Susan Flockhart�s essay about whether the abiding difficulty of combining motherhood and childcare meant women should return to the home prompted several readers to share their own experiences

Staying home can be the right choice

I am one of those who "have it all". I am a university-educated professional with the same earning power as my husband and two children under the age of three. However, I have felt for some time that I have been proverbially shafted by the feminists.

This dawning coincided with my return to work (English teaching in a secondary school) six months after having my first child. Maintaining both a high standard of work and my own sanity was always a juggling act I had only just managed, as any teacher will testify to, owing to the lengthy hours of marking at home, confrontations in the classroom, coping with new ventures such as a "curriculum for excellence" and so on. So, when I tried to keep up my professional life and cope with the early stages of motherhood it's not surprising that something had to give shortly afterwards. For me, it was my health and I was diagnosed with delayed postnatal depression and advised by my doctor to take some time out. Previously I had loved my job, but now, I hated it and, more shockingly, struggled to enjoy being a mum. Having it all seemed to me like having the worst of both worlds and what I realised was that I don't actually want it all. Having had a year off from teaching I quickly realised that I am wired for domesticity after all and I love spending all my time with the wee ones. Now, however, I am facing the dreaded return to work eight months after having child number two: a purely financial decision.

It's that "G" word, isn't it? Every mother experiences guilt from day to day and a working mother is laden with it. But, for the time that I wasn't working, I felt a different sort of guilt - that I had to constantly justify my failure to be out working and my inability to be a modern woman in all the ways we feel under pressure to be - all-round domestic goddess/yummy mummy/breast-feeder/maker of home-made organic baby foods as well as an ambitious, successful career woman. But how can anyone maintain that kind of pressurised living? In what way is this liberation? And if anyone suggests learning time management ...

It was taken for granted in our mothers' day that having children would be followed by a lengthy career break. But the expectation nowadays is that women will return at the earliest opportunity - the average timescale being between six and nine months after giving birth. Celebrity actresses and role-models shame us by returning as early as six weeks with already flat tummies (another pressure). I believe that it is impossible to do all these things without something or someone suffering, whether it is the mother through anxiety and stress, the children through feeling neglected or fobbed off, or the other unmentioned precious commodity, the marriage, usually the most neglected part of this whole scenario.

When our predecessors fought so hard for us to own the privilege of equal rights in the workplace, I can't help suspecting that they also did us a disservice. It's not so much that we have everything, as that we have to do everything. These are not the same things. I know it could be argued that what they did was give us a choice of life other than children and home-making. However, house prices these days are hiked so high that in order to afford homes big enough to accommodate families, two incomes are a requirement. In fact, it seems our whole economy and cost of living is based on the assumption that women will be breadwinners as well as mothers. I don't think this can really be called choice. So where does that put women's rights? Why should it be wrong to have the right to choose to be homemakers and child-rearers without being made to feel that we're letting the side down and putting our education and abilities to waste? That is the real myth.

Ruth Weir, Strathaven

Nursery care impacts on children

As a primary teacher for the last 17 years I can almost always identify the child in a class who has been in full-time nursery care as an infant. They seem to have an edge to them, a certain need for attention. Some shout the loudest, others are detached from forming a relationship with yet another adult in their life. I was fortunate my work enabled me to job-share and I will be eternally grateful I was in a position to do that. Did it affect my career? Yes, without a doubt, but I have come to terms with that and realised I wouldn't have been able to do it all. It would have come at a price - more than likely my health and no career is worth the effect that would have had on my family.

Lesley (via email)

Combining feminism with motherhood

I "have it all" in a country where many women have very little. I have it all in a world where many women are denied even basic human rights and have always had to work as well as rear children. But I wanted to respond to this topic from the personal perspective of having been a working mother for the past 15 years. As a feminist, I am aware that some of my choices are as a result of my conditioning as a girl living within a patriarchal society; where home and family are primary to the construction of feminity whereas work is primary for the construction of masculine identity. Many men have always had it all.

My mum and gran stayed at home till their children were older and then only worked part-time, supporting their husbands in better-paid jobs. I changed path by going to university in the 1970s. But when I had my first child, I gave up paid work (women at home still work!) to stay at home with the baby and a couple of years later had another. I could identify with Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, about the dissatisfaction felt by many women who, having been trained for a world outside the home, felt confined when they returned to it. In spite of this, I realise now that I was very privileged for five years to be able to do this until my partner was made redundant. As we had a mortgage on a cottage in the countryside and didn't want to uproot the children, we had the choice of him being an absent dad - living/working abroad doing a job he wasn't very happy doing (with occasional visits home) - or me working full-time in a women's organisation in which I had recently been volunteering. As the ideal - both of us working part-time - was not financially viable or practical, we swapped roles. We didn't know any other couples who were doing this but we wanted our children cared for by someone who loved them - especially if they were sick. We had no grandparents locally. I am aware that often both parents work out of necessity and many women are working and raising children on their own but the lack of good childcare in the rural village where we lived sealed it. As a result, my partner lost his footing within his career but feels that what he gained, by being at home with his sons, was worth it.

It has been stressful, at times, being the main breadwinner as well as a mother and I sometimes felt guilty before the youngest started school, particularly as my job initially entailed working with other women's children. One advantage was that I could take my own children to some of the activities I organised. I was also fortunate in that my work was flexible so that I could attend every school event both my sons were involved in and I rarely worked evenings and never weekends. We went caravanning for most of them in the summer. On the negative side, I can remember feeling pressure to be "on call" until a situation arose where I had to decide whether to leave my young children home alone at night (their dad was out) or respond to a crisis at work involving a 40-mile drive. I opted out of this service but realised I had been trying to prove that having children didn't affect my commitment to work; this can lead to burn-out. I can also remember a discussion about me always taking my annual leave during school holidays (because of school pressure not to take time off during term time) by a worker (without children) who said it was discriminatory for her to feel she couldn't have the same weeks off!

An example of different responses to me starting working was when I went to a week-long residential course with the Open University. My dad objected, "But you've got the wee men to look after", even though he had stayed in the USA for work events for longer when I was young. My mum had always encouraged me to not be financially dependant on a man so that I had choices about how to live my life. The traditional roles which Erin Pizzey is nostalgic about may have seemed liberating for some women (my mum said it suited her) and I agree that some women seem frazzled on a treadmill to finance society's rampant materialism. However, for many others, economic dependence on a partner leads to suppression of the spirit and it is still a breeding ground for abuse of power and violence today.

As my children became more independent, I re-trained as a counsellor whilst still working. Now that they are in further education, I have even reduced my hours. I ensure, like my partner, that I have a life outside the family. I am proud that I have been able to support my family financially, with occasional luxuries such as a recent family holiday travelling around India. More importantly, as both of us, as parents, have worked consecutively, we have been able to provide our family with a good, secure home and we both already have sufficient credits to claim state pension. To me, "having it all" is not about material gains but about being in loving, equal relationships with my partner and adult sons. It is about friendships and, in the end, about love.

Ann Greer, Helensburgh

Working mothers aren't all careerists

It was disappointing to learn that Erin Pizzey has joined the clamour for mothers to stay at home with their children (The myth of having it all, Opinion, May 17). During the second world war many factories had workplace nurseries to encourage women into war work, so munition factories, woollen, cotton and jute millas as well as many other large employers, found the space to set up nurseries, presumably with the support of the government of the day. I have no personal experience of these (I was a schoolgirl then), but considering the understanding of children's needs at that time, they probably varied considerably in their approach to childcare. Dundee Corporation in the late 1950s still had a nursery which ran from 6am to 10pm to allow women who worked shifts such as nurses and factory workers to continue working after the births of their children.

The children of these wartime nurseries are now pensioners and I am not aware of any research which concludes there is a body of disturbed pensioners marauding through their city centres or supermarkets, although it might be time for some ambitious academic to do some research.

Probably the most unhelpful aspect of Erin Pizzey's statement and that of Susan Flockhart's essay is the assumption that working women have careers. No, they do not - the vast majority work as cleaners, in supermarkets stacking shelves and working check-outs, in offices and as carers, many of them on the minimum wage, and they work to make ends meet, not to further their careers in the professions.

Why do these women not exist in the great nursery debate, or are career women more equal than others?

Morag Mitchell, Aberdeen