Teresa Strasser by Teresa Strasser

At the House of Pies, the waitresses are old and the fish is probably not young. It's the type of diner where one might see, as I did last week, a transgender homeless man in a full admiral's uniform eating key lime pie.

The House of Pies is where my happy place rents.

Every couple of weeks, I sit in the corner booth with my friend Gina, my last remaining non-mom friend. She's all I have left from the other side, a glimpse in the rearview of life before frog-shaped humidifiers and timeouts. She is a few years younger than I am, so it's not like she's pining for a life like mine, nor does she resent me for having things she doesn't. She's not trying to have a baby, but she's not avoiding me just because I do.

So, I have Gina. And I have the House of Pies.

We eat oversized English muffins drenched in butter and drink diner coffee that tastes like teenage runaways and unfinished novels and dishwashing detergent and waitresses who call you "sweetie."

After two years as a mom, something in the survival center of my brain requires me to find the relative merits of preschool teaching methods important. To properly raise my boy, there are volumes of information I must now digest, some of it harder to swallow than the clam chowder at House of Pies. Something primitive in me, something that requires me to protect my son and give him the advantages he needs to compete and survive, that primitive brainstem thing makes me care about some seriously boring crap.

However, I understand the deeply mundane nature of most things that interest me now. Unlike the mom who posts on Facebook a photograph of her child snuggling with the family cat — as though nothing this adorable has ever happened in the history of domesticated cats and human children — I am aware that nothing much that I'm experiencing is particularly unique.

The fact that inhalers don't work as well as nebulizers, the fact that the train in Griffith Park only runs on Sundays, this kind of talk is more dangerous than diner salmon.

It's deadly, deadly dull to your non-mom friends. Perhaps even to your mom friends.

Just because I have to figure out where to find an affordable denim jacket for a kid who is "barrel-chested" doesn't mean anyone should care. No one should care. And just the same, the juicy topics that used to keep me glued to diner chairs with girlfriends and gulping cold coffee for hours, well, I still love that stuff.

Gina dates. There are various boys to discuss. She goes to parties at The Roxy. She goes to Vegas with friends just because one of them has a room. She goes to Brooklyn and couch surfs. She is like a spy filing a report about what happens in a foreign place, the world that doesn't revolve around kids.

The thing about Gina is that she loves babies, and she wants to see pictures, but our conversation won't be dominated. We can talk about the old days, the friends we have in common, and we can speculate about the person we both think creates false online identities. We join paranoid forces against this person we've disliked since before I had a kid.

"Can you believe her?" we whisper.

Sure, it's gossip. But c'mon, I'm out of the house. I'm at the House of Pies. I'm talking about people who still live in the world I feel like I've left. Sure, I still work, I still grocery shop, I see all you people, but you look different to me now, now that I traverse the city in a vehicle with a child safety seat.

Gina carried over, so she still looks the same.

She doesn't know she's letting me see the world like I did before. Not that it was better. It's just that I spent so long there, I sometimes miss it.

When she salutes the admiral, who walks by with his chains and boots, and tells me, "She is amazing. I love her," I know what she means.

Teresa Strasser is an Emmy-winning television writer, a two-time Los Angeles Press Club Columnist of the Year and a multimedia personality. She is the author of a new book, "Exploiting My Baby," the rights to which have been optioned by Sony Pictures. To find out more about Teresa Strasser and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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