Looking For My Simon or My Stimulus Check?

From Rielle to "The Real Housewives," these days I wish the phrase "having it all" got buried alongside the "n-word."

Mia and Emily point out that watching the "housewives" of New York (oh, and Brooklyn) paint the town red is an exercise in both escapism and nostalgia. I've been borderline obsessed with the brand since the peroxide privilege of Orange County and even stuck by it through the unbeweaveable excess that was Atlanta.

But it was New York that gave me Bethenny. Who knows what a celebrity natural food chef does. Spoon-feed Madonna gluten-free air, perhaps? But who cares! Being single, successful and citified, Bethenny was like an affirmation-a weekly reminder that "having it all" is as stupid a statement as "having your cake and eating it too." Hello, that's what you do with cake-eat it.

A few weeks ago some of my sorority sisters and I got together for a "Waiting to Exhale" party. Basically we needed an excuse to get lit and laugh about boys. Today one of the girls sent an email to the group linking to Maureen Dowd's column about Elizabeth Edwards. The line that got her? "She had put so many quarters in the shiny slot machine of their mutual ambition. It was hard to walk away." Was this an indictment of Elizabeth's failure to invest in herself? Should we be ignoring the number of eggs in the biological bank and counting instead on our own ambition?

For a while I thought that's what Bethenny was doing. But by the close of season two my favorite homemaker became more mascot than muse. During last night's finale Bethenny only half-joked that soon enough she'd be getting dating advice from Johan and Francois, the long-haired screaming scions of the Van Kampen family. Because for 12 episodes the show has done a bang up job of presenting our favorite cross between Martha Stewart and Carrie Bradshaw as either a business maven or a barren old maid. See Bethenny date some rando French guy with greasy hair. See Bethenny have a heart to heart about "having it all." See Bethenny in a wedding dress. I can't!

It's as if her tax filing status has become her scarlet letter. A big fat bedazzled "S" that don't stand for "Super." Since when did being single suck so hard? I get that she's almost 40 and wants a baby, bad. That'll probably be me in 10 years. But I hope next season Bethenny will be more than just everybody's favorite bachelorette (Where's her mom? Who are her normal people friends?) because I'll be watching.