“You must be devastated to have to leave him.”“Don’t you just count the minutes until you are back with him?”“Are you sure developmentally it’s okay to be away from your child that long?”I can assure you that these are not phrases anyone uttered to my husband when he returned to work a week after our son was born. They are, though, three of the many comments I heard when I decided to go back to work a month after giving birth.I never thought my choices as a mother would be particularly controversial because I have had two quite different — and equally compelling — maternal influences. My own mother is a lawyer and has always been my role model. She worked hard and had her own pursuits, but was so involved in my life that one time she flew to see a play I was in a week after having back surgery. The other woman? My mother-in-law, who stopped working to raise my husband and his sister. I believe they are amazing mothers because they each got to make the choices that were best for them in raising their children. So that is the lens through which I viewed motherhood.And I have loved becoming a mother. But I do not think it is a secret to say that before my son was born I was a fully formed adult with interests and hobbies and a career I worked hard to build. When you become pregnant, people tell you that "everything changes," but that shouldn’t negate everything that a woman was before she became a mother. It’s as if society believes that, suddenly, all of the things that made you interesting are now not as important as having this new tiny human. For me, it’s more the way writer Adrienne LaFrance describes it: Motherhood is like “discovering the existence of a strange new room in the house where you already live.” Something wonderful and new has happened, sure, but everything else you’ve built for years around you is still also intact.Now here is the part that some people might not relate to (or that may send them screaming to the comments section): While being with a newborn is, for some women, totally and completely fulfilling and all-consuming, for others it is not. And when you have had a sleeping/crying/pooping/adorable newborn overwhelming your faculties for weeks on end, it is not a crazy thought to assume that you might relish the idea of not being consumed by mommyhood for a few hours to get back to the other job you love. I am not going to pretend that it did not feel glorious to shower, brush my hair, and speak to adults for a few hours.