“Until now everything was going well for me. I was in my bubble”. But since her separation almost two years ago, the life of Hélène, 30, has become “a constant fight”, she sums up sitting at the dining table in the living room. His 4-year-old son, Edan, is playing nearby at the end of the day, a flat marble in one hand, a futuristic-looking miniature train in the other.
The future, Hélène is currently having a hard time finding a moment to think about it. ” Time management ? Awful”. Especially since the dad suffered health issues, leading to his complete absence and the end of joint custody. If he “is better today”, pays a pension and begins to see his son two hours a week, Hélène does not want to dwell on the subject. She has enough to do with “this permanent race” punctuated with galleys that is now her daily life.
The first of these was to find accommodation. Keeping an apartment at 900 euros rent alone was unthinkable, despite her nursing income of around 1,900 euros. She also had to move and leave the peaceful village of Pélissanne, a town in the greater Aix countryside, where she works at the public mental health hospital. “To find accommodation that wasn’t unsanitary with two bedrooms, I didn’t have much choice…” Here she is, living for a little over a year in Pertuis, a small town in Vaucluse located 25 kilometers further north, along the A51. 650 euros rent for a newly renovated apartment. “Looks like nothing, it’s 200 euros more”.
The election? “A max of pipeautage”
Two months before the presidential election, the 30-year-old confides in a tone of guilt “never having voted in her life. Electing an idiot who lies to us, what’s the point? “, she asks. But this year should be his first. “I will vote,” she assures. “Even if there is a lot of pipeautage, I try to approach things differently this time”. Could her situation as a single mother be at the origin of this new civic discipline? “Maybe,” she mused. Could this change his life? Or at least facilitate it? Her round eyes in response indicate that she does not expect and hope for much from this moment of democracy, from this election, like any other.
Her interactions with government policy boil down to the CAF (Family Allowance Fund) and family justice, two new worlds for her… And so many disappointments. After the medical concerns of her ex-spouse, Hélène sought justice as part of a measure at short notice in order to set up publicized visits, so that the “dad can continue to see his son”. It took three months for the hearing to take place, then two more months for the deliberation, which was scheduled within 15 days. “That’s a lot for a hearing at short notice”, finds Hélène.
Miracle of the administrative division, the hearing and the publicized visits take place in Avignon, 80 km from Pertuis, yet closer to Marseille (50 km) or Aix (25 km). “It’s because it’s the same department… We tried to repatriate the file to Aix, but they had no room,” she regrets. His experience with CAF is obviously no more successful, although it was off to a good start: “When I applied for APL, CAF told me that I was entitled to 81 euros. Owl, I take! It’s a full tank of gas. Then it went to 51 euros and then to 37 euros. Damn what. »
Since she has been alone, her purchasing power has plummeted in the same proportion as her allowances. “When I found myself alone, I started to dig a little more my overdraft each month”. The move took away his few savings. The lawyer’s fees and the sole takeover of the car loan contracted together ended up putting her under water. “It had become unmanageable. I requested a spreading of the loan for the car, going from 3 years to 7 years, for 8,000 euros of credit on a car built in 2013. It will be dead before the end of the credit”.
“Nothing could be done for me”
Hélène has turned her accounts in all directions, the room for maneuver is zero, despite her income located a hair above the median salary in metropolitan France (1,837 euros net per month, Insee). “650 for rent, 300 euros for a nanny, 300 euros for a car. You add to that the gas, the electricity, the Internet and the telephone, when I did my shopping at the beginning of the month and filled up, there is not much left…”, she observes. This all the more so since with a disabled father and a mother in Corsica, she can hardly count on them, neither financially nor for the care of the little one.
“No one helped me, I had to fend for myself. Overnight, I found myself totally isolated, with my staggered hours at the hospital and Edan’s full custody. She then called a social worker. “But nothing could be done for me. I was told to see with my employer to return to normal hours. It took ten months, with the help of the CGT for me to switch to a 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. To cope and continue working, the single mother temporarily increases the number of hours – and the costs – of Edan’s nanny. This summer, she took all her leave to take care of her child. “I wanted to enroll him in extracurricular in Pertuis, I was told that it was done on the Internet. I logged in at 8am, the server was full, and by 8:30am everything was full. »
A checkmark that Hélène does not miss for the winter holidays for which the young woman goes directly to the town hall. “I was in front at 7:15 a.m.,” she smiles. “It’s first come, first served. But still, I believe that there should be a priority between the mother who leaves as a child and goes to work and the one who returns home, even if this life is not easy too”.
“Alone, the slightest hassle becomes enormous. We are not helped”, summarizes Hélène who, in her job, takes care of people every day.