My documentary Motherboard follows my first 21 years of motherhood – these films about single mums inspired me

On a warm and sunny May bank holiday in 2003, I had one of those rare days that truly changes your life forever. I sat in my bathroom, hands shaking as two pink lines emerged on the pregnancy test I was holding.

I was 38, single and broke. This pregnancy was the result of a brief relationship which had only amounted to four dates. Shell-shocked as I was, I laughed out loud in a moment of joy I knew there was no coming back from. Nine months later I gave birth to my son Jim.

My old Nokia still holds the text thread of the three years I was in touch with Jim’s dad. My messages began “I had a great time last night”, and ended “Have you got the results yet?” He had requested a paternity test when Jim was two. A week later we both received the results. The probability that he was Jim’s biological dad was 99.99%. This news prompted a final reply from Jim’s dad: “Yes, I got the results … I’m moving to Spain.”

We didn’t hear from him again for over a decade. Unable to combine motherhood with my previous career as a TV director, I quit my job overnight. I got a job teaching filmmaking and was out of the film industry for over a decade.

I began filming my son Jim as he grew up. I recorded hundreds of hours of footage, capturing each twist and turn in Jim’s life, from the thumbs-up he gave me during my first scan, to his first day at college.

Jim is 21 now. Filmed over 20 years, my feature documentary Motherboard charts the highs and lows of solo motherhood. It explores how Jim and I navigated him meeting his dad for the first time at 13, closely followed by my breast cancer diagnosis and Jim’s party-hard late teens, when tempers frayed and doors slammed.

When I was making Motherboard I burnt through any books, films and TV that I could find, exploring solo motherhood. Many repeated the same old tabloid cliches and movie tropes of single mums. They were victims or martyrs, their only moment of joy watching the sun set over their estate before the bailiffs turned up.

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In I’ll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood (2022), author and comic Jessi Klein writes that: “Motherhood as a story, is so infrequently told, because the world tells us that what mothers do is unremarkable and unimportant.” She goes on to explore the structure of the hero’s epic journey in Hollywood blockbusters, in which the (usually male) hero embarks on a quest and returns home transformed.

Klein turns this formula on its head. “Motherhood is a hero’s journey, it’s not a journey outwards to the most fantastic, farest-flung places, but a journey inwards, downwards to the deepest parts of your strength.”

My own film, Motherboard, and several of the films that inspired me, follow the trope of the hero’s journey. But the key difference is that the director is often the hero and the author of her own story. The following films and TV series capture the pain, happiness, chaos and comedy of the hero’s journey that is motherhood.

1. Lollipop (2024)

Director Daisy-May Hudson recently developed her own experiences of being homeless with her mum and younger sister into her feature drama debut. Lollipop tells the story of Molly, a young single mum who loses custody of her kids after a short stay in prison. The joy of the film is that it’s the polar opposite to the broken single mums we see in Ken Loach’s Ladybird, Ladybird (1994) and Cathy Come Home (1966).

In Hudson’s entirely female cast, Molly and her best mate Amina are fierce single mums who transform the obstacles they face into laugh-out-loud moments of comedy. These are single mums that are flawed, impulsive, powerful, funny and, most importantly, believable.

2. Better Things (2016)

Better Things is a TV series, written by and starring Pamela Adlon, based on her own experiences of being a single mum to her three teenage daughters in LA. There’s a great scene in the final series where Adlon’s character, Sam, is being examined by her doctor who asks her if she’s stressed out because she has “too many errands to run”.

She replies:

“No, no. Errands are, like, groceries and going to the post office, it’s the real mum stuff … Soccer club sign-ups and dance classes and tutors and tuition payments and parent-teacher conferences and schools and camps that I have to get them into, mean girl issues with my youngest at school and birth control with my oldest and cruelty from my middle daughter. And then there’s my own mom, who is driving me nuts … And I am definitely going through menopause. So, yeah, Dr. Babu, it’s, like – it’s a lot.”

3. Boyhood (2014)

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood often comes up when critics are reviewing Motherboard. It’s a film I love. Filmed over a decade, it depicts the childhood and adolescence of Mason Evans (played by Ellar Coltrane).

“I always described it as a film about growing up”, Linklater told the Guardian, “But it’s also a film about parenting”. Linklater was probably the first director I encountered whose character of a single mum (played by Patricia Arquette) felt real to me.

Patronising empowerment

I listened to a podcast recently in which Adlon challenged the words that are often used to describe Better Things. “Brave”, “raw” and “vulnerable” come up constantly.

Critics and audiences often tell me that I’m brave. It can feel condescending. I’ve never heard the word attributed to Linklater’s Boyhood. What sets myself and Adlon apart from Linklater, is that we are both single mothers ourselves.

As politicians continue to obsess over the recent statistic that “more boys have smartphones than dads”, families with absent fathers will continue to be seen as tragic and flawed. But single mothers are not a problem to be solved. Lollipop, Better Things and Motherboard are all proof of Klein’s belief that “a mother’s heroic journey is not about how she leaves … but about how she stays”.