We go on Holiday in ten days time. A week in Yorkshire.

It was a "gift" from my Mother.

It means we have to go when we need to pay £180 in bills, take Allison out of school for a week, abandon mother and ten puppies for a week and find temporary homes for a rabbit and a huge six month old, very boistrous puppy.

When I asked my mum for help solving one of these problems so we could all go on holiday instead of one of us having to stay behind to look after the animals she went crazy, accusing us of being ungrateful. Apparently I'm not supposed to bother her with practical problems and just be grateful for the holiday she'd booked for herself and my sister but had decided she wouldn't go on a few weeks earlier.

I've always made a point of not asking my parents for help. When a problem arises - any problem - my first thought is "how can we solve this ourselves?". This had led to many clashes and arguments between me and Charlie because her first thought is "Which parents should we get to bail us out of this one?". I've been nagged blind, or even tricked into accepting help we didn't need over the years, only to be let down or have to perform disgusting forfeits, like being nice to the man who once wanted to have me kidnapped and pushed off a cliff while he abducted my kids and forcibly adopted them.

I've been living on my own for thirteen years now. I think that's plenty of time to have cut the apron strings and to be standing on my own two feet, no matter how difficult the situation. I don't want to go to other people for help, I want to cope with what we've got.

Take last christmas, for example. Christmas, for Charlie, is the most important time of the year. There's a desperation that sets in around October time, and a manic need to enjoy the season that means we have to spend the whole of November and December (and January too) listening exclusively to Christmas songs. We have a DVD-r full of christmas MP3's. two weeks of continuous music.

She wants to spend every spare penny from September until Christmas Eve on presents. She worked out yesterday that if we spent £25 a week on shopping from now on, we could raise £1000 for Christmas.

I haven't checked her working out yet, but fuckin' hell!

Last Christmas was dire. I'd just been forced to quit a horrible job, my benefits weren't being paid and all we had to live off was what Charlie was getting in and what I could earn selling crap VHS movies on Ebay. Well, the videos netted us £300, which wasn't bad and was enough for me. Not for C. She borrowed £500 off her family (on top of the £400 she'd previously borrowed) so that she could mollify the manic desire to buy "enough presents for the kids" - a strange number, which changes every time she picks up the Argos catlogue or walks past Toys R Us.

On one level, I can understand where she's coming from. Her family brought her up on the verge of poverty, hardly bothering with presents for Christmas or Birthdays. Just a few years ago, a birthday present off her parents consisted of a punnet of fruit. So she has this psychological need to make sure her kids get a "good" christmas.

Her inability to cope with an "average" christmas that I could have provided singlehanded (It's no exaggeration that she probably would have had a nervous breakdown if we hadn't found some extra money from somewhere) means that we are now £1000 further in debt this christmas than we were last christmas, we can't borrow any more money off anyone and we're looking at a season with just a touch more money than last time. If we'd coped on our own, we would be able to cope this year - we'd be practised in turning virtually nothing into a passable Christmas. Now we have no-one to turn to and nothing to work with. I don't think she's realised that yet. She will when she reads this later today.

There is hope, however. I will soon be compiling a Business Plan for a business venture I know will work, which could give us something like £150 a week in disposable income. Added to that, I have another stash of crap videos which could raise some decent cash. On the whole, I think we can have a decent christmas without any help from anyone else. Unfortunately, I don't think "decent" will satisfy Charlie and I don't know how she's going to cope with that.

I'm off to work out a daily budget between now and Christmas so I can try and figure out where this £1000 is supposed to come from...