When she decided to separate from her partner, Francine Lopes had to reorganize her entire life. Her children were 4 and 8 years old at the time. First change accommodation, in spite of herself. “We had our house built, but to keep it I had to repay 900 euros per month. That, plus the property tax and the housing tax, it was impossible”she explains, surrounded by her two dogs, on the sofa in her social housing, a three-room apartment in a housing estate in Egly, in Essonne. “I would have liked to live elsewhere, she said, looking outside. But I had no choice, and I was lucky that the town hall offered it to me after six months. »
For this former cashier, who became a product and services saleswoman at the reception of a hypermarket twenty kilometers from her home, “the most complicated” however, was to find how to look after her children, for whom she is responsible alone, while her schedule requires her to work staggered hours: “I was already regularly finishing at 10 p.m., working weekends and some public holidays to make ends meet and, despite this, paying a nanny was too expensive for me. My sister helped me the first few years. But I left them very early, very alone. That’s why they asked me for dogs: with them, no one bothers you. »
The obstacles, like the sacrifices, were numerous. With a monthly salary of 1,600 euros, supplemented by only 210 euros of alimony paid often late, to pay for canteen, transport tickets, telephones, insurance, pairs of glasses and orthopedic insoles, and no effort from his employer to adapt your schedule. There was never a family vacation. And we also had to take out a loan to finance the children’s studies.
Francine nevertheless describes these adventures with great calm, almost as if it were obvious. This is because her brother, her best friend, several colleagues and neighbors are, like her, separated with children. And juggle schedules and pensions. Their situation is in fact no longer exceptional. Today, one in four families are single parents, most often following a separation, whereas they represented less than 10% of families in the 1970s.
Transpartisan work
A massive societal evolution, of which the media and politicians have taken time to become aware, just like public statistics: from INSEE to the Public Treasury, there is no harmonized definition of what a “single-parent family” is. A vagueness which is found in the instability of the lexical field: we speak here of “single parent”, “single mother” or “single mother”: in 82% of cases, it is in fact women who raise the children alone. children.
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