The other day, my eight-year-old son caught me dancing in the bathroom. "Not that you'd ever want to, but if you did that in a nightclub you'd probably catch a man." Hilarity filled our house, as it so often does.
Our relationship is pretty close. We're bound by a mutual love of Miranda, Friends and absurd gags (he recently divulged that his book of choice on Desert Island Discs would be a joke book – that's my boy). We are glued together by blood and the searing love that springs from it and, for better or worse, we live this out against the backdrop of being a single-parent family. In this "buddy-free" system, teamwork reigns supreme.
These happy times are frequently punctuated with self-doubt: Why hasn't he lost as many teeth as his friends? Is he happy at school? Am I doing enough to stimulate him outside it? These worries are all too familiar to most parents, but my parenting angst is compounded by the fact that as well as being a single mum, I have bipolar affective disorder.
There are times when parenting is hard for everybody, even when you're hunting in pairs. Equally, lots of people love being single parents - and are psychologically healthier as a result of being uncoupled. But when you're feeling mentally unwell, it's hard to feel that doing it all on your own is working at all.
When I'm having a 'wobble' – a zinging, terrifying mix of depression and agitation – every mundane task seems gargantuan and every choice I have to make on my own seems terrifying. I feel like I'm drowning in a sea of responsibility and lone decision-making, and wonder if this might be the last time I come up for air.
When I am ill, I wish someone else who cares for him as much as I do could scoop him up and say, "Come on – shall we go to the park?", so that I can fight the tears and demons for a while without feeling like I'm handing him a sad memory.
My son is amazingly compassionate. He understands the concept of me 'not feeling well in my head'. He understands this is an illness and nothing to do with him. Despite me insisting that I can look after myself and that the 'ill phase' will pass, he tells me it's okay, that he wants to be there for me ("because I love you") and that there's nothing that his solution (a hug, a box of tissues and a glass of milk poured out into a Lego tumbler) can't solve. Although he doesn't know it, my son locks me into life.
But his words of comfort worry me. They make me acutely aware that with just me and him in the house he has to cope, and he has no choice. I worry about his future, too. The statistics make for uncomfortable reading: the ONS has found that children from single-parent families are twice as likely to suffer from mental health problems as those living with married parents. It feels like our little family unit has fallen victim to a Catch 22: my depression contributed to my divorce, and now I'm a single mum, those pesky stats tell me that the risk of me becoming mentally unwell has risen, as has my son's.
Why, then, is there not more help out there for single parents? Let alone single parents with mental health issues. Around 50 per cent of parents with a severe and enduring mental illness live with one or more children under 18. My local mental health trust offered a gardening course when I asked what support was available for parents – I should be grateful for anything in the current climate, I suppose, but I'm not sure how that's relevant to helping me look after my son. I rely instead on friends, many of whom are single mums too, who understand the pressures of raising a child alone.
Before the election, Gingerbread launched its Single Parents Decide campaign, which shines a light on the issues that matter most for single parents, including affordable childcare and securing decent incomes. I think there also ought to be a political commitment to help single parents with mental illness.
I can't help feeling that we – single parents battling chronic ill health – are a subclass, and one most politicians don't want to touch with a barge pole. Mental health is marginally more fashionable for politicians to talk about than it used to be, but single parenting most definitely isn't. For the most part we aren't economically powerful, so why bother trying to court our votes? Add mental health into the mix and we are arguably so niche as to be arcane. But of course, the consequences of failing to support single parents with mental health issues may be catastrophic, for both parents and children alike.
I cast my vote on May 7th knowing that none of the parties, really, had thought of me and my situation. But I live in hope that I'm doing it right, that growing up with me will leave my son fortified rather than felled, and that, sooner or later, we'll get the extra support we really need.
A version of this article appeared in Psychologies magazine.