'Like Nicole Kidman, I have no doubt that working makes me a better mother.'

Nicole Kidman just dropped a bombshell. Alright, it was more like an observation during an interview with Harper’s Bazaar about her decision to keep working while having children. While she’s happiest when she’s around her two daughters, the actress explained she is reluctant to give up work.

“I don’t want to be the mother who lives vicariously through my daughters, so I’m trying to balance it,” she told the magazine.

“There was a period where I didn’t do anything, and my mum said, ‘I really think you need to get back and do something’.”

Better duck for cover Nicole. These are the sort of comments easily seen as adding fuel to the impossibly-patronising “mummy-war” fire. A hand grenade carelessly tossed from one side of the motherhood fence to another. An attempt to ensure the divide between mums who work outside the home, and those who don’t, remains impenetrable.

Frankly I’m weary just thinking about that.

So here’s the alternative view: The comments reflect one parent’s decision and one family’s situation. And while Nicole Kidman’s world might be entirely different from yours or mine, her situation isn’t.

She makes a point that will resonate with plenty of working parents. Like me.

It is true that combining work with parenting has many obstacles. Sick days, childcare, inflexibility and workplace discrimination are just a few of the realities.

But it is also true that combining work with parenting has upsides. Independence. Space. Creativity. Perspective. Fulfillment.

For all the juggling it entails, working and parenting is a dream for plenty of Australians. It’s the unspoken antidote to the awful, prevalent, and HARD TO SHAKE mummy guilt that so often accompanies mums to work. (Guilt that rarely seems to trip up working dads).

In the years before I had children, I spent a good chunk of time thinking and talking about combining a career with a family. Like many women my age, I had invested a lot of time and energy into creating a professional life. I had also always wanted to have children. Many years ago, when children were merely a pipedream, I often wondered – and more often worried – how those two worlds would collide.

Having now spent more than five years in the parenting arena, when I reflect on the various ways they have, I want to pinch myself. Not just because they have collided and manage to co-exist, but because the result is so much more satisfying than I imagined.

I feel the need to type carefully at this point. I realise that for many parents, not working is their preference – which I absolutely respect. I don’t think working or not working makes anyone a better or worse parent.

I think the best any parent can do, is whatever works best for them as individuals and families. My experience is exactly that – what works for me and my family.

But I don’t think Nicole Kidman and I are alone in finding that working – or doing something that is completely separate from our roles as mums – is a necessity for us. There is a financial imperative of working but work is more than an income stream. What we do for work is part of who my husband and I are, and it is part of how our family works.

For me, I have no doubt that working makes me a better mother. It certainly doesn’t ensure the house is always tidy, the laundry always done, that balls aren’t regularly dropped and that birthday invitations don’t occasionally go missing. That stuff is a given.

But working ensures that I am not completely and utterly lost in motherhood. Does that make me selfish? Possibly, but it also makes me sane, which is a far better gift I figure I can impart to my family than the alternative.

I treasure my days in the office and work itself and I treasure my time with our daughters. My priorities have changed and I guess partly because work isn’t everything I can enjoy it more. And in some ways the same goes with my daughters. Because I don’t do either ‘home’ or ‘work’ one hundred per cent of the time, I’m free to appreciate each of them – differently – in their glory.

Combining motherhood with work gives me perspective on a daily basis. Compared to the health and wellbeing of our daughters, work doesn’t rate but I’m also completely aware of the valuable and fulfilling role work plays in my life. I love going into work and I love seeing the girls at the end of each work day.

There are days where I don’t feel this way. Where work is stressful. Where I don’t want to tear out the door and race to work. Where I would like to spend the day with the girls. But for the most part I love doing both.

There are caveats though.

I’m not sure I would enjoy this balance if I worked in a corporate role which demanded long hours and treated parenting as an invisible adjunct to someone’s life, if I didn’t enjoy my job itself, or if I didn’t work with other parents who understood the realities of young children.

Or if we hadn’t found brilliant childcare that the girls loved. There are numerous factors that make working, work for us.

At this point, combining work and family isn’t a possibility for too many families. (As a sidenote there are $25 billion reasons to engineer our workplaces, leaders and policies to ensure that work works for as many mothers in Australia as possible.)

But what isn’t spoken about enough, is the satisfaction and salvation it delivers for the families lucky enough to make it work.

I think we do ourselves, our friends and our families, a great disservice by painting parenthood as one big, long, soft and cuddly advertisement. But equally I think we do ourselves just as few favours by painting the juggle as an impossibly hard slog.

For more from Georgina Dent, you can find her on Facebook and Twitter.