After their relationships broke down, Jane Hoggarth and two other mothers decided to get together and create a ‘mommune’

Janet Hoggarth had been a single parent for a year, mother to children aged five, three and one, and she was floundering: “The adrenaline had gone and I was hit by the forever-ness. I was struggling with the heartbreak, with being replaced. I was living a half-life,” she recalls.

Then her friend Vicky called. Vicky’s relationship had also broken down, leaving her with a 10-month-old daughter, a house that was up for sale, and rent she couldn’t afford. As a temporary measure, Janet invited Vicky and her daughter Daisy to move into her spare room.

Not long afterwards, Janet met Nicola, a woman she recognised from the baby-group circuit, who was living nearby in south London. They chatted and swapped numbers, agreeing that a coffee might be nice. When Nicola mentioned that weekends would be good, Janet rightly deduced that she, too, was a newly single mother.

And so, more by accident than design, the women hit on a new domestic set-up: the “mommune”, as it is termed in America. And for the next two years, the three of them and their six children shared their lives: Vicky in the spare room, Nicola a weekend resident and daily visitor. “We were a family,” Janet says. “We went to the supermarket together, cooked together, ate together, shared childcare. Our parents met.” The children, she adds, “became like siblings”.

“The mum house saved me,” Janet says today, seven years on. “It wasn’t a grand plan, it just seemed a practical solution. We instantly stopped feeling so broken.”

The impact of living with people who understood what she was experiencing was profound for Janet. When Janet and her husband split after 11 years together, her social life died with the relationship. However hard the couple tried to share access and discourage side-taking, the situation was awkward. “If I went to something, friends were always with their partners and there I was, on my own, with the children. If anyone saw my ex with his new partner, they felt they couldn’t tell me.”

In the shared house, “We all knew what the others were going through without having to explain. We shared the pain. We could be as mad as we liked,” Janet says. “If you can’t express those feelings to someone, then they are just echoing back in your face all the time.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nicola, Janet and Vicky with their children. Photograph: Mark Chilvers/The Guardian

For Vicky, the everyday, on-tap adult companionship and conversation transformed not only her emotional state but also, quite unexpectedly, she says, her understanding of family. “Very quickly it felt as if we were building a different family unit,” she says. “It was based on sharing, supporting each other. That’s what really makes a family. There was a sense of there being a plan. It didn’t feel as if there was a big gap, as if we needed someone else here.”

For Nicola, too – in the house with her children at least one evening a week and each weekend – staying in the house was a source of comfort and fun. “I was the only person I knew who was divorced, until I bumped into Janet and saw how we mirrored each other,” she says. “Having us all together was so important for stopping the children feeling weird, too – knowing there were others in the same boat. And we could do normal family stuff, just hanging out, having tea, going to the park.”

Having initially wanted to sell up and leave town (too many memories), Janet realised she didn’t need to move on: the whole atmosphere of the house had changed. “It felt like a home again. When my ex-husband left, it had sort of died. But it had a beating heart again.” The new arrangement restored her attachment to the house she and her ex had bought and painstakingly done up as newlyweds. “The place became important to me again.”

We didn’t have the same parenting styles but we agreed on the basics and were comfortable telling anyone off if needed

Janet, Vicky and Nicola (who slept in Janet’s son’s bunk bed when her children were away, “to avoid going back to an empty house”) settled into a domestic routine. “It was like a marriage, only better. We had a kind of invisible rota. We cooked proper dinners for each other every night. We had roles.” Janet did the paperwork. Vicky baked. Nicola cooked Sunday dinners and, she says, cleaned up after parties.

Because they saw each other as much more than housemates, there were, Janet says, no petty student house-style squabbles. “We are all very neat and tidy, but also laid-back. So if there was a bit of a mess around, you just tidied it up. When you have been through something as awful as divorce, that sort of thing seems like nothing.”

While the adults had chosen this domestic arrangement, their children, of course, had not. Throwing them together could have created a difficult dynamic.

“Making sure the children had a positive experience was paramount. We had to create a real home for them, too,” Janet says. “But just having each other’s support actually gave us the emotional space to be better parents.”

There were mass outings – “rowing on the river at Richmond or going to Hyde Park, proper days out we wouldn’t have got round to on our own” – and in time the children formed bonds. These remain strong seven years after the arrangement ended. “There was real depth, so it was always much more than a play-date friendship, but without the pressure of a blended family. They didn’t suddenly have to become siblings,” Janet says.

As with the adults, the children benefited from being around peers with shared experience. “The older girls in particular talked a lot about how they felt.”

Discipline, a potential source of contention, was addressed. “We didn’t have the same parenting styles. Vicky was the most relaxed – they all knew she might slip them some extra sweets – but we agreed on the fundamentals, and we were comfortable telling anyone off if needed.”

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The children now arrange regular sleepovers. “They talk about those times a lot: the firework party where we nearly set the house on fire, the trips, the Santa-mummies, the Christmas with the tree that was so tall we had to saw the top off to fit it in the house.”

The second of these Christmases, celebrated a week early as all the children were going to their fathers, featured real snow. “The amazing non-Christmas was probably my happiest ever,” Janet says.

But soon after this, Janet met her new husband, Neil. “I felt I had a lot to give up. I didn’t need a relationship, so I took it very slowly,” she says.

In the end, the household ran its natural course. Janet got engaged; Vicky and Daisy needed more space; Nicola started a new career. “We all had very mixed feelings, but it felt like the right time to un-cocoon ourselves.”

Their lives remain closely connected and the women still see each other every week. Vicky’s phone, Janet says, still has her listed as “wife”. “Our friendship has been totally bound by being there when we needed each other. It has become much more than the sum of its parts.”

• The Single Mums’ Mansion by Janet Hoggarth is published by Head of Zeus on 4 October.

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