My best friend was in town last weekend, on an unexpected personal trip to the West Coast.

I put Nolan to bed a little early and we sat on teak patio chairs in the fading light of summer, delivery pizza cooling on the counter inside.  We sat in silence, we sat in gratitude, we cried quietly in snippets and high-fived one another at particularly bizarre and profound utterances.  I sat back in my chair and remembered something I often forget in the chaos of my life as a single Mama: friends are precious commodities, at any stage, at any age.

Talk turned to men, as it often does.  She is 34, single, no children.  I’m a year behind her, single, with one baby who has perplexingly sprouted into a little boy.  We’ve been friends for 15 years, she and I: we met when she was a bartender and I was a cocktail waitress at a rugby-player infused Irish pub.  We spent most of our early twenties swilling summer cocktails and flirting with cute snowboarders; we spent the latter part of that decade convincing ourselves that we could change the bad boys.  If they had heart, we argued, the rest could be fixed.  Heart, humor, that’s the stuff that matters.

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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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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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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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