We sit with wooly socks, red wine and frozen aero bars, feet tucked up under us, talking about our babies and boobs and lust and irrelevance, venting at the gulf between how we see ourselves (fully rendered) and how we are seen by the world (matron-breeder-minivan driver).

Unfair, so unfair it is. It takes at least thirty years and career success and pregnancies and kids to feel confident, compelling, worthy of interest — at least it did, for me — and now, catching a glimpse in a plate-glass window, JEEBUS CRIPES. I look like I've been sucker punched. I am Trainspotting. I need Stacy and Clinton to drag me kicking and screaming from the 'Young Trendsetters' department. I'm a stringy, flaccid, overstuffed sausage. Winter's here and it's hiking boots and long johns for the next six months. I'd be, like, TOTALLY the hottest she-male sheep herder ever seen in the whole Orkneys.

I know what you mean, commented Jana on Flickr. I can store loose change in my pores.

YES! Thank you, Jana-With-The-Gorgeous-Profile-Picture. Thank you for knowing I'm not merely fishing to be told otherwise. I'm just tired and cranky and my clothes don't fit and I've been castrated by a baby and I was just told second-hand about a compliment six years late and all I can think of is that if I passed him on the street now, he'd probably wrinkle up his nose and say, "Pheewph! What's that smell?"

When we're feeling our most ashen grey, our most worn out, the fantasy is not necessarily limbo parties at all-inclusive resorts or glycolic facial peels or accidentally getting in the way of a rampage of bearded Vikings. It's stiletto kitten heels and a pair of Spanx, out on the town with girls, feeling swishy and indulgent, pretending for one night that we're the hottest things in the room. Faking it until we make it. Group therapy by estrogen immersion.

Gawd. Just writing that made my Kate Skin Suit tighten by a half-inch all over.

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I remember arriving at a bar one night in 1994 or so and thinking damn, we're never going to find them in this crowd. Then remembering hang on, Lauranne's here! Easy peasy.

From a higher perch I spotted her, a human combine harvester on the dance floor, clearing a swath through the mob with wicked enthusiasm. This girl, she wears her heart tied around her forehead like a bandana.

She is going to be my friend FOREVER.

Those were our university days. Now we sit together at the Charlottetown Farmers' Market as she wipes smears of chocolate from her son's cheek, all business.

I can't stop staring at her. Is this really us? We are mothers. Happy as we are, all we want to be is that and more.

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Then there was Bon, the second destination of me and my baby's twizzler-fuelled roadtrip to the Island.

Someone I'd never met but already knew, both of us having walked the same hospital hallways, her before me.

We have earned the fortitude to bear the sight of each other, each of us medusa.

Did you get that, too? I ask her. People ask you about what happened like they're doing a community service, because they are good samaritans, because they want you to know they care about you. Then you look over and they're gripping the arms of the chair white-knuckled, and staring at their shoes, and you realize that to them, you are nightmare incarnate. And you love them for trying, and give them a piece of it gently so they feel like they did the right thing, because they did, but you're still so alone, and you can hardly believe that you lived through this thing that makes others think they wouldn't (even though they would).

Did you get that, too?

She looks at me glassy-eyed, smiling, and I feel that way you feel when you're outside in a blizzard and come upon a small cabin nestled in the woods, windows glowing gold with warmth and light. A glow that says there is heat here, and nourishment, and solace, and lemon tart.

We don't need to talk about our lost boys but we must. We giggle at the macabre and scorn the clichés and become weepy at the everyday. She could unicycle around her living room juggling flaming bowling pins and soothe me just by existing.

Magic. Sweet female communion, and we are not alone.