the children and maternity leave. When my ex left me, I was only working one day a week and I suddenly found myself with the responsibility of a house that had been purchased on 2 full time wages. Even if I'd been working full time and hadn't been pregnant, I'd have still struggled and there are no insurance policies that I know of that allow for the 'can't keep it in his trousers' contingency!

If you give up work to look after children, you can be putting yourself at a dreadful disadvantage if the relationship fails. But how many people really consider that? I had my children within what I considered to be a stable marriage - even if I did wonder about 'what if...', it never occured to me that my ex would dodge maintenance payments or be happy to see the roof taken from over our heads. Our children are our responsibility, not mine alone, I shouldn't have been left to care for them 100% in financial terms, let alone the practical, social and emotional. My ex was the nicest guy you could hope to meet - it's only hindsight that makes the signs (as there were signs every now and again) more obvious and I kick myself for not recognising the obvious and acting upon it. I feel quite sure that many reading this know exactly what I mean and more still, in the months and years to come, will come to understand. A second marriage/long term relationship will be approached from a very different perspective but I don't think I did anything fundamentally wrong or abnormal or out of the ordinary with my first marriage.

As for a partner not being there some day and the reasons for that not mattering, it does matter. You can plan for death or illness with insurance but the only insurance you can take as a parent is to not become dependent when you have children. That is very much easier said than done, particularly if you have two good wages coming in which allow you to make sacrifices and go part-time or not work at all for a few years. So you can be as clever as you want and go back to work, but I can assure you that's what I did and what many other women are doing right now. Doesn't make being a single parent any easier.

georgiesmum

at no point did I suggest that girls are getting pregnant for benefits.

Come to Speke, that is the career that a lot of teenagers choose there. They boast about getting pregnant to get a house or flat and their life is benefits and housing allowances. They have state of the arts prams and go to designer shops for there kids clothes.
Not all of course, but some of them are so brazen about it. There are whole families who have gone down this route and think it is their right, and never dream there is anything better for them. I am not even going down the road of the (mostly ) ugly morons of fathers that produce these babies. Stop giving houses and benefits to the kids and watch the teenage pregnancy rate go down swiftly.
I live among them and see them every day.

kafkathecat

OK. In the 1930s my grandmother was put in an insitution for having an illegitemate child leaving my father with an inability to form lasting relationships. Fortunately in the 1970s society was not so harsh on single parent families and I grew up to get a good education, a job and the ability to stay married (so far anyway). Punishing '!!!!less' parents always has the knock on effect of punishing the children which produces more problems further down the line. We need to find other ways to create meaning in peoples lives. Dysfunctional families were not created by the welfare state, you only have to read Dickens or look at the work of Hogarth to see that. And please remember that the more benefits are reduced the less they need to pay any of us to work.

Ada_Doom

Lotus-eater wrote: »

Well we already pay them, why not have them doing something for the community, instead of sitting at home and doing nothing?

I agree, if they had even a couple of days a week work doing something useful, it would weed out alot of the lifetime claimers.
Especially if you didn't get paid if you didn't turn up.

This is already happening, its called workfare. People are forced to work in places like Primark for their benefits, working alongside people employed on proper contracts with a proper wage. Why not just give them a job on Primark so then can earn their money, plus get a contract which entitles them to annual leave, sick pay etc? Am sure it suits businessess down to the ground to get some free labour.

And to those who begrudge the welfare state I would be interested to know what your solution would be to a family without work. As a society, do we want children to go hungry? To not have a decent roof over their head? Enforced sterilization? Doesn't sound like a society I would want to be part of.....

Ada_Doom

Totally agree with your last point kafkacat, also high unemployment makes people so grateful to have a job they are less likely to make a fuss about pay/contacts/rights. Classic Tory goverment innit?