Oh poor marlasinger. I think the best advice any women can ever have is "ditch the guilt". I was interviewed once by a journalist who had been doing a series of profiles of "successful working women". I remember her saying that a common theme of all of them was they felt they just had to do a good enough not at home and at work. They weren't constantly worrying was that work or that time with the child first class. Simply would it "do". I think that's how I feel. I obviously want to be the best at what I do in terms of work in the UK but I will stop when I feel I've done enough or done what the task requires and then forget about it and then spend some time with the children until I feel I've done enough of that and then not agonise unduly about whether it was "enough". Because nothing is perfect.
Many parents, male and female, find it easier to go to work than be at home. The nature of the job at home is one of not completing tasks. You do something and then redo it. At work you tend to get some personal glory and praise and money and do a task and it's finished. With children it's like building the Forth Bridge, it's never finished and you redo again and again what you've already done. It's just a very different task than most external work. I like to have both but I would not have been happy just with the children and nor are most parents and probably 99% of men and we don't criticise the men for that.
Glad my initial advice had helped. I think mothers who want not just help but 50% parenting with a spouse need to be humble and self deprecating but some get so full of themselves - they are the only person on the planet who understands and can deal with this baby. They need that personal glory that they alone of the 6bn people in the world can deal with that baby. In fact their partner may be better. Lots of people are better than I am at loads of things.
I remember when I was 22 and first employing a nanny which is pretty hard when you're also in your first job and quite young and inexperienced the key to it working was accepting she was different. She might well do things differently but they weren't necessarily wrong even if they might be things I wouldn't necessarily do (obviously with some limits like no smacking etc) and accepting that she, the children's father and I together were bringing up those children ( we had three under four at one point when I and their father were working full time) and we would each have different ways of doing things but should each not criticise each other.
I have never worked part time but looking from the outside in on it it wouldn't suit me as the pay is usually quite low and sometimes you end up doing too much at home because you're the one in part time work. But if you read some entrepreneur's books (apart from the fact they all work hard and I have at times worked very hard) they do say work smart not necessarily hard. If you can find work that pays a lot of a short time working do that. If some of my work pays me about 42 times the minimum wage then it's better to do one hour at that than 42 hours cleaning etc., that that everyone has choice. But someone might decide to run children's parties for £200 for 2 hours on a Saturday afternoon which seems to be the rate around here for good entertainers rather htan 33 hours in a local care home.