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 had a meeting with my boss when I was 9 months pregnant, nearly ripping at the seams of my maternity shirt.  I was uncomfortable and somewhat cantankerous and I was itching from every pore, eager to get this cumbersome pregnancy over with.  I wanted to expel the baby, and...love him a bit, of course - but more than anything, I wanted to get back to work.  I wanted to make phone calls, send emails and get stuff done, without a gigantic protruding belly, niggling worry about my potential skills as a Mother, and constant heartburn.

“Gary, I’ll be back at work in 6 months,”I assured my manager,”I can’t wait to return.”

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I have a recently divorced friend who blames the breakup of his marriage on the demise of the stay-at-home housekeeping Mom.

“I think the model just worked better,”he explained,” Back in the boomer days. When Mom stayed home with the kids and Dad brought home the bacon.”

My pal is not a misogynist in any way, so I just remained silent and looked at him curiously.

“There was no resentment about making the bed and packing the lunches,”he said,”Because it was balanced by the fact that Daddy’s bringing home the bacon.  Now, often, Mom and Dad both bring home the bacon, but Mom’s expected to cook it and then clean the dishes and Dad still kinda wants to hang on the couch after dinner with his socks balled up on the floor and… it’s messed with everything.”

“Hmm.” I said, considering,”Huh.”

And I wondered: is it true that in this Generation, Moms are bringing home as much bacon as Dad?  What impact does that have on divorce, family balance, and career success?

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Foreclosures everywhere. Global markets in crisis. Record numbers of people losing their jobs, being evicted on to the streets. Doom, gloom, on the headline of every paper that’s still gasping with the last gulps of circulation survival.

I’ve been trying to avoid the headlines, because I know my own predisposition for parallelization in the face of panic, and there’s no time for that right now. I need to have my head to the grindstone, my tacks sharp, I must put in extra hours and struggle fiercely for revenue in a market that doesn’t want to part with its precious dollars.

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I don’t believe I can have it all.  I don’t mean that in a negative way, just realistically.

As a single Mom, (taking romantic love out of the equation) looking only at the triage of home, work, and child,  I can only keep two happy.  Most of the time, it’s my home that is the neglected of the three, covered in secret dust bunnies, holding sad crusty dishes in her sink.  I’ve tried the house cleaner route, but it’s too much of a luxury right now and honestly: my son is number one, my work is number two, and the smudges on the bathroom mirror will just have to wait.

I have found, though, that there are a few small things I can do that allow me to have maximum bike-riding time with Nolan, completing my work and maybe making a bed or two.  Here are my best 5 timesavers.

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I arrived home from four nights in San Francisco, bedraggled and more than slightly crotchety. The flight had been delayed, the man next to me had some serious garlic breath, and I somehow lost an awesome little organic shirt I’d bought as a gift for my son. It was the longest stretch of time I’d ever been away from my son.

My Mom had sent me little updates, of course, as she always does. She titles them “Dear Sweetpea” and provides little details about the toasted tomato sandwiches she and Nolan ate for lunch, how he thrilled to touch a white jellyfish at the beach near the house. She tells me he is mostly happy and just gets a little teary at night, when he asks how many sleeps till I come home. I had a fantastic time at the BlogHer Conference - professionally and personally - but my heart was left in the hands of a little boy searching for skittering crabs under barnacled rocks and I couldn’t wait to get home.

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I recently had to can my Nanny.

It was awful and heart wrenching because my son truly loved her, and god knows he’s had enough change in his short life in the last two years, you know? But I had few options: my caretaker had lost her driver’s license for too many speeding tickets, and then asked for a five hundred dollar a month raise. She texted me to inform me of her dilemmas when I was sprinting to a meeting in San Francisco.

At first I went into shell-shock mode, furiously scribbling numbers, trying to determine just how many more freelance jobs I’d have to take on to pay her what she said she needed to survive. It was absurd, I didn’t have enough hours left in the day to take on anything else. I pondered and stressed and watched Ridiculous Late Night Shopping Channel to combat the insomnia that took over while I figured out what I was going to do.

In those first aftermath mornings, I’d drop my son off at her house, and sit in traffic on my way back to work, at my home office, stewing. She couldn’t come to us, you see, because her boyfriend had just given her a new puppy, and she had to be home with him.

I guess I’m trying to illustrate that I didn’t have much of a choice in changing my childcare arrangements. It was time. I think she was telling me that, too.

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I had arranged my overnight business trip to LA to coincide with my son’s visit with his Dad, so I could meet with clients and host lunch meetings without feeling that lurking, creeping business Mom’s guilt: get back to the child or he will be messed up for life.

I had packed his snacks, his Hot Wheels, his favorite books and rolled his tiny jeans into cinnamon bun curls in his custom luggage. I had wrapped his hand in mine on the ferry to go see his Daddy, explaining that I would see him in just a few days. And oh, look, sweetie, there’s a whale! And Mommy will miss you, and see you in just a little while.

By the time I dropped him off and took the ferry back and staggered in my front door, it was close to midnight. So I glanced balefully at my pyjamas, strewn at the foot of my bed, and did what I always do: sat at my computer to write, to propose, to sell: to squeeze my brain into emails and strategies with the knowledge that my career will provide everything my son needs. When I was done with my inbox, the sun was a dim pink light, slicing through the trees. It was time to get to the airport.

I had some time in LA between client meetings, and I pulled my rental car into a shaded Starbuck’s lot, fighting the urge to recline my seat and close my eyes for a few minutes. Business trips as a single Mom, for me, are a tangled concoction of elation, focus, guilt, fatigue, and pride that I am somehow juggling this, making it happen. And I want to keep getting better at it.

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