Parenting & Family Quote by Alison Moyet

The bluntness here is the point: no metaphor, no romance, just a life reduced to two facts that don’t fit together without violence. “Single parent” signals responsibility, dependents, time sliced into survival-sized pieces. “Prohibited from working” lands like an absurd decree, the kind of rule that turns adulthood into a paperwork trap. Moyet isn’t fishing for pity; she’s naming a contradiction that millions recognize and that policy debates often sanitize. You can’t demand self-sufficiency and then criminalize or block the very tool that produces it.

The phrasing is deceptively passive. She doesn’t say “they wouldn’t hire me” (an economic failure) or “I couldn’t find childcare” (a logistical one). “Prohibited” points to authority: the state, the system, the gatekeepers. It’s a word that carries the chill of permission. That choice shifts the story from personal misfortune to structural control, implying a world where a woman’s legitimacy is conditional and where motherhood becomes a category that can be managed, not supported.

Coming from a musician, it also doubles as a comment on creative labor. Artists are routinely treated as hobbyists until they’re profitable, and women are especially asked to prove that their work is “real” while still performing caretaking as if it costs nothing. Moyet’s line is a small protest against that cultural hypocrisy: the moment you need work most is often when society finds a reason to deny it.