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She reached back into her coat one more time to touch the baggie of bleach that was going to make her pee clean, make this particular shitty moment go away. Last week as I drove home after watching , I went back 20 years ago, to the blue and white van with my sister and father. He jumped out of this truck and started yelling at my sister and the young man. My sister and this man stared at each other on the side of the road, cars flying past them, the dying deer between them, the young man watching silently.

Without hesitation I shared with my new coworkers my love of Suzanne Somers. It seemed that my new coworkers did not share my enthusiasm for Suzanne Somers. Next month I will be 46 years old and I share that story with you not to shed light on one of my more disappointing professional moments, or to turn you into a Suzanne Somers fan (although you should really look into her), but instead because I have finally figured out what my key takeaway is from the SHE RECOVERS LA event: I am going to follow through on some long-standing Suzanne Somers’ advice and …. And if the answers to those questions are not some variation of self-love and self-care, then please, fuck that shit.

For three days last week, in the ballroom of the Beverley Hills Hilton where just a few months ago Oprah told the viewers of The Golden Globes that “What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have,” I mainlined the woo woo. But it was the attendees – the women who had come to do what Tara Mohr described as “the ‘women’s work’ of our particular moment in history Alanis Morrisette’s song did not come through my headset channel that Saturday night, but the words of her song echoed in my mind in the days that followed as I relived the memory of so many women dancing together with unadulterated joy, released for the night (perhaps forever) from our individual battles with terror, disillusionment, frailty and consequence. All of it – the LA event, the disco, the women’s work of this particular moment – all of it is only possible because we women got silent and still.

But true single mothers – for those living without an additional paycheck or shared health benefits, for those shouldering complete responsibility for medical conditions and daycare costs, for those walking a parental tightrope without a net – these women make magic happen every day while the world remains unimpressed and forever worshipping at the altar of “rugged individualism,” an altar that inherently excludes mothers who are always a plus-one package. Politically, we have decided not only that married motherhood is better, but that we will create economically disastrous conditions for women who have children outside of marriage – or, given that many single mothers were at one time married, we have chosen to craft disastrous conditions for mothers who have the bad luck to be widowed, separated, or divorced. In other words, women – married and unmarried, with children and without – are living out the realities of our cultural insufficiencies and until we commit to finding true ways to change that culture we will just be pulling people from the river. I was turned back every time, until I finally realized I could no longer be single, no longer be small, no longer be silent, no longer be content to just pull people from the river.