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Today I got some bad news which was not unexpected but still a sad setback: my daughter has been unequivocally denied a nursery place in the only nursery for under-3s in our town, which I’ve been trying to get her into for over half of her life.  Despite being almost two and a half years old, she has never set foot in a nursery, and never will until at least 2010.  And as I don’t have a car and there are no local private nurseries, there are no other options for me.

The sole under-3s nursery in Barrhead is a council-run and rather ironically styled “family centre”.  It’s ironic because a child who comes from a family has a cat’s chance in hell of getting a place in there.  According to the council childcare hotline, admissions for the family centre are in this order of priority:

1. Parents on file with social work
2. Parents with a record of being abusive to their children
3. Parents with a registered drug problem
4. Teenage parents
5. Single mothers

Working parents don’t even get consideration, and that is on purpose.   During the year that I fought to get my daughter in for a measly two afternoons a week, I would phone the nursery once a month to check where the waiting list was.  The only question they would ask me: “are you still not a single mother?  No?  Then we can’t put her on the priority list.”  What exactly does that mean, still not a single parent?  Are they suggesting that my husband and I should be splitting up if we want her to have a place?  After several months of this nonsense, I saw sense and accused East Renfrewshire Council outright of discriminating against me because I am a working parent.  The woman on the other end of the phone actually laughed at me and said: “It’s not discrimination, because nurseries aren’t for working parents.”

Nurseries aren’t for working parents: Scottish Labour in a nutshell.

The woman then became even more patronising and informed me that if I’m working, I should be using my Working Tax Credits to put my daughter in the private nurseries in Newton Mearns.  There is one bus an hour between Barrhead and Newton Mearns, and it takes almost an hour to get there, then almost an hour back.  That would mean me sitting on a bus for four hours a day, when the family centre is so close that I can read the sign over its door from my front window.  I don’t think so.  And since when did working necessarily mean being able to afford a private nursery in one of the most exclusive and affluent neighbourhoods in the entire country?  I’ve got money, but not Mearns money.

As if that was not bad enough, another East Renfrewshire Council employee actually suggested to me that I go on file with social work if I want my daughter to get a place.  What exactly is that implying?  That I start whacking my kid around Tesco until someone calls the police, and then the family centre will roll out the red carpet for me?

I have a friend who acts as a childminder for my daughter, looking after her when I have a client meeting, but that is one-on-one care from a friend.  What my daughter needs now is structured social contact with other children.  Aside from weekly swimming lessons and trips to the soft play centre, she has no interaction with other children.  Working from home also means that she is with me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  That is great when children are tiny newborns, but when they are talking, calculating, curious small people, they need to develop a sense of identity and independence apart from being glued to mummy 24/7.  But because I don’t beat her, I’m not on drugs, I’m not a teenage mother, she has a dad who comes home at 6 PM and, worse, I (shock horror) work for a living, for these sins, she is being punished by the Council.

Some well-meaning but very unhelpful people have suggested that I simply pack up and move closer to a nursery or buy a car, as if these things were as easy as changing a line of code.  What they fail to understand is that in this economy, with the perpetual “bad credit” record of a non-citizen, the only way I am going to be able to afford to do either is if I can dramatically expand my business.  And the only way I am going to be able to expand my business is if I can put my daughter into nursery.  I am stuck in a vicious cycle which prevents me from even setting foot on the next rung of the ladder.

I went to my daughter’s health visitor two months ago and asked her if she could make an appeal for me to the family centre.  She suggested that the best tactic would be to talk about how stressed and frazzled I am as a mother, in an acknowledgement that admissions to the centre are a perverted competition to see who is the most deprived and incompetent.  This morning, she phoned back to inform me that the appeal failed and that, for what it’s worth, this is happening to working parents all over our Council.  We are in a very strange boat where our children are being punished not because we as parents aren’t good enough, but because we are not bad enough.

I now have some thinking to do about how I am going to have to govern my time between now and next year.  I started my own business so I could be there for her and have that elusive “work-life balance”, and I’ve succeeded, but now the balance has tipped too far in the “life” direction.  All I need is two afternoons a week to focus on work while knowing that she is learning some basic social skills, but that is indeed too much to ask.  Under Scottish law she is guaranteed a nursery place in a 3-5s nursery from the age of three, but that’s December.  With the holidays, that means 2010.  Like I said, she’s not a docile newborn any more, and it is increasingly hard to structure and plan a workload around a business partner going through the tantrums of the terrible twos.

Last night I was at this computer working on two projects until 1 AM, just trying to keep my head above water.  I then stood up and stretched, and found myself glued to the window until well past 2 AM watching the drama in the car park below.  Police, paramedics, and family had gathered because the nice but very troubled man on the ground floor of my building, who lived off benefits and had not worked legitimately for years, finally drank himself to death.  He got a lot of care and sympathy from those around him, but he was a complete f*** up who used to hide his drink in my daughter’s pram.  Maybe back in January 2008, when I first put her on the waiting list, I should have pushed her to the family centre in the pram with the booze still in it.  She’d have been in there within a week.