My friend Paula spent the weekend at my house, bringing with her an air-puff of worldliness, expensive perfume, and fabulously chic pants. She just turned forty and looks younger than me.

“You work too much, there are lots of slacker jobs that will let you work from home,” she instructed me when I apologized that I would have to work a little bit here and there during her visit.

“Sorry,”I apologized, dipping into the brown bag full of shortbread cookies she’d brought with her.

“Don’t say sorry to me, just know that you don’t have to do this,” she said,”You choose it. With your skill set, you could easily find a full time job that lets you work from home where you wouldn’t be constantly tied to your computer.”

“Oh.”

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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 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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Like half the dedicated blogosphere, I am at the BlogHer Conference this week — though unlike most of the attendees, I am here for work.

It’s a strange phenomenon for an introverted extrovert like me, and unlike most of my business trips, it’s four days rather than a single day trip, and each time my Blackberry buzzes with a new email, I check eagerly in anticipation of a potential update from my Mom, who is looking after my son. The morning I left, he’d awoke with a grotesquely swollen left eye: a mosquito bite gone very wrong.

“It’s OK, Mommy,” he assured me with his normal glass-is-half-full optimism,”It would get better soon.”

But the guilt almost killed me as I drove to the airport and thought about him and his swollen eye and my Mom saving my life once again. She sends little snippets every day, starting with “Hi Sweetpea”, and assuring me, though Nolan misses me, he is fine.

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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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I sprinted up to the United Airlines counter, passport and boarding pass soaked with sweat in my left hand, one high heel wedge sticking haphazardly out of my oversized purse. I lost my grip on my laptop bag and twisted my ankle a little on the freshly washed lemon-vinegar floors of the late evening airport and when I screeched to a bedraggled halt in front of the coiffed man at the counter, he looked thoroughly unimpressed.

I looked at my boarding pass: 8:20 boarding for an 8:55 PM flight. We both looked at his large silver watch: 8:42 PM.

“Oh, man, I missed it, didn’t I?” I was aware that I looked like I’d just rolled out of a filthy livestock bus, with all the running hysterically through the noxious fumes and consuming fury of LAX, and I didn’t even try to charm him.

He looked to the attendant to his right and frowned.

“Ms. Darguzas?”

“Yes!” There was hope.

“Next flight leaves tomorrow morning at 9:30 AM. You’ll have to get a hotel.”

I slumped against the counter, letting my head rest on the cool marble. My Mom had arrived at my house at 5 AM that morning, I had been on a 6:30 flight and I’d finished four business meetings. And then been steamrolled by LA traffic before being punched in the face by the Red Tape at the car rental place. I knew my brother was looking after my son, but even on the flight I was supposed to be on, I wouldn’t have been back home till after midnight. Tomorrow was too late. My son expected me to be there when he woke up. Not to mention what staying the night in LA would do to my work load the next day.

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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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At the end of a long day, I stand at the kitchen sink, my right foot perched on my left leg, stork-style. I watch the remains of the sun disappear behind the purple-blue mountains, and inhale whatever leftovers my son has left on his hour-old dinner plate. His scraps are mostly wilted, soggy, and unappealingly cold. As he shifts and sighs and prepares for sleep in the room down the hall, I wolf down half-eaten spaghetti primavera, a quarter of a mushy veggie burger, some summer corn that may or may not have been slightly regurgitated.

I’ve always been a fairly healthy eater, I’ve never been overweight, but in the year-and-a-half that I’ve been single, I’ve noticed that my eating habits have gone to pot. It’s not like I’m cramming chocolate-cream pie in my face every night, but I’m definitely wolfing down leftovers, often at eight or nine o’clock. I rarely cook a nice meal for myself. It’s just such a pain to cook for one-and-a-half, especially in the summer as the light simmers through the house windows, amplifying temperature and decreasing any appetite to cook.

Last weekend, my furtive leftover-cramming and lack of good breakfast-lunch-dinner routine came back to sock me in the eye. Or my love handles, whatever. I’ve never had body issues, those were for my friends who stressed about the five extra pounds or refused the slice of cheesecake because they “were dieting.” Ptooey, I thought, Life is for the eating. I was mostly happy with my runner’s build, although I knew I could tighten the arms up, do something about that cellulite on my upper things.

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