Where am I? And how did I get here?

When I was furloughed I landed smack in the middle of suburbia. Gone was the apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the weekend trips to Paris, the part-time job that paid full-time (well, sort of.) In their place was a starter house, a fiance with a dog, the sense of finally settling down. Oh the cliche: I was now an ex-flight attendant, complete with real estate license (a full-time job that paid next to nothing.)

Fast forward one wedding, a baby, and two houses and the airline called. They had a job if I wanted it. Did I! I was ecstatic to get back on the line (read: get my travel benefits back.) Then I got pregnant. Now pregnancy and I don't get along so well, so three trips into my new old career, I went out on maternity leave. There's nothing worse than morning sickness on an airplane. Three kidney stones, one Ceasarean and another house later, I'm getting ready to start flying again.

Which is being met with some strange looks from around the neighborhood. High school prepares us for the ubiquitous schism between the haves and the have-nots. Here it's the haves and the have-mores. The stay-at-home moms and the career girls. The private school car pool caravans and the (gasp) public school buses. And this is just the middle-class. The middle of the middle-class. Why on earth would you want to work? Doesn't your husband make enough money? What about the children? The unspoken benefits of employment--mostly opportunity for adult conversation and sweet escape from changing diapers, cleaning toilets and folding endless loads of laundry--remain just that: tacitly cherished by those of us selfish enough to consider them. It's as if defining yourself outside of being a mommy has suddenly gone out of fashion.

Not that anyone here would know anything about fashion. This is, after all, Ohio. When I first came back, the labels on my Canal Street handbags meant nothing; no one here had even heard of Prada. The evolution of the purse party changed that and now everyone has a knockoff. In an cruel twist of Midwest irony, Canal Street has lost its prestige. Although even though I'm of course over the whole fake purse thing, I do still have a pair of Christian Dior sunglasses acquired south of Wall Street. They just fit my face well. Really.