A girl needs to treat herself good every now and then, get out on the town and let her hair down. Once you have kids, it’s not always so easy. Fortunately for me, my son has become a man. Not legally, but I discovered a stash of my JC Penny catalogues underneath his mattress and I got the point. A man needs some alone time (so does a single woman in her mid-forties, he-he), so I try and give Jake some privacy. I think it calms him down. He burns a lot less stuff than he used to. Plus, now that he’s old enough to watch himself, Momma can have some fun too.

A few weeks ago, my girl Trish was down in the dumps ‘cause the government caught on to her boyfriend’s worker’s comp scheme. So me and Brenda took her to the Pittston Tomato Fest. We figured the festivities would get her mind off losing out on that kind of cash cow.

Our plan was to enter the beauty pageant. We weren’t expecting to win, but hey you never know and we could’ve used that prize money. Besides, for a woman in her fifties Trish looks great in a bikini and Brenda does a killer version of “Rawhide.” Unfortunately, the judges rejected us. They only wanted to look at high school girls. Excuse us for looking age appropriate.

I was pissed. But Brenda always says, when life gives you rotten tomatoes, you make Bloody Mary’s. So that’s what we did. And once our spirits were back up we entered the tomato fight and got some revenge on those judges—messed them up pretty good, those skank high school girls from the pageant too. They weren’t so pretty now, huh?! By the end of the night, Trish had hurled so many tomatoes she forgot all about her man, Brenda won a giant teddy bear bobbing for tomatoes, and when I got home, Jake was sound asleep and nothing inside the house was even burned. So it turns out, if you’re willing to take a little time for yourself, a single mom can still have it all.