The practical steps

Then came the dreadful task of having to concentrate on the practicalities. Not something I wanted to do, but it needed to be done. I still had to keep the roof over our heads and support the children. To my horror this was not as straight forward as I thought.

All our income was stopped at the beginning of July. Lyanda was claiming child benefit in her name since before we got together. Our children got added onto the claim, which was never a problem. Until now. Everything else was in joint names. I now had to reclaim everything solely in my name. Until child benefit was processed, nothing else could be claimed so a long waiting game began.

I rang mobility care and informed them, i knew the car would need to be returned. The lady I spoke to was lovely. Ordinarily the car would need to be returned immediately, but she extended the pick up date as long as she could. The car would be picked up first thing on the 29th July. She said she wished she could extend it to the end of the summer holidays so I could take the kids out more. I was grateful for what she had already done, but that would have been nice.

I also rang the occupational therapist. I asked them to pick up the bed which they loaned us 2 years previous. That was difficult to deal with. I didn’t want it to go as it was there she lived for the past couple of years. But it’s also there I found her and I didn’t want or need that memory.

We have all decided we would like to stay in this house. Our family home. The landlord has been good and given us extra time to pay July’s rent due to our now financial difficulties. But we can stay as long as we want, which is a huge weight off my mind. The only thing that is uncertain is whether I will be able to afford to stay here. Only time will tell. But I hope so.