As a gift for joining The Forty-Something Club, my generous-to-a-fault husband said he was going to send me and my two sister-friends to Toronto for an all-expenses-paid girls’ weekend.  He wanted us to do it up right – spa time, shopping, dinner, dancing.  It was the kind of weekend that the me before kids was all about.

As my girls and I tried to find a weekend that would work – extremely difficult when there are 8 kids and many hundreds of kilometers between us – I was coming to realize that there was something I needed more than ‘let loose’ time in the city: I needed time alone.Read more