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 sat at the desk near the front entrance to my small, mildly dilapidated little home. The late winter sun was harsh and unrelenting and hurt my eyeballs from the outside in.  I remember: the dust on my computer monitor, the piles of tear-stained kleenexes littering the top of my desk.  Paper in disarray and files scattered, a two-day old plate of untouched toast near the monitor.

“You’re not coming home, ever, are you?”

I’d whispered it into the phone but I already knew the answer and though I had asked him to leave, though I needed time, I wasn’t sure that I was ready for the consequences of the inevitable permanent divide.

“I don’t know.  No, I don’t think so.”

I thought about our son: not even 2 years old.  I thought about the past four years: Amsterdam, concerts, beer nights and snowboarding.  I thought about the shrill fighting, alcohol, money, responsibility, pettiness.  I thought about myself: at 30 years old, a single Mom, disengaged, struggling.  A statistic.

Two years ago I’d been engaged to a beautiful man, a baby growing inside me.  Outwardly we were so happy: young, employed, laughing.  The fragility of that glass castle amazed me, and I remember putting my head down on the paper, the tissue, the hardness of the desk, to cry.

***

I worried about my son, of course, about the adjustment to a one-parent home, about a life with a half-time Dad.  But I also stressed about my future.  I foresaw in my bitter glass ball: chinchillas, maybe a few birds, a puffy pink housecoat and a grimy abode.  Maybe, I thought, I’d get lucky and one of my friends would end up solo too, in older age, and we could cook each other feta cheese and pickle sandwiches and lie about the fact that our butts had dissolved into dimpled pancakes.

At the time, I wasn’t thinking about men.  I didn’t want to feel the pain of heartbreak ever again and the thought of it being my son and I for the next 30 years was all right for me.  Painful.  But all right.

But as the years dripped on - one, two - I started to “see” men again.  I started to miss their companionship, humor, and unabashed appreciation for soft clothes and a homemade meal.   But I really believed that I was a pariah - that my son was a breathing indication of the fact that I’d had successful (not to mention unprotected) sex with another man.  What man wants to see that, every time he looks at his woman?  I understood that biologically, and intrinsically.  It made me wistful.

***

I’ve now been juggling work, dating, and my son for over a year and a half.  What I have discovered is this: a child is not necessarily “baggage” to the right man.  In fact: Nolan’s presence in my life has negated the necessity for me to weed out the bad eggs.  Men who are willing to take me on must be willing to take my son on, too - and it serves as an automatic filter, of sorts.

I am attracting a different kind of man these days than I used to - better and kinder and I think my son is the reason.  These men don’t see my son as a manifestation of another man - but rather as a sweeter, more naive extension of me.  The good ones - the awesome one I’m with now - is as eager to be liked by my son as he is by me.

It amazes me that our darkest days often represent the beginning of the pivotal climb to the brightest ones. 

Here are a few of the gifts the last two years have bestowed:

• A small boy with pudgy hands and an orange Popsicle streaked face, morphing astonishingly fast into a boy.
• Innumerable walks through sloping muddy forest paths, on various quests for slugs and peet moss, the perfect sun slant through the trees.
• Sorbet for dinner, cheese for dessert, imaginary dragons in fortresses made of sheets, my imagination ignited by the power and force of his.
• An endless number of books, stacked in piles on our knees: hours of reading about Andrew’s Loose Tooth or Stinky Socks while we huddle under cool blue sheets, listening to the rain pelt outside and feeling our fingers inter-wrapped, contentedly.

Those are a just a small sampling of the wonder  I’ve experienced in the last two years of my life: my life spent as a single Mother.

I’m accustomed to being the only Mom at the parent/child floor hockey shinnies. I’m content to sit solo at the pool’s edge at 5:30 on Thursdays,  while my son dives for rings and emerges exuberant.  I’ve mastered the craft of cooking dinner for 1.5, and subsisting surprisingly well on wilted salad remains and mildly regurgitated avocado sandwiches.  I love being a Mom, I am astonished by how much I love my boy.  The experiences we’ve had together, me as his solo Mama and he as my affable Sidekick will stay with me forever.  These years will go down in my Life Book as the most probable reason for my life’s meaning.

But.

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I think, much like labor and childbirth, one has to experience the blindsiding pain of kid-addled divorce (or permanent separation from a life partner) to fully fathom the pain.

I’d been through plenty of breakups before separating from my son’s father, and though each one of those hurt at the time, the sting was nothing compared to the devastating pain I felt to lose the Father of my baby: the one man I thought I would spend my entire life with, that we would spend our entire lives with.

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Guilt is a common resonating theme in many of my posts pertaining to Motherhood. In fact, in three years of Motherhood, that thorny, useless emotion has reigned supreme in my conscience, in the forefront of many of my other (much more productive) emotions.

I’ve felt guilt about my career, the fact that eight hours a day are dedicated to my computer and my phone, while a little blond chunk of my soul plays quietly in the care of near-strangers, meeting childhood milestones away from the company of his Mother. I’ve felt angst about the dissolution of my relationship to my son’s father: about the way our inability to make it work might impact him in future years. I create all kinds of ugly scenarios: he will not trust, he will remember discord, and worst, he will blame me for the loss of a traditional “family” in his formative years.

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Last week, for the first time in almost 5 years, I took a full week’s vacation.

My son was scheduled to spend the week on an island with his Dad and paternal grandparents.  I, though sorry to hug him goodbye, had a lump in my throat and permanent adrenaline coursing through my body.  A holiday!

I had a small suitcase packed with two bathing suits and white terry shorts, my iPod and three books, a bottle of perfume, and, perhaps most importantly, no Internet connection.  I did bring my Blackberry (I’m an addict, after all)  but I only read my urgent email and didn’t respond to a thing: everything could wait till Monday.  I had a vacation to inhale.

The destination shifted a few times but the company did not.  My vacation companion would be my new friend: a tall, dark man with curly black hair and a quiet manner.  We’d only been hanging out for three months, playing that odd furtive get-to-know-you-game.  In this case, it had been complicated for my intense desire to keep my son far from any semblance of a romantic life.  My feelings were bundled into a fray of exposed electronic wires: nervousness, doubt, giddiness, hesitancy.  I continually felt like something was off but I assured myself: of course it feels wrong, this is brand new, senseless territory.  Coy romance games suck even more royally when you’re not a naive twenty-something.  Go with it, I told myself, go with it.

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We’re sitting on a rooftop patio in a chic section of downtown, the ocean breeze rummaging through our hair, the sun setting on the mountains.  My son is at home with his beloved Unky, undoubtedly in his underwear, glorying in doing Guy Stuff: eating popcorn and watching Shrek for the seven hundred billionth time.

We’ve just finished eating a vast array of sushi, my dinner date and I, and as I finish the last of my water, our waiter drops off the billfold and tells us to have a good night.

“Thank you,”I say, and reach automatically for the bill.

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I watch my son from the window at the kitchen sink, he lines his cars up one after the other, a long multi-colored lineup of shiny toys, broken only by the pilfered dustbin, his ramshackle ramp.  He is wearing navy blue pajama bottoms with boats on them and his hair has a snarled, comical tangle at the back, his signature unruly bed head.  The birds are chirping and it’s barely dawn and he seems cognizant of this, whispering imaginary conversation between the red truck and the yellow car.

“I’m going to the supermarket,”says the red truck.

“I‘m going to the beach,” says the yellow car.

He is so good at playing by himself, my son, and I am both proud and saddened by this.  He has to be good at it; I have even less time than most Moms to play with him; I’m on the computer firing off urgent emails or I’m cleaning the bathroom sink, or I’m wandering around trying to find his right flip flop.  In another life, I imagine that I might be pregnant again around this time, brewing a sibling for my golden sun.  Then he’d have an instant playmate: someone who would both infuriate and endear him, who would be the only other person who would understand what it’s like to have a Mom like me.

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Several months ago, when I was settling into the still-uncomfortable role of Sole Head of Household, my brother told me to stop being such an antisocial old lady and get the hell out of the house, meet someone of the opposite sex who didn’t enjoy peeing in his own bath water.

I remember the moment clearly: my 29-year-old sibling and my two-year-old son were sitting on bar stools in the kitchen of my half-decorated new home, eating toasted sandwiches, one of them with breadcrumbs surrounding his lips and trailing up into his cowlicked blond locks.

“I know,”I sighed,”I miss people my age. I miss flirting. But what? I’m not going to meet a hot prospect in the canned fruit aisle. I’m too haggard for the club scene, and I am totally not asking anyone to set me up.”

“Online dating,”my brother replied, and I looked at him suspiciously. “I did it,”he continued,”I had no time for the bars and I met some cool chicks that way.”

My brother is a good looking man; he’s athletic, fun, and well-employed and he’s never had a problem with the ladies. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite, he’s mostly had to fend them off.

“You dated Internet girls?”I asked incredulously.

“Yeah,”he said nonchalantly,”It’s not weird anymore. Seriously. There are a lot of single Moms on there. You have nothing to lose.”

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I had to get up from my computer three times while writing the headline to this post, walking in circles and cracking my neck, inspecting the sink for any errant ants, wondering, is there maybe some pudding in the cupboard? Anything to distract myself from my nervousness at stepping into this taboo topic.

I picture Doctor Laura with her crackling voice and defiant understanding of the Way Things Should be Done: no dating for the single Mom until the child is 18 and out of the house, she would say and so I think: yes, you know what? I need to write this.

Married couple sex is discussed openly and with gaiety in the media: husbands make lecherous jokes, wives roll eyes, advice columns explain patiently how to keep the spark alive. Twenty-something relationships are highlighted in ad campaigns: naked, brawny couples rolling in white sheets in underwear and sexy tank tops. But there’s not too much out there for the Single Mom who is devoted wholeheartedly to her children, carrying around a bit of a hole in her own heart. Ecstasy for the Single Mom isn’t sexy, it’s taboo.  It’s baked with guilt and suspicion and a half a cup of “you really shouldn’t be doing that.”

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