It’s 4:37 AM and the streets are pitch black, the birds silent and the house completely still. I’ve blow dried my hair and guzzled my third cup of coffee, vainly hoping that the caffeine will shoot up into my face and do something about those godforsaken black bags, hanging limply underneath my eyes like old-lady stockings.

At 4:47 AM, there is a quiet, purposeful knock at the front door and I tiptoe down in my bare feet to get it. My Mom stands there, immaculately coiffed as always. The fact that she only got three hours sleep is only evident underneath her eyes: her sacks match mine.

“Hi. Thank you, Mom,” I say, and I am wracked with guilt again, as always.”He went to bed late, so hopefully he’ll sleep in till at least six — I put some pillows on the couch and the coffee’s on. Can you rest?”

I have my laptop, my business cards, my small box of schwag for potential customers.  I slip on my Serious Business heels and slip my trusty black ballet flats in my purse and check one last time for my passport.

“We’ll be good,”my mom insists,”He’s a joy, don’t worry, I’ll email you and let you know how our day goes.  You’ll have your Blackberry?”

I nod and slip out the door into the silent almost-morning, and watch as my Mom sits in front of the TV.  She won’t sleep, I know.

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The caption in my senior yearbook says that in ten years I will be “a successful businesswoman.”

I burned my high school journals in a fit of indignant rage at my diary-reading parents, but if I had to venture a guess, I’d say that fifteen years ago, the mystery of career and family balance didn’t hold a lot of space in my cranium. I wanted to be a successful businesswoman because I got decent grades and figured that could translate to decent money one day, so I could buy lots of hot pink Benetton sweaters and salon-grade curling irons.  If I was successful and respected, I could command the things I wanted in life, rather than sheepishly request them, rather than be judged for what I did not possess.

Ten years ago, I still put business skills at the top of my life priority list: I wanted to climb the ladder, reap the fat paycheck, command respect of lots of employees. I wanted to be a Vice President of Something, but probably not of a household.

It’s not that I didn’t understand that marriage and family are a cornerstone of our society; I just didn’t know if I fit the mould. I wasn’t sure I was the marrying kind, and I was almost certain I wasn’t the Mommy kind.

Fastforward a decade, a failed engagement and a surprise pregnancy, and I am President and Sole Executive Officer of my house, my almost-three-year old, my career and my house’s ant problem.  Not only do I not have an army of minions who make photocopies for me, I don’t even have a partner who is tall enough to take the garbage out.

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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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In the early days of my separation from my son’s father, I didn’t know quite what to do with myself.

Couplehood takes a lot of time: there’s dinner making and cleaning up, occasional movie nights and crowd-battling Sunday Ikea trips to replace that shattered lamp, to acquire another bookcase to hold the various household shrapnel that accumulates over the years. There’s also, perhaps, cleaning up after the other person: razor hairs in the sink, jeans on the floor, an extra few coffee cups to be loaded in the morning. Eating my son’s leftover tomato sandwiches and re-using the same coffee cups, swapping weekend retail ventures for crab hunting on the beach with a mini-person, I suddenly found myself with too much time to think.

Many days I dreamed of cold beer on the beach in Greece to relieve some of the stress associated with a major life change, other days I just wanted to don my running shoes and sprint for the mountains, pouring out my worry and loneliness in a reckless, indelible waft over the soil. But there can be no Mediterranean or long solo exercises when there is also a small blond boy who needs the near-constant attention of his single parent. And so, I poured my vibrating energy into my work.

Ten years ago, when I first entered the professional workforce, I had a manager who gave me one of my greatest career compliments to date: “Kristin, you have a really excellent work life balance.”

I worked my butt off at the office, staying late when I needed, pulling overnighters if there was a very large Tuesday proposal due. But on the weekends, I’d pack up my snowboard to head to the slopes. And I’d use everyday of my three weeks of vacation, often jetting to a tropical country, never thinking to bring my laptop, turning off my cell and leaving it behind on my bedside table.

After becoming a single Mom, that balance all but disappeared. Rather than take up gambling or drinking, impossible with a small kid, I took up work addiction. When I wasn’t looking after my son, I was at my computer, prospecting, furiously hunting, writing and seeking more freelance work when I already worked 50 plus hours a week.

“You’re a workaholic,”my friends started to tell me,”Slow down, you’ll have a heart attack before you turn 40.”

It wasn’t a compliment, but I smiled weakly and continued my obsessive urge to work. It filled up my mind, distracted me, fulfilled me in many ways. After all, in America, there’s no such thing as someone who works too hard, right? If you drink too much, you’re an alcoholic, if you gamble money relentlessly, you might have a gambling addiction. If you can’t stop working even when prodded gently, you’re a workaholic. But somehow, the latter has managed to escape the stigma of the other “holics.” But I’m beginning to think it’s just as dangerous.

Having a child has taught me, among so many other things, that time passes in a blink. A baby is a boy overnight, crying becomes talking, and age lines become prominent, etched stories on an increasingly experienced face. And I don’t think there’s room for “aholic” anything in these precious, pivotal, alarmingly fast years.  And so I’m going to start making an effort to turn off the computer a little earlier, get up at dawn with my son and not flip through emails, to fling out “aholism” from my repertoire of characteristics.  I have the feeling there’s a little blond boy who can show me how to do it.

The other night I was in the grocery store, attempting to bribe my son into cooperation with the promise of a new Hot Wheels car if he could make it through the produce aisle without flailing himself out of the cart or eating any unpaid-for bananas.

My Blackberry was vibrating frantically in my pocket, as it always does and I consulted it for emergencies and mentally made a checklist of all the things I needed to do once we were done grocery shopping and my son had his bath at home — write column, email that editor again, revamp that proposal, make sure my car rental is lined up for LA on Friday. I walked past the yogurt section and caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the refrigerator and almost ran myself over with my cart. Man. I look old.

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My first female boss was a woman I’ll call Jane. She was the only female manager at my blue-chip, buttoned-up company and she infuriated me absolutely.

I, newly graduated from University with the extremely useful BA in English/Minor in Religious Studies and History combo, sat bitterly at the reception desk and screened calls from eager salespeople and crotchety clients. I said “good afternoon” seventy five thousand million times a day. I had a drawer full of Twizzlers and a simmering bad attitude underneath my very fragile chipper demeanor.

What I remember about Jane is this: her schedule took precedence over whatever I was doing. She interrupted me every time she left the office to tell me in a stage whisper that she would be back in an hour, rather than just moving her name to “out” on the bulletin board at the reception desk. If I was on the phone with a client, she’d be perched next to my desk, leaning over me, pointing to her coffee cup.

“Coffee is empty,”she’d say, and I’d nod and smile and hold up a finger and, still negotiating the phone, think, are your hands broken? If you want coffee can’t you just put a pot on?

In retrospect, I think Jane ordered me around more than the other, male bosses because she had to. Ten years ago when I was starting my career, female managers were even more rare in high-tech than they are now. She had to pull her weight with someone, even if it just meant bossing around the beleaguered receptionist. I wanted her job. I wanted to beleaguer the receptionist.

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I didn’t know much about business etiquette in the face of major personal trauma.

During my previous tenures with blue chip, Fortune 500 companies, I’d maintained a friendly but distant relationship with my various management teams. They knew I liked to snowboard on weekends, but didn’t know whether I had a boyfriend. They knew I could construct a killer presentation, but I didn’t ever share personal details of my home situation or my personal fears that I didn’t actually know what the hell I was doing in front of that projector. I cultivated friendships almost exclusively outside the office, or let just one or two trusted confidantes know the insides of my non-professional persona. I  really believed that my insistence on maintaining a firm line between personal and business at the office was a hallmark of my career success to date, and I didn’t think I’d ever stir that pot.

But a year and a half ago, things changed. My partner walked out of my life and I felt perilously close to disintegration. A year before, I’d resigned from my job in radio ad sales to scope out a work-from-home sales career. Amazingly, it had panned out and, I was able to find a job with the same salary that allowed me to work exclusively from home, with the occasional foray to New York or San Francisco for business trips.  I felt endlessly grateful to my new employer, who took a gamble and trusted my potential and capability to perform for them from an unseen, faraway office.

At the time my relationship atom-bombed my heart, I was a fairly new employee. My bosses — three kick-ass, amazingly entrepreneurial and razor-sharp women — knew I could sell ad space, but had no idea what was going on in my personal life. It didn’t help much that I worked almost exclusively out of my home office, thousands of kilometers away from them. I didn’t want to tell them about my personal woes, of course — but I knew I wasn’t performing at my usual tip-top level, I knew my voice wavered suddenly in otherwise normal conversations, and there were times I had to go to my lawyer’s office for two hours on a Wednesday afternoon. I needed to explain.

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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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My friends fall into two distinctive camps: the Never Been Marrieds and the Blissfully Domestic with at Least Several Kids. The NBM’s are mostly beautiful women in their early thirties, with glossy careers and cut-crystal wine glasses, stainless steel refrigerators stocked with goat cheese and aperitifs. The BD’s, on the other hand, have smudges on their countertops and overflowing laundry bins; they have traded in their stiletto booties for lululemons and washable t-shirts. At night they sit on the sofa with their increasingly rotund husbands, sorting socks and checklisting menus while their children sleep upstairs. Unsurprisingly, these two groups of friends rarely mingle. And perplexingly, I don’t fit in with either of them.

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