Tonight, I'm working through a pile of freelance work. My daughter is spending the night at my parents’ so I won’t have to get up early to take her to school in the morning.

It's a beautiful night. I've had the window open all evening.

At midnight, I decided to take a little break, and pulled on a jacket and started to walk around the block.

The warm, quiet night reminded me of a time a hundred years ago, when I was living in Manhattan, and working for a large-ish architectural firm. There was a shy young architect at the company who I never spoke to at work, but wound up quietly kissing in some dark corner on a couple of occasions when we found ourselves at big parties. If you knew both of us, you’d never put us together, but I thought he was very sweet, and apparently, liquor permitted him to approach me.

One summer night, we were at another big downtown party at someone’s loft. It was an amazing New York evening, with noisy, bright people, twinkly little lights, great art on the walls, and all of Manhattan at our feet. Late into the evening, without really speaking, we somehow decided to sneak out together. He was drunker than me, and far too drunk to steer his bicycle, so I climbed up onto the seat in a pencil skirt and his jacket, and tipsily tried to reach the pedals while steering the bike towards his apartment in Alphabet City.

I eventually built up a fantastic velocity, and was laughing and pedaling and bumping over cracks in the sidewalk while he ran behind me, street after street, laughing and hollering my name.

“HOLY CRAP, MARY! I’M GOING TO FALL AND DIE!”, which only made my stomach hurt from laughing harder.

We whizzed past an older man sitting on a brownstone stoop. The man watched me, ponytail flying, pushing the bike pedals with the tips of my shoes, the guy behind me, arms flailing, not getting any more sober, both of us laughing, him screaming out hysterical things from time to time.

“Women, boy!” the man cheerfully yelled. “We always chasing them!”

He laughed while I determinedly turned a corner and the architect, still running, bellowed “You’re not kidding!” over his shoulder.

It was small snapshots like that of my previous life that, years later, when trapped with a baby in an unhappy and financially destitute relationship with her dad, made me feel like my life as a woman was over. Until recently, I worried that motherhood had swallowed me whole.

But tonight, I walked down the street at midnight, under the palm trees. I thought about the girl on the bicycle. And I thought about the broke and terrified new mother, with way too much fear and responsibility on her shoulders. I suddenly realized that it was midnight, I'm working at stuff I love and am actually really good at, and through a lot of hard work, and several conscientious and difficult decisions, I am right back where I need to be. I just needed to match my head up with the fact that these snapshots are just snapshots in time, not long-lost memories. I've been right here all along. I'm still here.

At that very moment, I felt just as pretty, free, and complete as I did as a single woman in New York, a hundred years ago. At this point in my life, even as someone's mother, anything can and will still happen. Because I'm still me.

And as absolutely corny as this sounds, I realized that even though I've been ready to meet the right man in my life for a while, I never needed someone trying to catch me to feel that way. I just needed to keep pedaling.