A miracle occurred and four of the Fabulosities (my single mom gal pals) were childfree on the same weekend.

“Let’s go away together,” I suggested.

Another miracle occurred where a location was chosen and ferry times were coordinated with minimal fuss (a total of three emails!).

The miracles continued as three of us congregated at Willow’s house, on time, piled into her car and despite the Seahawks tailgaters and otherwise annoying congestion, we still pulled into the ferry line with 10 minutes to spare. We looked out the window to see the smiling Isabella, who had just left her date in Belltown to meet us.

All four Fabulosities were in the same car, going away for the weekend. I should have known it was too good to be true.

I felt some tension rising on our ferry ride, but chose to ignore it. I assumed it was due to all of the attention we were paying to Isabella’s recent love interest, who we did not know, therefore still liked, compared to Willow’s boyfriend, who we did not trust, therefore did not like.

I freely admit I am the most judgmental when it comes to my friend’s lovers. My friends know it is based in my protectiveness and adoration of them, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a cause for tension sometimes.

By the time we drove off the ferry, dark storm clouds had gathered, both inside and out.

By the time we got to the house, it was pouring down rain and our fantasy of sitting outside, laughing while sipping wine and smelling the aromas of a perfectly grilled salmon was diminishing.

“I didn’t bring a sweatshirt,” Isabella said, while rubbing her bare arms for warmth.

“I only brought these,” I said, pointing to my flip-flops.

“I’m going for a walk,” said Willow, who was not doing a good job of hiding how pissed off she was.

Misty grabbed some extra long sleeved shirts out of her bag and passed them around. She reassured us further by showing us the bottle of absinthe she brought and started to make a fire.

Willow passed on her walk, we gathered by the fire and my warm, fuzzy feeling returned as we talked about our work and where we hoped we could take it in the fall. We brainstormed marketing connections for one another, caught up on our lives and sipped delicious glasses of Syrah.

But when we sat down to dinner and Willow left the room once again to be alone, I said, “Are we going to act like this isn’t happening, or are we going to talk about it?”

“Willow,” Isabella cooed. “Come in here, we miss you.”

“In a minute,” was the terse reply.

I’ll spare you all of the details of how the next hour unfolded, but I will say it bared no resemblance to a Jerry Springer episode. Willow admitted she felt as if she couldn’t talk about her man, especially to me. I admitted that I couldn’t keep up with her flip-flopping on whether she was in love with him or was going to dump him, that I didn’t trust him and would continue not to until his actions resembled his words and that, especially in my just-had-my-heart-broken state, she was right, I didn’t want to hear about him.

I cried, she laughed, everyone breathed a sigh of relief except for me. I knew it wasn’t over, we had merely applied a band aid to an amputee.

Around 1 a.m., Willow came into the room where Misty and I were talking to announce she had just received a text from the friend who was watching her son. With more excitement than I had seen all day, she described how her son had wet the bed and didn’t want to go to sleep until she got home.

While Isabella yelled down the hallway, “He’ll be fine, just go to bed,” I checked the ferry schedule. I knew Willow wanted to leave, hell I wanted to leave, but there was only one ferry left for the evening and if she was going to catch it, she needed to leave right now. So she did.

The first thing out of my mouth in the morning was, “ I no longer deem you Fabulosities, you are now bitches.”

In my defense, I had just been woken up a mere three hours after falling asleep by Isabella, who was demanding to know where the coffee was and “How the hell are we going to get home?”

The morning progressed with the only taxi service on the island being run by a man who happened to go on a bender the night before so not only slept through our numerous phone calls, but once he did answer the phone, admitted he didn’t even have a car.

A long walk in the rain, a sort-of taxi ride, a ferry ride and a bus ride later, we finally made it back to Seattle.

I looked at Isabella’s hair falling out of her clip, her eyes so wide she looked as if she just did a line of coke, and her jerky mannerisms vacillating between checking her phone, wiping the hair out of her face, and re-situating the 40 pounds of crap we were each carrying because Willow had fled in the middle of the night with nothing but her wallet and my only sweatshirt, and I knew I was equally a mess, only I was the just-took-too-many-downers version, with my greasy hair and puffy eyes.

How had we become so unfabulous, I wondered.

The answer came to me when I looked at Misty, sitting back in her cozy wool sweater, jeans and appropriate foot ware with a serene smile on her face.

She frequently looks as if she has just been on a delightful cruise because she is the only one of us who is choosing not to date. She is “self-contained” as she says and quite content spending her time travelling, making art, writing a book, growing her business and spending time with friends and her son.

The rest of claim to be doing the same, but really 80 percent of our energy is spent on navigating our romantic relationships. This makes us sleep deprived and scattered on good days and emotionally volatile the rest of the time.

If nothing else, the trip with the bitches was worth that insight. In the following days, I channeled my scattered energy into a new writing project, my children and painting my living room.

I called it off with several of the men I was sort of seeing but not that into and treated myself to a splurge at Wild at Heart.

Willow and I talked things through to where she felt comfortable talking to me about her man and I felt comfortable listening. I can’t say I’ll stay here forever, but for the time being, I see huge benefits to being self-contained.

Corbin Lewars (www.corbinlewars.com) is a writing mentor, the founder of Reality Mom (www.realitymomzine.blogspot.com) and author of "Creating a Life" (Catalyst Book Press, 2010) and the forthcoming "After Glow." She will be teaching a memoir writing class in Ballard starting in September. Contact her for details.