WHAT more could a woman want?

That was what Madam Shirley Lee, now 39, thought more than 15 years ago.

After all, she had a doting engineer husband and a cherubic young daughter, Samantha, then three years old.

All seemed perfect.

But her world came crashing when her husband of six years abandoned her and her daughter without warning in late 1998.

He called her on the phone and said he was leaving her.

Madam Lee, a secondary school teacher, said it was only later that he revealed he had left because of another woman.

She added: 'The feeling was horrendous, scary. The world around me just collapsed.'

Not only did Madam Lee have to contend with a broken heart, she was left with only $3,000 in her bank account.

Madam Lee told The New Paper on Sunday: 'He was such a nice man, nobody suspected that he would do this to me.'

Then she realised that there was a $70,000 debt that she knew nothing about.

With loan sharks scrawling ugly demands for money outside her Jurong West flat, Madam Lee took her child and moved in with her mother. She later got a rented flat.

But the single parent had no income.

Madam Lee had stopped working as a teacher in 1997 to study for a teaching degree at the National Institute of Education (NIE).

She had to juggle a monthly car loan of $800 and monthly housing instalments. She said she couldn't remember how much the instalments were.

The financial and relationship burdens drove her to despair.

She also had to struggle with how she was going to break the news to her daughter about her father.

Surprisingly, young Samantha beat her to it when she asked her plainly where her Daddy was.

Madam Lee recalled: 'She said, 'Mummy, I've grown up already, just tell me what happened'.'

Stunned, Madam Lee told her that her father had left them and she wouldn't see him for a long time.

The stoic reaction of her only child, who didn't cry, gave her strength. Her maternal instinct kicked in.

Madam Lee said: 'I couldn't be weak in front of her, I needed to be strong.'

This enabled her to endure a gruelling regime of attending school while giving tuition in a bid to earn some money.

WON CUSTODY

In late 1999, Madam Lee went through the divorce proceedings successfully. She also won custody of her daughter and got the four-room Jurong West HDB flat that she had bought with her husband.

Madam Lee did not want to reveal how much she got.

Looking fondly on at Samantha, now 13, she said: 'I love her. She's the most important thing in my life.'

While Samantha doesn't recall too much about those days when her parents broke up, she's proud of her mum for entering the pageant.

She said: 'If she's happy, I am happy. I'd just like to tell her 'thank you' for taking care of me.'

Madam Lee's entry into her first-ever pageant 'celebrates' the 10th year of her split with her ex-husband.

And she hopes her experience will give encouragement to other women from broken marriages.

She said: 'It doesn't mean that because you have a broken family, you have failed. You can be successful if you take charge of your life.'