Hey, everybody! I’m Jenn, from over at Breed ‘Em and Weep, and I am thrilled and honored to be taking over here for the wonderful Kristin (and the lovely Trace of Sweetney, who was supposed to be taking over) at Single Mom at Work. I am still officially single enough to get to write in this space each week, pretending like I know what the heck is going on, while in actuality, I’m really quizzing you nice folks in hope of gleaning some wisdom.

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I don’t wish Single Motherhood on anyone.

It’s not a situation that any woman enters into with glee and racing anticipation - no little girl grows up with dreams of becoming a Single Mom.

And yet, I can say with full certainty:  I would not trade the last two years for anything.  They taught me more than four years of University, several trips around the world, and four years in a monogamous, committed relationship ever could.

I say this with knowledge of the risk of sounding trite: those two lonely, soul-searching years taught me how to be happy and confident with my tiny party of two.

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I’ve been missing in action from this space, struggling for several weeks with what I would write.  This column is called Single Mom at Work, and it’s been a diary of my experiences of heartbreak, hope, balance, and the all-encompassing undercurrents of this life: happiness and stability.

When I started writing for Work It, Mom!, my little boy was just two years old.  We spent our time mostly alone: on the beach searching for scuttling creatures, in the forest twirling in the rain and stomping mud soaked boots.  Looking at the clouds in the air, searching for the future in a promising ray of light.  I made dinner for him and ate the leftovers off his plate.  My Mom took him while I did my business trips: exhausting day jaunts to San Francisco and LA when I’d leave the house at 4am and return near midnight, my Mom asleep on my couch and my still-wee boy entangled in his blankets, dreaming.  I’d kiss his head and creep to my room and set my alarm for two hours later, when I needed to complete a freelance project.  I supported the two of us with no financial aid from my son’s Father: it compelled, exhausted, and terrified me while simultaneously filling me with a kind of pride.  I could do this, I was doing this, albeit sometimes barely.

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I’m typing an instant message, responding to our sales assistant, with one hand and scrawling a note with the other - Thursday, 6:00, dinner with T?

I’m talking to my good friend Tammy, making dinner plans for us and our kids for Thursday night.

“That sounds really good,”I say into the phone and my stomach panics a bit as I think - can I make it out of work and out to dinner by 6?  What about my boyfriend, he’ll be on his own.  I have two columns due and I wanted to work on that freelance stuff Thursday.  Maybe I’ll wake up early Friday instead, get some stuff done.

“It’ll be really good to see you guys,”Tammy says brightly into the phone,”Ash has been asking about Nolan, it’s been weeks and she misses him.”

“Aww,” I say and I think about the fact that my fridge contains only half a container of banana peppers and a handful of blueberries.  There might be a rotten cucumber in the produce department.  Grocery shopping will have to wait too.”We”ll see you Thursday at 6:00.”

When I hang up the phone and close off my IM conversation, I open up my email: 27 unread, 4 requiring immediate action, 2 very important proposals are perilously close to being overdue.  I think about the fact that the towel rack needs to be hung and I have a major ant war going down in the kitchen.  Even though I really do want to see my friend and her daughter, I’m already thinking of ways I can get out of it.  There’s just too much to do.

***

I’ve always had a tendency to overcommit, and I fear I’ve gained a sometimes flaky reputation because of it.  My intentions are good: I don’t want to disappoint people, I want to be a good friend, I want to take on that extra piece of freelance work and do a bang-up job for an acquaintance who’s given me an opportunity.  I want to make a salmon dinner for my boyfriend while engaging my 4-year-old and sporting lean legs. I aspire to be an earnest, reliable friend to all the girlfriends who’ve been so good to me.

I hate saying no.  I feel inherently that I can somehow squish 40 hours worth of stuff into a 24 hour period.  And then I realize, for the umpteenth time, that I cannot.  That I have disappointed someone again.  It’s worse since I became a single Mom, and often I feel like I have to choose one: friends, boyfriend, son, or work.  If I try to spread myself out between all four, I become pretty useless to any of them.

***

On Thursday at 5, I have a 6 figure proposal due in an hour.  I haven’t yet gone to get my son at daycare, and my fridge is still perilously empty.  I’m guilty because I didn’t get to my run yet today, and really I don’t have the excess cash to be spending on dinner in a restaurant for Nolan and I.  I grit my teeth and feel awful and, inevitably, pick up my phone.

“Tammy…”I say.

“I know. It’s OK.  Next week.”she says sweetly, used to my cancellations and perpetually forgiving.  She’s a single Mom too, but somehow she never flakes on me.  I want to know how she does it but I fear it’s simple: she doesn’t over commit.  I have to learn that one, and it might take me some time.

I spent the majority of last week at the BlogHer Conference in Chicago.  Though I’m a blogger myself and interested in maximizing my own personal opportunities in the space, I was there for business.  I have worked for BlogHer for three years now, selling digital advertising to agencies and Fortune 500 companies.  It is the best career I’ve ever had, and I love it, in large part, because I am wholly excited about what I sell.

Marketers, more than ever, have realized that Moms are the primary decision makers in household purchasing decisions.  And they know that many of these women have turned away from TV, radio, and newspapers in favor of the Internet.  In particular: Moms have turned to blogs as a way of understanding, absorbing, sharing and relating.  And the big brands, in turn, are looking for a way to reach these women who write blogs, and who read them.  I feel privileged that I have both the knowledge and the opportunity to help connect companies with the audiences of the smart, tech savvy women who are paving new paths with their writing about parenting, products, relationships and life.

But I’m also a little worried about the possibility that these Moms - whose attention is so very coveted by these big brands - might be sabotaging their golden power of influence by overreacting to marketer’s attempts to reach them.

***

I woke up early on Sunday morning at the Conference to respond to email and peruse through the trending topics at Twitter when I saw conversation that made me suck in my breath.  A few tweets told me quickly of a happening at the Conference: a Mom blogger had attempted to take her baby to a Nikon invite-only event, and had been turned away - the event was at a bar: a cocktail party.  The Mom was offended and apparently so were dozens of other Moms - so much so that they initiated a hashtag to aggregate the conversation - #nikonhatesbabies.

As someone who works in the digital ad space to sell marketing on Mom blogs, I obviously have both a bias and a vested interest here.  I want my customers to see Mom bloggers and their audiences as savvy and valuable.  I want them to see Mom bloggers as business women as well as lucrative spokespeople.  When I see stuff like this, I cringe: it makes me wonder if companies will stop attempting to outreach to us, if they will eventually dismiss us as too dangerous, vocal and shrill.  We’re such a diverse group, we Mom bloggers - but I still feel we all have a responsibility to conduct ourselves professionally and with integrity.  Labelling a company as “baby hating” because they denied an infant entry to a cocktail party seems to me a giant mis-step.

***

Chris from Notes from the Trenches has a brilliant post on this subject, and I particularly like Kristen’s, too.  My own opinion is this: Nikon invited Mom bloggers to their event in hope that they would woo the women as writers, as business women, as consumers.  The fact that they did not allow a baby at a cocktail reception was not a personal attack on Motherhood, and I wish the offended parties could have contacted Nikon via email or phone to rectify the situation if it was that offensive to them.  I believe the punishment in this case is much worse than the crime, and has the potential to hurt the reputation of Mommy bloggers as savvy business women - as well as fierce adorers of our babies.

It was quiet in the Safeway as the sun dipped down in the parking lot outside.  I blew a wisp of hair out of my eyes and unloaded some green and red peppers on to the conveyer belt as my son played with a packet of Transformer stickers and my boyfriend (which man - is there no good alternative to this word?  I am in my thirties and saying the word boyfriend makes me feel like I am 14) was loading bags into the grocery cart.  We were making quesadillas for dinner: veggies, wraps, salsa and benign items lined up in a row.

There was a blip as the cashier scanned a white onion and then a loud, startlingly clear voice asked:

“Mommy.  Why are you and my Daddy not friends?”

I froze, vegetable in mid air in my hand, and looked at my clear-eyed son.

“What?” I was numb, and I glanced sidelong at the cashier, looking for help.

“My Daddy,” he said impatiently, obviously wanting to know,”Why are you not friends with my Daddy?”

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My friend Lara never ceases to amaze me with her grace.  A quiet, intelligent woman with an aura of calm, she somehow manages to juggle an active social life, superior Motherly skills, and a prestigious job in pharmaceuticals.  She’s also beautiful, and a ton of fun, and I don’t think she’s going to be a single Mom for long.

Even though her husband is (in my totally biased opinion), a bit of a jerkwad - she handles him with aplomb.  In fact, she also handles his exes with deft grace: her husband had been married once before he married Lara and my friend is friends with the First Wife of her Ex. What?  I know.

This weekend Lara was telling me with her usual practical intonation that she’d gone for dinner with Cathy, the First Wife of her ex, and I was watching her with my mouth agape and my shoulders slumped a little in defeat.

“Man, I’m not nearly as good a person as you.” I thought of my ex and his ex girlfriends and though we were never married, I am certain I’ll never have any desire to eat artichoke dip on the patio with a woman he’s slept with.

That’s how it’s been, with my ex boyfriends, anyway.  I think of most of them fondly - remember Dale’s ice blue eyes, Jay’s riotous sense of adventure, the earnestness of Derek - but I don’t particularly want to be bosom buddies with any of them, and I’m not overly interested in their current conquests.

But it struck me, over my weekend conversation with Lara - that perhaps the current relationship of your ex is a little more significant when the two of you share a child together.

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I really hated being pregnant.

I can say this four years after the fact, with a twinge of embarassment, knowing that there are so many women that struggle to conceive, that want nothing more than to brew a new life inside of them.  But I’d be dishonest if I said that I was a glowing, radiant pregnant lady.  The fact is: I was a cantankerous, beligerent, swollen and crotchety preggo, counting down the days until I could just. Get. The. Baby. Out of me.

Part of it was vanity: I’d been slim almost my whole life and my ballooning body parts simultaneously horrified and astonished me.  I didn’t expect the back fat, the swollen feet, the giant hips.  Superficially again, I was disgruntled that men no longer even glanced my way: I felt asexual and totally unsexy.  And finally: I was uncomfortable: gaseous, nauseous, and perpetually headachy.

But.  The moment of my son’s entrance into the world has etched itself into my brain and soul and there has never been a more profound, beautiful, perfect moment in my life.  Suddenly, my heart was outside my body and I felt a love so perfect, sharp and exquisite that it made me gasp, crumpled me, reduced me to overflow capacity with joy.  And in the almost-four years since, I’ve realized that there is nothing more important to my being, than my daily joy, than the fact that I am my son’s Mom.  I’m now forgetting the drudgery of pregnancy.  I’m thinking more about whether I want to have more kids.

***

I am hurtling toward my mid thirties, and realizing with uncomfortable clarity that each day, my fertility declines.  I’m in a fresh relationship, one that is bursting with promise.  If I’m honest, and if you read me elsewhere, you’ll know that I am pretty sure that the man I am with now might be man I end up with.  I’ve fallen pretty hard.

We talk a lot, about everything, and even though we’re only a month and a half into our relationship, the subject of kids has come up, randomly.

People tell us we look alike, my new man and I, and so we were talking lightly one night about whether our potential offspring would look like us, too.  My tone, I think, was blase, but my heart was racing.  Crap: this is no longer an obscure “maybe one day…”   It’s now a real possibility.

And the other day, when my monthly cycle arrived with its prompt efficacy, he jokingly made a remark: “No little munchkins, then.”

“No,”I laughed, and though the chances of that physically were very remote, and though I want nothing less than to be pregnant right now, I sighed a little inwardly.  I only have a few years left of fertility: if I am going to have another baby, I’d better do it in the next three years or so.

My boyfriend has been married and divorced, but he doesn’t have kids, and I can’t imagine denying him that, if it’s what he wants.  But if I do ever have another child, my own son will be at least 6 or 7 years old - and his sibling would be a half-one, and the rammifications of both of those make me sweat a little.

Plus - there’s my career in corporate digital ad sales -  I love it, and I don’t want to pause it when I feel like I’m on my way up, immersed in a career I love.  And really - my cut off is age 37.  I don’t want to try and have babies after that.  I was tired with a newborn at the age of 30 - how much harder would it be seven years later, with a seven year old used to seven years of exclusive attention?

I wonder - do you have a “cutoff” age for additional children? Do you agonize about this as much as I have been?