God, how I hate being the single mom on Friday nights. Stuck home with sleeping kids while all the free world plays. I can't leave even for five-minutes to get ice cream from the quickie mart.

Even if I could, 14-hours into being mommy, after making three meals and washing three sets of dishes, after all day wiping butts, and a night of reading stories, my get up and go is gone.

This afternoon my friend Sequoia called. She's spent hours in the back yard watching her Blondie-girl splash around the kiddie pool. It's all you can do in this Portland heat wave.

We have the kind of hot that feels like being stoned. Too hot to think. Too hot to move. Too hot to breath. Way too hot to single parent alone. So you find water and wait it out. If you're solo, you try to find another mother to help get you through.

Sequoia is married, but hour for hour she single-parents more than I do. She does it all week. I'm on 24 hours for half the week, but the other half, I am free, free, free. And for tonight, I’m free.

It's close to dinner time, Sequoia’s husband's out of town, Blondie-girl goes to bed around eight, and then its empty hours ahead. There’s that hollow belly feeling that settles in around sunset.

Roxie and Lila are at the beach with their Gammy and PopPop, so I tell Sequoia, "Yeah, hell yeah, I'll come drink red with you."

Heat blows though my open car windows and Mt. Hood glows pink in the rearview mirror. This is the kind of summer day it was two years ago when I first knew.

Calf-deep in the wading pool at some sun-baked park, Lila in a swimming diaper at my feet and Roxie on the merry-go-round. One eye on each of my babies, and right there I realized the truth of how staying in that marriage would bring more pain than parenting alone.

When Sequoia opens the door her fingers are bare, wedding rings off. I wonder what she's been weighing today.

We pour red wine into Moroccan tea glasses and half a bottle in I ask about the rings. She says she doesn't know. Says she's not going anywhere, anytime soon, but her hand feels good without those rings.

She says leaving her marriage to become a single parent feels like trading one kind of suffering for another.

I remember those first months alone. Walking in the rain and crying and talking to the sky, asking "Please, oh God, please let fibers be strong enough. Let the fabric hold." And whispering up, even then, "No matter hard this is, it's still better. I still feel better."

That's what I tell her. I say there's suffering, but single parenting is a different quality of hard than a crappy marriage. There's more possibility. Sure, you have double the work and worry, but you get yourself back, at least I did, and you figure out how to get through. It gets easier.

Sometimes you scream into the sky. Sometimes you just sit under the stars, drinking red wine out of tea glasses, glad to have a friend who gets it.