The other day I flicked on the TV for a little mindless entertainment while Master Energy Ball was paricularly happy zooming his many trucks around the house. I happened to switch onto Home and Away, the ultimate in mindless soap opera fun on this side of the world. Normally its 30 minutes of men and teen boys with no shirts on canoodling around in the Australian surf with their barbie girlfriends, and I have to admit, I like it. Its the perfect fluff to the end of a work day.

But today’s episode had a bit more of a serious edge. Though I hadn’t seen it in awhile, it was easy to to figure out what was happening. In this particular scene Mrs Doctor was having lunch with her husband Mr Gym Instructor. It was obvious that he was tip toeing around her, she was recently “recovering” (their words not mine) from PND (post Natal Depression) hard to tell how old the baby is or when she had him, cause we all know that in soap opera land, time rolls at a different speed. Lets just say that Lil Master is less than a year but around 6 months.

So Mrs Doctor tells Mr Gym Instructor that she has figured out one of the reasons she is finding motherhood so draining and why she inadvertently rolled over in bed and suffocated their baby (lordy! Hence the treatment for PND, exhaustion). She’s always been a multi-tasker and though she loves Lil Master with all her being, she is finding it unfulfilling to have to focus on just one thing all day long – namely Lil Master. So sufficit to say she needed to do what all of us mothers do as part of our natural being MULTI-TASK!!! She then told Mr Gym Instructor even though she intially wanted to stay home with Lil Master for a year, she decided that she needed to go back to work ASAP, assuring him that she would feel more like herself if she did. I won’t get into the worries that Mr Gym Instructor had and how they are now finding it diffcult to manage both of their jobs around baby.

What I do find interesting is that my initiation into motherhood was quite similar to Mrs Doctor. I didn’t suffer from PND, just your “normal garden variety new mother stuff” – while talking to my real life psychologist friend this past week, she used that term for run of the mill new mother loopiness, I love it! I knew that I needed to keep doing my webby stuff to stay sane. I think we all need different levels of adjustment time to ease into motherhood. For me, as a self-employed person working alongside hubby it was almost necessary financially for me to get back in the saddle fairly early on. It was also something I wanted. I’ve been lucky that I can juggle work, dropping him at daycare and even having full days just with Master Energy Ball because I can work around his sleep and basically make my own hours. At times its tough, in order to get those full days of fun with him, I have to sacrifice my evenings to get caught up.

Ultimately, we all have a choice and it was nice to see even the most soapy of daytime shows make a point that its okay for mothers to return to work, whether its in a couple of months, a year or even never. My point is that we are all doing what works for us, no point in hating on WAHM, SAHM or Work out of the home mothers, we all know that each of us is working as hard as the other and loving our children just as much as the other.

Motherhood is a round the clock job that I would never dream of quitting…but I like my “part-time” office job it only takes up about 60 hours a week of my like