(LifeWire) — When Christine Durst, 45, had her first child in 1987, she received a package from her boss while recuperating in the hospital. But instead of a baby gift, she found something else: year-end tax forms to complete.

“My son lay sleeping in his bed next to mine while I toiled away in the middle of the night,” Durst recalls. “I was the business manager. If I didn’t do the work, it wouldn’t get done.”

She worked at that job until 1993, two years after the birth of her second child, a girl. Today, her children grown, Durst works from home. But she regrets missing those early years with the kids. “I felt tremendous guilt about being away from home, and I felt terrible about the stress I brought home from the job.”

While Durst, of Woodstock, Connecticut, looks back with regrets, Karol Rose, 64, of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, doesn’t. Rose, an executive with FlexPaths, a women-owned consulting business specializing in workplace flexibility, raised two boys while working full time, taking off only a few months when they were born. “I think my sons liked that I had a job,” Rose says. “You know, too much focus isn’t great for children, either.”

Motherhood brings many difficult decisions, but perhaps the most fiercely debated is whether women should work outside the home, especially when their children are small. Whatever their decision, the choice is rarely easy.

Mixed messages

Both mothers who go back to work and those who care for children at home agree on one thing: A woman’s decision to work outside the home is scrutinized by her peers and society in general. Even experts are divided on the benefits or risks of mothers working full time.

Debra Condren, author of “Ambition is Not a Dirty Word: A Woman’s Guide to Earning Her Worth and Achieving Her Dreams,” says women face an impossible double standard.

“[Society says] we’re bad mothers if we go back to work and that we’re pampered or foolish if we stay home,” says Condren, a psychologist and founding president of Business Psychology Solutions, a business coaching firm.

These mixed messages women receive can be unhealthy. “We end up being our own worst enemies,” she says. Moreover, Condren adds, mothers who work and those who stay home often end up judging one another.

But Dr. Scott Haltzman, a clinical psychiatrist and an assistant professor at Brown University, says it’s important that mothers focus on their children. “It’s very clear to me, from what I’ve seen in my clients, that children who are put in day care, not raised by their mothers at home, feel a real loss,” he says. “They feel the absence of those parents and it affects how they want to parent their own children.”

Haltzman, who wrote the book “Happily Married Women: How to Get More Out of Your Relationship by Doing Less,” says women suffer when they try to juggle career and parenthood. “If you have a conversation with women who have their pedal to the metal in the workplace and trying to excel at motherhood, you’ll find that these women are juggling and they are exhausted,” he says.

Besides his own research into marriage and motherhood, Haltzman also cites a study — “What’s Love Got To Do With It? Equality, Equity, Commitment and Women’s Marital Quality,” released last year by University of Virginia sociologists W. Bradford Wilcox and Steven L. Nock — that found women are happiest in clearly defined and traditional marital roles.

Condren disagrees. She says women can balance career and motherhood, despite what she sees as media bias against working moms. “Each time the media reports an interview with yet another professional woman who has seen the light and taken time out for motherhood, everyone breathes a collective sigh of relief. Finally, this woman has figured out what’s really important,” says Condren. “But keeping yourself from your own ambitions, dreams and career goals can be soul destroying.”

Can you have it both ways?

Barbara Curtis, 60, of Washington and a mother of 12, believes a mother’s foremost responsibility is raising her children.

“I’ve been a single mom and I know there are circumstances where women need to work, but there are a lot of women who choose to work when they don’t have to,” she says. “They crave that attention and status a job gives them.”

Curtis, whose blog, Mommylife.net, is about her experiences as a mother, teacher and writer, thinks more women should stay home. “You have to cultivate those early years. The most important work in the world is raising children,” she says. Moreover, “it takes a certain kind of maturity and self-awareness to be comfortable, because you don’t get your ego stroked or awarded like you do on a job.”

But other women say they wouldn’t be happy or feel healthy if they spent every second with their offspring. Their solution is a mix of work and caring for their children.

“My brain would turn to mush, and I love being with my children,” says Jennifer Cooper, 32, of Lawrence, Massachusetts, who quit her job as a scientist to raise her children, now 3 and 4. Cooper says she found the perfect solution: She turned her love for wine into a work-from-home job with the Traveling Vineyard.

She works a few evenings a week when her husband is home and spends days with her children. Cooper plans to continue her wine business when the kids start school, but she’ll never go back full time. “Some of my friends have their kids in day care and they only get to see their children for a couple of hours a day,” she says. “Looking back, I don’t want to have missed a moment of their lives.

“My parents had to work to make ends meet and I missed having them at home. I don’t want to have regrets.”

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/worklife/07/14/working.moms.look.back/index.html

First, let me say that this article makes me heave for a number of reasons. Second, if you get the chance, go back to the original article and read the comments below it. They are pretty hysterical at times.

Now, I have a bit of a split personality when discussing this issue. I think there are plenty of women who enjoy their jobs and probably shouldn’t stay at home with their kids. I also think there are many, many women who wish they could stay home but for whatever reason cannot. Neither scenario is one that should produce any amount of guilt or shame. But for some odd reason, women are constantly being told that whatever their choice, working or staying home, they are somehow “damaging” their children.

That is a load of bull. Plain and simple. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Even as I support attachment parenting, I don’t believe it has to happen with mother. Have we not come far enough to realize that fathers are equally as capable of creating deep and lasting attachments with their children if they were to stay at home? Are women so neurotic that they simply can’t be satisfied unless they make the opposite choice of what they are currently living? Because that is what this article seems to be implying. If you work, you’re going to regret not staying home…especially those first few years. However, if you do stay home, you’ll never be fulfilled or worthwhile until you are employed and earning your keep.

I’m sorry, but this is not the feminism I signed up for. I believe that women are supposed to come together and support one another in whatever choices they make. Of course, I’m human, and I believe that I have made the “right” choice. But I believe that based on knowing myself and the things I think about my own children. I wouldn’t presume to tell another woman that she should feel the same as I do, simply because it is right for me. That is ludicrous.

And the shrink who determined that “women are happiest in clearly defined and traditional marital roles?” Uh, you need to talk to quite a few more women, buddy. Even though I stay at home, I have no intention of taking on “clearly defined and traditional” roles in my marriage or family. This is not the 1950s! I don’t acquiesce to every thought or action of my husband. Sure, he may bring in the money, but I’ve got just as much say as to where it goes. I also have plenty of expectations of him as a partner and father that could never be considered traditional male roles. Not only does my husband actively participate in the care of his children, he helps around the house, cooks, and encourages me to be more than just “mom.” Yet still, he is often congratulated for being “such a good Daddy” and I am never given more than an ounce of credit for the job I do as a mother. Don’t get me wrong, my husband is a fantastic father. But he isn’t doing anything more than he should be…just as I am not doing anything more than I should be as a mother.

As for the author who said of stay at home mothers: “keeping yourself from your own ambitions, dreams and career goals can be soul destroying.” I’m so sorry, but WHAT?!?! Since becoming a stay at home mom, I have actually discovered the career path I want to pursue and probably would never had done so before I had my children. Being a stay at home mom is also giving me the opportunity to achieve my dreams and ambitions by freeing me for the time I need to get the education required for my future career. How on Earth could those perks be “soul destroying?” The only way that would happen is if I had a career in mind and did nothing to plan for the future. By getting my education and certification while my children are young, (and I am at home with them) I will be right on track to jump into a job when they are in school.

Maybe some women keep themselves in their particular cages. If we are talking purely of women who have the ability to choose and they are dissatisfied with their choice, I’m forced to say the blame is on them and not society. Women who have no choice one way or the other need the support of their female friends, not judgment. Life is hard enough as it is. It doesn’t get any easier when we’re constantly putting other women down to comfort ourselves that we have made the “right” choice.