The perfect suburban birthday party

My son was a guest at his friends 6th birthday party this weekend, and it was lovely, but for reasons other burb moms may find disturbing--lots of cocktails, and comradery with other women trying to find their way in this world!
Some of us felt pressure to explain why we continued our careers with 2.5 kids, and yet really did love them, others felt pressure to explain why they had given up lucrative careers to stay home with their kids and really had much to offer the community at large. The funny thing to me was that we all wanted each others approval for the life changing decision we made.
Whether you ended up being in the stay at home crowd or the working mom crowd, I found that we had much in common, but that two things really got us talking--an appreciate of good television and/or movies and figuring out a way to make 30's the new 20's and to make the 40's the new 30's.
Once we let down our perfection guards, we realized that we needed each other to vent, commissurate, or to use one another as a muse for the lives we thought we had left behind. And after even more cocktails we each realized that grass may or may not be greener on the otherside, but if it was greener, we knew we could each change the angle of the slope to get the color we were meant to have.