Being pregnant while homeless changed my life

Even now, I worry that it might all fall apart again

My son spent his first Christmas in a homeless hostel.

A year earlier, in December 2013, I found out I was pregnant. I was 27 at the time and was living in my mum’s spare room in south London with my 10-year-old daughter. A few weeks before, my mum had broken the news that we would have to move out. The thought of being homeless with a young daughter and soon, a newborn baby, filled me with dread.

I’d been living with my mum for years but she was having to become a legal guardian, external for my nieces and they would be moving into the spare room. It was a small house with two bedrooms and there just wasn’t enough space for all of us to stay there.

I was gutted when she told me but understood her reasons. That Christmas, I hid my worry behind my smile, while we ate sprouts and exchanged gifts, trying to keep everything as normal as possible for my daughter.

I grew up in south London and, after having my daughter at 17, I took a bit of time off school and stayed home with my mum to raise her. Then I went to college, got a degree and a decent job as a student support advisor at a London uni. I helped students out with issues around mental health, money and, ironically, homelessness. 

After the Christmas break, I went back to work and signed up for housing benefits. I would spend hours every night searching for a flat online but it soon became clear my pay by itself wasn’t enough to rent a suitable flat, as well as pay for food and essentials for my kids. Moving out of London to somewhere cheaper would have meant leaving my job and my family and trying to find a flat in a strange city, with no regular income.

It felt like every time I got my hopes up about a flat, even a little bit, a door slammed in my face - and this happened time and again, day after day, week after week. The odd time I found somewhere vaguely affordable, they refused to take me on as a tenant because I was on housing benefits. Finally, I had no choice but to go down to the council and ask for help to find some social housing.

In the UK, a person is considered homeless, external if they don’t have a legal right to occupy any accommodation, or if the accommodation they’re currently in is unsuitable to live in. So I needed to prove to the council that staying on my mum’s sofa with my daughter was officially ‘unsuitable’.

At the time, I was entering my second trimester, working full-time and caring for my little girl. I was exhausted, stressed and my hormones were surging. At first, the council wouldn’t accept that I really did need to leave my mum’s house, until they came to visit and saw for themselves how cramped everything was with five of us squeezed in there. I felt like the council workers were treating me with suspicion, even though I knew they were just following procedure and the whole experience left me feeling even more anxious.

Because I was pregnant and had a child, I was considered a priority need, external - but even then, trying to get housed felt like wading through treacle. Finally, after five months, the council put me up in a hostel. And that was when it all sunk in.

One day in May 2014, I arrived at the hostel with my 10-year-old daughter and five-month baby bump. To me, it felt like a prison - an image not helped by the metal grilles on the outside of the windows. Inside, there were two beds and a small kitchen area. There was no space for anything else, not even a cot for when my baby arrived and I was sharing a bathroom with three other families.

Living in the hostel meant we were officially known as so-called “hidden homeless" - when you’re homeless but you’re not sleeping rough on the streets where people can see you.

Hidden homelessness is a problem that has been getting increasingly worse in the UK over the last eight years. In September 2017, the National Audit Office revealed there were more than 77,000 households like us, living in temporary accommodation in the UK - 60% more than there were in 2010. Within those households, more than 121,000 were kids, 70% more than in 2010. 

Usually when you speak to expectant mums, it’s an exciting time in their lives. Sure, your hormones are a bit all over the place, you can get morning sickness and you’re worried about the health of your baby but at the same time, you’re looking forward to welcoming a new life. I just didn’t have the space or energy to feel any of that. I didn’t resent my baby, obviously - I loved him. I just couldn’t stop worrying that I looked like an unfit mother to the rest of the world.

In August that year, I gave birth to a healthy baby boy. But I was still living in that hostel.

My son spent the first two months of his life sleeping in a Moses basket because there wasn’t enough space for a proper cot. Plus, he was crying through the night, which kept my daughter awake and meant she went to school super tired. Soon, her grades started slipping.

I love my kids and even at my lowest points I knew my son was a blessing. But over those next few months, everything just seemed to be getting worse. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I had two tiny lives resting on my shoulders and I was failing to provide for them on the most basic level - by not being able to put a decent roof over their heads.

It was only thanks to a couple of different housing charities that I was eventually moved into suitable accommodation. They also put me in touch with a mental health counsellor, who helped me talk through my worries.

My son is four now and we’re living in a housing association house which feels like a proper home. He goes to primary school, he’s happy and lively and he has lots of friends. My daughter is the same - she's 14, and although she remembers everything that happened, she's doing really well. Even though I still get anxious that it could all fall apart again, the year we were homeless feels like a million miles away.

Yet the hostel address is on my son's birth certificate. So even though he doesn’t remember anything about it, being homeless will be part of his life forever.

As told to Ashitha Nagesh