One advantage of living in New York City, this great teeming bastion of worklife, is that you rarely feel like the only woman on the train platform who has just kissed her kids goodbye for the day.

One of the most consistent anecdotes of isolation I’ve heard from other executive moms –generally moms who live in the suburbs or outside of major metropolitan areas — is just that. That feeling of looking up and down the length of a commuter rail station and being the only one LIKE YOU.

And yet, and yet… this is the 4th summer my older daughter has gone to a fabulous day camp outside of the city (I’ll put aside that it costs more than a year of private school in some parts of the country). It is actually such a popular choice with families like us on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, that our entire bus route is happily no more than a few blocks long. We wait just across the street from our apartment building each summer morning, and at this stop drawing from just a one block radius, there are about 8 families with children bound to the same camp we have chosen. In four summers, I have somehow been the only mother of the eight who is turning around and heading to work after the bus pulls away.

And for all the familiarity we have gained in the daily July and August ritual of sending off our children together… for all that I know and believe about the immateriality of “working” vs “staying at home” as a differentiator or divide… the truth is, I have been apart from (as opposed to a part of) this group of other moms. We have smiled at each other, chatted a little; but then the circle gently closes in on itself with pencil-skirted me … on its outskirts.

And in spite of myself it has made me wonder: all good intentions aside, do we moms do our own form of “racial profiling:” i.e. are you a stiletto, or a sneaker? … and then shape our perceptions and behaviors around this? How much of my outskirtedness is a benign result of the practical fact that they can linger; I can’t… and how much is that factor just sealing the deal?

To be clear, I feel no judgment towards these women, and as importantly, no judgment from them. We are merely on separate paths. My path takes me immediately from the camp bus to the subway platform, for my commute to work. Where I am again just one of many.