More Gaga, Less Goo Goo

It was 103 degrees in the shade and I was happily traipsing through the concrete canyons of Tribeca on my way to meet a friend for lunch. These were the stiletto sidewalks of my singlehood, and after spending the Fourth of July weekend with Scott and the children at the beach, I was overcome with nostalgia for my life as a unit of one.

My friend and I had agreed to meet at the Odeon and I arrived early. I reveled in opening the door with my hand instead of kicking it karate-style so that I could jam a stroller through it. I sat down, ordered a club soda, and just breathed.

My friend arrived, looking damp, but dapper. In the middle of a successful law career, he had taken a turn at home with his two children and I was hungry for some empathy.

"So," I began, reaching for the bread basket. "About staying home and raising children..."

"It's horrible," he said with a big smile.

That moment captured for me the dichotomy of parenting. We spent the rest of lunch discussing the boundless joy of watching your children grow and the paralyzing fear that something could somehow go terribly wrong.

I told him about the weekend we had just spent at our good friends' beautiful new beach house. On the one hand, I relished our big barbecued meals outside, our post-bedtime, adults-only wine talks and my delicious swim with Emma and Quinny while my friend held Henry in the shade and loved up on him. But where I once adored water in any form, now, with three children, it became another hazard and source of anxiety. Our friends' pool sparkled, but it also menaced. Jerry Bruckheimer has nothing on me in dreaming up disaster scenarios and this little flagstone oasis became the backdrop for my worst fears played out in the technicolor 3-D of my overactive imagination.

My friend told me about the day he took his daughter on the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island. As the car crept up the rickety tracks toward the first drop, he was at once both utterly proud of her bravery and completely convinced the tracks would collapse and their bodies would be thrown into Astroland.

"How can you bear the anxiety?" I asked.

"Because I want them to be brave and adventurous," he said. "I want them to be bold."

"Damn," I thought. "I do too."

Because I was, and can still be, bold. I just need to be reminded that inside this Upper East Side mother is a cocktail-swilling, purse-slinging daredevil who once grabbed Manhattan by the horns and rode it like a mechanical bull.

My mother always says that when you're paying attention, the universe will guide you.

As luck would have it, the next night, I had tickets to a Lady Gaga concert with my dear friends Kate and Anne and my new friend Cristina. They are three badass blonds who love a good time and somehow have refused to allow their family lives to swallow them whole.

I knew I could learn from them.

So I pureed carrots for Henry and pumped a bottle of milk, threw a roast chicken on the table for the big kids, stuffed my bra with breast pads, shook my hair out of its bun a la Linda Carter turning into Wonder Woman, bid Scott a fond farewell, grabbed his credit card and hailed a taxi.

After some pre-Gaga libations at a bar down the street from Madison Square Garden, we strode to the box seats that Kate had wrangled for us. We were sharing the box with the usual panoply of bankers and lawyers.

Lady Gaga made her entrance and I was captivated. She appeared on a giant screen in silhouette, several stories tall, in what looked like a set of bat wings, but turned out to be giant disco ball shoulder pads.

We danced and shimmied while the bankers and lawyers emptied the chafing dishes of their fried chicken strips and hot dogs. The mix of free vodka and Gaga left us dizzy. "Jump!" shouted Gaga, and we jumped.

On my second trip to the private restroom - a close runner-up to the open bar for my favorite feature of the corporate box - a woman hissed in my ear: "Going to the restroom again? I'd like to be doing what you're doing."

I looked at her, confused. All of that jumping was a bit much for my post-baby bladder and I had slightly peed myself. Just a little, but enough to require a couple trips to the Ladies' to, um, mop the floor, so to speak. She wished she had wet herself....?

Then it dawned on me. She thought I was doing cocaine.

I went back to my Gaga gaggle and told them what happened. It is rather telling of our current station in life that everyone was outraged by the suggestion. "Can't we just be high on life?" Kate asked in a snit, until Anne reminded her that we were also high on a bottle of champagne, a round of pre-concert Gaga-tinis and the deadly Cape Cods Kate had been liberally mixing at the open bar.

We jumped higher and harder as flames shot out from Lady Gaga's leather bikini. I didn't even think about Quinny's bathroom nightlight setting the hand towels on fire and burning down our building, or whether I had left some carrot chunks in Henry's food.

"You can be whoever you want to be," exulted Lady Gaga, who had changed into a transparent nun's habit. We cheered wildly.

As the show ended, I got a carefully-worded email from Scott asking when I might be on my way home. I slipped into a cab and sped back to my life.

I opened the door and a battle-weary Scott was holding a non-sleeping Henry. The big kids were asleep, but Henry was just getting the party started.

"From Goo Goo to Gaga," said Scott.

"And back again," I thought scooping up Henry.

I put the baby to bed, then woke up two hours later to feed him. At 3 a.m., a wet Quinny crawled into our bed dragging his urine-soaked blanket with him. An hour later, Henry was hungry again. When the sun rose, so did Henry, and I saw that one of his eyes was swollen shut with mucus. It was about this time that Quinny used his Yoda underpants as his own personal toilet for a number two. I began collecting soiled bedding.

My hang-over, which had just been flirting with the corners of my eyes, smacked me upside the head. There would be hell to pay for the fun I'd had. And laundry - yes, there would be laundry. Lots of it.

But I had been to Gaga. I was a Gaga-loving mama. And if Lady Gaga was right and I could be whoever I wanted to be, I would choose exactly this: a woman facing three loads, one in Quinny's underpants, and a vodka death spiral that would take two days to overcome. I vowed then to keep that Gaga flame alive.

Before I left the Garden, I bought the concert t-shirt, the one with the oversized banana and two disco balls on it. And yes, I will be rocking it at the Citarella fish counter.