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I stare out my window at our neighbor Marvin’s yard and see him outside in his bathrobe for a secret smoke, far away from his wife, Judy.

His robe falls open as he sits in a lawn chair, but he doesn’t care.

He just lets his balls air out in the breeze while he inhales.

I see Marvin almost every morning. I see Marvin’s testicles almost every morning. I desperately need a change of scenery.

I book my ticket before even asking my boss if I can write the story.

***

I adore being on planes without my children. Work travel has never felt so luxurious as right now, even squeezed into an economy seat at the back of the plane, just one row away from the bathrooms.

Absolutely no one needs me. No one is asking me to fix the volume on their screens or get them a snack or scratch their right foot. I’m in heaven. It feels like I have twenty-seven hands and all of them are free to do whatever I want.

There’s a mom behind me balancing a baby on her lap while a toddler draws a butt with a bright blue marker on her knee. I’m so happy I’m not her, and yet when I pass her to go to the bathroom, I want to count every single one of her baby’s naked chubby toes and maybe put them in my mouth.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been going back and forth with Bex about the details of this trip.

She’s been tight-lipped about the announcement she’s making, the big exclusive I’m supposed to be writing about.

“Can’t be too careful, even with you,” she messaged me.

But she ended up reimbursing me for the plane ticket and then paying for all the other expenses.

Bex asked me to meet her at something called the MomBomb conference at this insane resort out in the desert where rooms start at $2K a night.

It’s close to her ranch and she’s apparently making her big announcement there.

She promised we would head to the farm the next day.

I’d never heard of MomBomb, but apparently it’s the number one conference of female influencers in the world.

Bex thought it could be a nice way for me to get the lay of the land.

Why am I so eager? I keep coming up with new ways to explain it to myself.

It’s a good story for one thing. Anything written about Bex has been going viral for the better part of a year now.

She’s a lightning rod in the mom socialsphere but has also become something of a pinata in the culture wars.

An exclusive interview with her (she never does them) would do great things for our website and maybe I could convince her to do something in print too, even though no one reads us in print and the magazine is leaning toward becoming only digital to save money.

There’s also something else newsworthy here, something that’s even more interesting to the old hard news reporter in me, the person I was before I had my kids.

According to some of the influencer chat boards on Reddit (they’re insane and highly detailed and it’s no wonder that traditional news is in the shitter when people can just read these conspiracy theories all day), there’s local speculation that Bex’s husband might be gearing up to run for office, maybe even Congress. That’s a real story.

The existing congressman for the district is approximately 107 years old and keeping an iron grip on the seat with every ounce of Viagra coursing through his mottled veins, but the local party is hungry for fresh blood and a reboot of optics (this is according to one intrepid redditor named DesertFoxStormTrooper).

Grayson Sommers has everything they want in a candidate.

Excellent hair, traditional values, a pretty wife, and a gaggle of children who all live off the land.

I wonder if I’ll get to meet him, and maybe interview him too.

It could be a story for one of our publishing company’s other magazines, the newsier ones.

It could be a chance to do some real reporting again.

I could really go for a Bloody Mary. I cut down on drinking liquor when I had the kids, because I couldn’t hack hangovers while parenting, but being alone on a plane seems like an excellent time to indulge.

I order one and ask for it to be extra spicy even though I know an airplane Bloody Mary is just cheap vodka and tomato juice.

I say it because I want to feel like I’m in some fancy bar.

I pay the thirty dollars for in-flight Wi-Fi so I can research MomBomb as I sip, and to be honest, the conference is way more intense than I expected.

There are more than two hundred panels and breakout sessions on growing your business, courting advertisers, reinvention marketing, and pivoting your personal brand.

It’s a master class in entrepreneurship and I can’t say I’m not intrigued considering my career in magazines is a sinking ship and I have no life preserver.

Could I become an influencer? Is it an alternative to working at Trader Joe’s, something I have actually strongly considered since learning about their generous health benefits for families and because I truly enjoy their early 2000s playlists (so much Weezer) and Hawaiian flowered shirts?

There’s actually a panel entitled, “Content Creation 101: How to Start Monetizing Tomorrow.” I click the sign-up button.

But what the hell would I monetize to my 347 followers on Instagram?

Here’s a picture of the secondhand water sandals from Target that I snagged from the pool lost-and-found rummage sale the other day.

#Blessed. Let me show you my toenail that fell off after the kids gave me hand, foot, and mouth disease twice in two months.

#TheJoysOfMotherhood. I’m a person who currently edits spam listicles for a women’s magazine about how to perfectly shape your eyebrows to look like Karlie Kloss, so I shouldn’t be such a judgmental asshole, but I still can’t wrap my head around what it would be like to monetize my actual life.

It’s only been two weeks since Bex first messaged me, and we never got on the phone to talk about the plan for the next few days.

We organized all the details over DM. It was intensely efficient, which I appreciated, but left me no time to ask her any real questions.

I did tell her I wanted to dig into all the online vitriol that gets slung her way in the comments section of her posts and on a variety of different Internet forums (and also my own personal moms text chain, which I left out).

She wrote back with a shrug emoji and said that would be fine.

“We’re old friends,” she wrote. “I’ll be an open book.”

But will she? Her image is so carefully curated, her accounts so well-orchestrated. Am I going to get Bex or Rebecca? I have no idea what I’m in for.