I do not like the online chat feature of Facebook. I don’t like boxes popping up from people I haven’t got time to talk to, and I can’t keep up, and so I tend to stay offline, but every now and then I pop online because I get a dose of Fomo (fear of missing out).

Yesterday, I snuck on, to find my childhood best friend online. We have been Facebook friends, in the loosest of senses, for a couple of years, but have barely even texted one another. She was my best friend from the age of six, to eighteen, my friend and confidante during all of my ‘firsts’.

We spent hours discussing, first dolls, then wanting to be actresses, through first crushes, first kisses, and on until our first year of University where I think we argued over nothing, and that was that. I bumped into her once, a couple of years later, which was awkward and not terribly pleasant, (my fault), and hadn’t seen her in almost twenty years before finding her on Facebook two years ago.

Yesterday, I typed ‘Hello’, in a box. She typed back. Two hours later, we were still frantically typing, which is what happens when two writers have an online chat - there are no brief sentences; everything is at least two paragraphs long - and I found myself having a deeper conversation than any I have had in ages. As deep, in fact, as those I used to have, for hours and hours on the phone every night, with my childhood best friend.

I have long thought that Facebook is both a blessing and a curse. Yesterday, it was a blessing.

I just got an email from our local oil company, announcing the winner of the Contest for Oldest Boiler.

I’m thinking they ought to run a new competition:

Most Expensive Oil Bills

or, my favorite,

Most Inefficient System (despite said oil company coming to service it so many times, I am now almost as friendly with them as I am my UPS man).

(apart from one employee. Two months ago representative from said oil company left without servicing aforementioned inefficient rubbish boiler as he said there was dog poo in the garage. I was horrified, and went to check. There was a tiny piece of crumbling concrete under the boiler, which, our 120lb doberman couldn’t have squeezed himself under even if the evil doberman catchers were after him and he needed, and I mean really needed, to poo.

I phoned oil company to express outrage. ‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘This is concrete.’

‘Are you sure?’ they asked.

‘I am touching it,’ I said, lying on my stomach and reaching under boiler to retrieve concrete, before crumbling it to dust in my fingers.

‘I have a 120lb doberman,’ I said. ‘If there had been dog poo in the garage, which there isn’t, ever, it would be a mountain of steaming turd the size of your head. There would be no doubt.’

He had the grace to laugh too.

I have written a short piece for the new Chicken Soup book: Chicken Soup for the Soul: Power Moms to be released March 24th.

The book contains 101 great stories from mothers who have made the choice to stay home, or work from home, while raising their families These multi-tasking, high-performing women have become today’s Power Moms. Every stay-at-home and work-from-home mom will view this book as having been written just for her. Perfect for book groups, it will contain a reader guide.

In case you hadn’t realised, I have lifted the aforementioned quote directly from amazon.com. Only because I would never have described myself as a Power Mom, but since my inclusion, I shall have to rethink myself, and I am very happy about becoming one, particularly because I feel so extraordinarily intimidated by the women I think of as the true Power Moms.

For me, the true Power Mom knows her children’s schedule without having to check her date book, and has her child in a life-enhancing or educational activity every hour of every day of the week. (She’d never let her children wander around the yard for a few hours, knocking on a few neighborhood doors to see if anyone else is free to play).

The true Power Mom is first to volunteer for classroom duties. She’s the Secret Storyteller who shows up not just with a great book, but with home-made double chocolate chip fudge caramel whirl brownies to boot.

(The first time I went in to be a Mystery Reader for The Eldest Son, I took his favorite book and a smile. A week later another parent showed up. She brought her child’s favorite book, Yertle the Turtle, together with a wooden turtle toy handpainted with each child’s name in the class. That was when I made the decision to give up.

The true Power Mom shows up at Little League games with her folding chair, her coffee in portable Starbucks cup, her boxes of Munchkins for the team just in case anyone else is hungry, and a selection of fleeces in case anyone’s cold. (She does not show up, underdressed, and perch on the bleachers, freezing, her eyes crossed with boredom, before texting everyone she can think of before reading perezhilton.com on her Blackberry and wondering how it is possible that time can pass so slowly it almost, almost, appears to be going backwards.)

The true Power Mom knows the Principal. Well. She will stop him in the hallway and they will chat about possibilities for her child. She will not have spent three years at the same school and be entirely unrecognized by the Principal. (Although she does know all the ladies in the office, which she suspects the true Power Mom does not).

The true Power Mom sends out birthday invitations for her child’s parties at least four weeks in advance, and preferably six. She may or may not have printed invitations, but these days she will certainly use evite. She will also have an exact record of who is coming and who has declined. She will not have forgotten to do anything until days before, and have The Eldest Son sit on the phone one afternoon, ringing his friends and inviting them for a sleepover. No no. That’s just horrific. A true Power Mom would never do that.

The true Power Mom knows where all things are. Her children are at the bus stop warm, hatted and gloved every morning. They are not wearing a motley selection of her hats, gloves that are too big, mismatched, or pink, which is fine, unless you’re a boy, because somewhere in the house is an invisible monster who eats hats, gloves, important paperwork, and Advance Reading Copies that Power Mom is supposed to have read and provided a blurb for, except they appear to have all been eaten.

Until today, I have never considered myself a Power Mom. The fact that I am a not-quite-married mother of four, with two extra children on holidays and weekends, who works, cooks, entertains, runs a household, is building a house, possibly starting a new business, runs all our lives, means that most of the time I’m not feeling very powerful. Most of the time I’m just treading water.

But I’m realising that Power Moms come in very different forms. Being a Power Mom doesn’t mean, I realise, being a perfect mother. It means being able to do what’s right for you, and your children. For some that means staying at home, CEO-ing their children, being an earth mother, organising busy schedules to entertain their kids.

For others it means leaving the house every day and commuting into the city, working full-time to provide for their families, to provide for their own wellbeing.

And for others, like me, it means having a bit of both. Working to keep my sanity, to define myself by something other than motherhood, and being around for the kids when they climb off the bus every afternoon, to bake cakes and cookies when I feel like it, and slap down Entenmann’s best when I don’t.

I take my hat off to all of us, because whatever our choice, life is busy, and fast, and hard, and the only thing we can hope for, is to make the choice that’s best for us, that makes us happy, because as we all know, if Mama ain’t happy, aint nobody happy.

I’m lucky. I’m happy. And I’ll remind you to buy the book closer to publication date…

I love my train journeys into the city every week. I’ll either run into the corner store and pick up a week’s worth of gossip rags, or, more often these days, I’ll bring a book.

Last night saw me going in for dinner with an old friend of Beloved’s. We went to La Goulue, which is an Upper East Side haunt, filled with the rich-but-not-as-rich-as-they-were-this-time-last-year and beautiful, but instead of being fussy or intimidating, it’s like a traditional French brasserie, and there are always scores of Europeans in there who clearly feel the same way. It’s the best place I know for authentic steak frites (although will say last night the frites were more american-style french fries than proper shoestring frites - delicious nevertheless, but unexpectedly thick).

And on the way in, I finished the book I am reading - The Divorce Party, by Laura Dave. her first novel, London is the Best City in America, garnered wonderful reviews, and I had met her at an author tea a couple of years ago. I liked her enormously, and that was despite feeling like the Grande Dame at the tea - I hadn’t realised I was so much older than all these authors.

But I’ll confess, I was a little nervous about this book. The title made me think of a girl I had heard of who threw a huge divorce party to celebrate her bitter and difficult divorce. She has a number of children. I found it sad, and somewhat tasteless. Divorce is never something to celebrate when you have children, and however relieved you may feel, I’m not sure how appropriate it is to celebrate the end of a marriage that produced your children. So, I was apprehensive, but in fact the divorce party of the title is thrown by both partners, to celebrate their marriage. I believe this is possible, but rare. Possible perhaps only when both parties are in exactly the same place, have reached exactly the same decision, but I don’t believe that happens often, for divorce, by its very nature, is painful. It has to be.

Friendship is always possible, desirable in fact, but not until the pain goes away, and there is always pain. Whether in the form of hurt, anger, resentment or simply sadness, you need to feel these things in order to have the proper closure you need.

The book deals with all these things beautifully. It is a lovely, gentle gem of a book. It tells the story of a couple who are about to embark on marriage, going to stay with his parents, who are at the end of theirs. It is mature, and moving, and real, with extraordinary depth and feeling. Please go and buy it. You won’t be disappointed.

Having commented recently on my new friend, the UPS man, several women have emailed me to say they absolutely get our friendship, and how we women rely so much on ‘guys’ like the UPS man, the mail man, the oil guys. The guys, in other words, who help our lives run smoothly.

I feel very lucky in that the ‘guys’ in my life are all pretty damn great.

It wasn’t always like this. When I had the big house with the serious gardens, I couldn’t STAND the landscapers. The company was your typical ‘mow, blow and go’, a team of South American men who would pitch up once a week, but every now and then one of the owners would show up, and would tell me that something was wrong.

He didn’t like how the orchard was planted. Those plants shouldn’t have been put there. He claimed a degree in horticulture, and was imperious and patronising. This, despite my having studied every plant that went into the garden, every bush, every shrub. I knew exactly what my lovely English landscape designers had planted, why, and how to take care of it. He said they were wrong.

When the garden was on the garden tour, I asked him to come and clip the boxwood hedges, which were in dire need. He showed up, but didn’t do it. When I phoned again, he came over and refused, saying the leaves would turn brown. I told him I didn’t care and would take that chance, and still, he refused. I wish I had fired him. Instead I went to Home Depot, bought an electric saw, came home and clipped them myself. Needless to say, the leaves never turned brown.

I made a decision, sometime after that, not to have people around who I dislike, not even for the briefest of jobs. And so, my ‘guys’, are all people I adore, and will willingly sit and chat to for hours.

We women need these guys, and we need to like them, and feel safe. I’m lucky I do. On both counts.