There are days where I long to be a regular ole Stay at Home Mom that gets to spend lots of quality time with her young children, has time to actually fold and put away the laundry, and doesn't have to think about working outside of the home.

Then there are days that I am so thankful to have a job so that my tiny little adult mind gets stimulated in the way that it needs, and I get to schmooze with clients.

There are also days, though, where I really feel the squeeze of trying to have the best of both worlds. Ordinarily I get to work from home, since any meetings that I have with clients are done on-site at their facilities (and not my own). For the most part my job consists of a lot of email and telephone correspondence with my clients, topped with Grant Writing and Training Project Management for active grants.

But there are days that I have to travel. Days where I have to rent some crappy car and drive some ridiculous amount of mileage leaving the house at 6:00 AM. Days where I have to fly hundreds of miles, only to have to drive another few hundred miles to get to my destination and stay in a holding tank for business travelers. Days where I don't see my children when they wake up, or before they go to sleep. Days where I don't know what they have eaten for lunch unless I get around to asking their daycare provider. Days where I have to drop off my youngest and he cries for 10 minutes after I leave.

It's heartbreaking for a Mother that is all about attachment parenting to have to leave her children for business travel. I can honestly say that what stresses me out most about traveling for business is coping with the guilt that I have associated with being absent. I never thought that I would be forced in to being an absentee parent for my job. And while I don't have to travel every day, the average one day a week that I am covering several hundred miles is definitely taking it's toll on the Mommy side of me.

I know that Moms have been working for years outside of the home, and that there are many Moms out there that travel far more extensively for their jobs then I do. But how the heck do they handle it? How do they deal with the guilt? How do they deal with the anxiety that they might miss the biggest milestone of their little-one's life because they were in a meeting... in Bakersfield?

I grapple with this every week, and it's certainly not fun. I've tried rationalizing it all, saying that my children are better off going to daycare in some capacity now because they will be better students in the future and more independent. Then there is that part of me that says, "No, no, no... Jennifer! Wrong! Children need their Mother around to feel safe, secure, and loved to grow in to confident, independent, and happy adults!"

And so I remain torn. Torn between my financial need to work as well as the desire to work in the family business, and the innate need to be a full-time Mom so that I can take care of my children the way they deserve to be taken care of. I imagine that this feeling of being torn would be worse if I didn't have such awesome daycare providers that I trust implicitly, but it certainly doesn't make it easier knowing that they get to hug my children all day and I don't.

Children, I love you. Career... I love you too, but you need to learn to get along better with my children and my needs as a Mother. Got it?