The high price of a career that only some can afford Lehman Brothers Holdings CFO showing Erin Callan (main), Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (top) and Yahoo's Marissa Mayer all have demanding careers. TULIPS, fields and fields of them as poised as soldiers in that perfect moment between bud and full bloom. And there I am, in the middle, pictured on a precious holiday in Amsterdam with my parents. I can barely look at the photograph now. Hours after it was taken I was summoned back to work, aborting a holiday that had been months in the planning and deserting my parents who had flown 18,000km to be with me. I didn't see the Van Gogh museum with them; didn't wander the markets nibbling on sugar-dusted poffertjes. Sadly, I never will. Back then work was not what I did, it was who I was. I was a features editor in the most competitive newspaper industry in the world. Saying no and continuing with my holiday didn't enter my head. The memory seared afresh this week as I read that a woman I admire enormously hasn't switched her phone off in six years. She was concerned that in taking on a new job she'd have to drop to "normal" hours. I cringed not because I don't applaud her but because she reminded me so much of me. In the current avalanche of opinion on women and work triggered by Marissa Mayer of Yahoo and propelled along by Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg the focus remains on the conventional working model as patented by the patriarchy. Longer, harder, louder, be seen, be heard, lean in, work from the office not from home, are the messages we've been assaulted with. Upwards always upwards we strive, beguiled by the beat of feminism and its promises of purpose, success and financial independence. As the daughter of a working mother, I was always seduced. Still am. But the reality is, it costs. Unless you are Sandberg with her millions or Mayer with her purpose-built nursery or Gina Rinehart who doesn't have to factor in spending time with her kids, you'll twist and tweak the components of your life, lining them up like a Rubik's cube. Occasionally you'll think it's solved but then a rogue square will reveal itself, throwing it into disarray. The failure to quarantine our work, to plan our lives as much as our careers, is writ large over my generation. I ache upon reading the account of former Lehman Brothers CFO Erin Callan who says work cost her a marriage and a chance at motherhood. She is now 47, remarried and attempting IVF. "We are still hoping," she writes. A friend, 39, and at the top of her industry is also soul searching. "In the past five years I've been in an intense and committed relationship," she emails from a conference in Asia. With my employer. My friend is single, works 12 hours a day and travels three months a year. She's sacrificed so many moments that mark a life: birthdays, weddings, supporting friends through miscarriage. I missed Father's Day two weeks after my own father lost his. Last year she booked two days leave to dovetail a work trip to India with a long-held dream to take her mother to the Taj Mahal. But two weeks before, her leave was cancelled. "All I could think was, 'How am I going to tell my mum?"' My friend organised a driver for her mother who saw the Taj Mahal on her own. This dilemma is not unique to women and the high-salaried; a new study shows singles feel their non-work lives are as squeezed as those with families. But to embrace work at the expense of all else is to reduce ourselves to monotone in a life which should be a rich landscape. So why is the ladder still the symbol of workplace progression when a web-like, more communicative structure is arguably as successful? Is it any less ambitious to aim wide rather than high, for a portfolio of work and interests indexed to satisfaction and health as much as remuneration? I know my best writing comes after a swim, a run, lunch. My friend Sarah worked all this out years ago. In our 20s she knew when to give it her all, but also when those efforts threatened to morph into the neurosis and dutiful but unproductive hours that lead to diminishing returns. If you ask others to describe her they would say great mum and loyal friend yet she is a foreign correspondent of note. It took the breakdown of my first marriage to bring clarity. On the phone to mum this week, I ask what she remembers of Amsterdam. "Missing you," she says. But having the utmost faith you would find your way. Email angelamollard@gmail.com; follow her at twitter.com/angelamollard