The Same Mom, On the Job or Off

But my two older ones can tell time, and they know it's not urgent until there are three minutes left and they can't find their shoes. And my youngest is finely attuned to the changes in intensity of mood and tone of voice: When the right pitch is reached, and only then, is it time to get going.

It doesn't help that I am someone who sees the hour between the time I'm starting to get them ready and the time we need to leave as an opportunity to squeeze in a few things -- fold the laundry, run out and prune a few bushes or plant those mums. The thing is, I had more time, but I was still who I was.

5. Finally, my kids are who they are. Our fantasies of perfect mothering implicitly involve so-called "perfect" kids. But your loving presence isn't going to change your boisterous son who can't sit at the table into someone else's angelic one who can.

My kids didn't jump on each other less because I was home this summer, and there were just as many toothpaste fights and supposedly innocent sports injuries ("I swear I didn't throw it at him on purpose") as when I was toiling at the office all day.

Despite morning bike rides for warm doughnuts, lunches and museums, several cookie-baking afternoons, and my face at the door each afternoon after camp or school, they started October with the same warts they had in June.

I learned other truths as well. I learned that I love to sit around with them at breakfast rather than rush to get all of us out the door, and that it's a nice feeling to actually plan for meet-the-teacher night or picture day instead of remembering those things halfway through the workday and frantically calling my husband on his cell phone to figure out how, what and who.

But most of all, I found that career or no career, I would like more time with my kids, an ever-expanding universe of time, in which the years, and hours, would move more slowly, giving us the space to cherish each moment.

But no one needs to tell any mother that.