Re: yesterday's post - I think I might have nailed it. Not the working mum dilemma - surely that would be akin to brokering world peace! - but I have put my finger on just why my guilt quotient has increased in the last few weeks.

It's the choice thing. As I said in my previous post, I went back to work between the boys through a sense of obligation - mainly to the firm and to my family from a financial point of view. I didn't really enjoy it, I didn't really set the world on fire during that time, and I definitely wasn't looking forward to going back again this time. I didn't enjoy it again for the first couple of months, but in the last month I have moved offices, and in the process moved away from a difficult person I had worked with for some time, I have started afresh, have new clients, new staff and a new attitude. I enjoy work again - I haven't come full circle, in that I am not as career focussed as I once was, and I think I never will be again - but it is a marked change in my post-children attitude to work.

And that is the clincher - the choice thing. When I went back before I felt that it wasn't really a choice. I felt that I had to - I know, I know, everything is a choice, but I felt a little cornered back then. Now, it occurs to me that even if I had a choice not to work, I would - and that's where the guilt increases - I would choose to be away from my boys to go to work. Does that make me a bad mother????