I was sitting in my office overlooking Sussex Street in the city. It was mid­morning and I was reading the newspaper. In those days (it was about 1994), The Sydney Morning Herald was still a broadsheet, so its pages were spread across my entire desk. My boss, the new  chief executive of ad agency JWT, was walking past my glass­fronted office. He stopped and came into the room.

"Don't you have anything to do?"

"I have plenty to do," I said, without raising my eyes from the newspaper.

My boss shifted from foot to foot. I turned another page. He left the room.

It was a small moment but an important one. I did not need to feel guilty or act as if I had been caught doing some­thing wrong when questioned by my boss. This new kind of self-­control was very recently acquired.

I had spent the previous five years at home with small children. I didn't like it much. I loved my kids but I did not love the drudgery and loneliness that accompanies parenting. My mothers' group helped enormously. The fact that my sister Ann had left her career in publishing to parent her daughter Alice also helped. But I had felt washed up. My brilliant career (if that is what it was) had gone bung. I did a little freelance work, but over the years it dwindled away to nothing. I was not able to imagine being out of the workforce forever, but was pretty sure a return to copy-writing in an ad agency was unlikely. Instead, I retrained as a relationships counsellor.

This was in no small part because I had become – and remain – a convert to the power of good therapy to change lives. I was a living example of it. Unfortunately, once I grad­uated from the part-­time training course, I found I could not fit in actual counselling with the demands of my children and a husband who was away all the time. This meant I never fulfilled the practical hours required to become a fully quali­fied counsellor. I remained adrift.

I still needed something beyond children and household, however. I joined a book club and a monthly writing group. I also took myself off to a couple of creative writing short courses. One of them, run by Dorothy Porter at the University of Technology, Sydney, helped me to regain a little of my old con­fidence. She was a demanding but skilled teacher. She expected a high standard from her mixed bag of students. I worked hard for her and she praised some of my work. I needed that praise like I needed oxygen.

But most of the time I felt stymied and useless, and I turned my unused energies in on myself. I was less anxious but probably more depressed. Then, just after Polly had started her first year at school and Charlotte was at preschool, I received a phone call that changed everything.

It has often been my experience in life that just when you think something you've done has had no impact at all, you discover how wrong you have been. I remember the first profes­sional communications workshop I ever ran. It was for health promotion professionals in the Illawarra. It was hard to forget, not just because it was the first I'd done, but also because it was the night of Princess Diana's funeral and the day of unbeliev­able floods. I watched Diana's funeral on a tiny little telly in the half pre­fab cottage, half motor home that my budget­-strapped clients had booked for my accommodation. The rain started that night and continued all the next day. When the workshop ended in the late afternoon, I only just got out of Wollongong before all hell broke loose. As I drove up the steep hill away from the coastal city, I passed huge volumes of water cascading in the opposite direction.

Then, 16 years after that first workshop, a woman rang and identified herself as a participant. She had risen through the ranks and now headed the program. She had a little money left over in her budget, so she'd had a think about the most useful thing she'd done in her career and – you guessed it – it was my little comms workshop. She booked me again to deliver it to her staff, after more than a decade and a half. Never say never.

The same thing now happened, although without the extreme of 16 years between event and follow­up. Before Charlotte was born (indeed, I think I was pregnant with her at the time), I had done a few weeks' freelance at Saatchi & Saatchi, working on a pitch for feminine hygiene products with an art director called Jenny Eborall. It was a hard brief to crack, par­ticularly as we were tasked with selling sanitary napkins rather than tampons. The "consumer insight" (wanky language which just means how the people who use it feel about the product) in the brief said that it was older and more conservative women who chose pads over tampons and that the key thing about these women was that they objected to any public mention of menstruation at all. Hmm, that created a pretty high degree of advertising difficulty.

Jenny and I struggled with this for some time, but eventu­ally we found an answer. As usual, the breakthrough came when we finally got down to the nub of what users were looking for. In a word, with sanitary pads, it is protection. What we developed was scripts for a series of TV commercials that gave women advice on how to protect themselves in all sorts of situ­ations. We wrote one featuring Wendy Harmer giving women tips on how to protect themselves from sexist remarks, another with a self­-defence expert advising women on how to protect themselves if attacked, and a skin cancer specialist giving advice on how to protect your skin from the sun. The line at the end of the campaign was: "This message is brought to you by Stayfree. Because we have always believed women should be well­ protected." Way to promote sanitary pads without mentioning menstruation! We high-­fived one another around the office.

We'd done a terrific pitch, if I do say so myself, and Saatchi used it to win the business. They never produced any of the work, however (this is quite normal, sigh), and apart from receiving a much­-needed cheque, I had not heard from Saatchi or Jenny Eborall again. Until early 1994, that is, when I received a call from a new art director at ad agency J. Walter Thompson. Her name was Jane Evans and she needed a freelance writer to come and work with her while she looked for a full­time creative partner. Jenny Eborall now worked at JWT and, bless her, she had recommended me. I told them I could work Charlotte's preschool hours – in other words, three five­-hour days a week.

They agreed. It was only temporary and such limited hours meant that I would be very cheap.

Jane and I hit it off and I loved being back in the work­force. Colleagues are generally polite to you (toddlers are sweet but neither polite nor predictable) and work has a pay cheque attached. But that wasn't the only attraction. I felt wanted again – as if I had a contribution to make that might be of value. My appetite for the work was enormous and we churned through briefs with enthusiasm. When you get the right creative partner in advertising, it can be a very exciting and stimulating job. I knew it was only going to continue until Jane found a full­time writer but I didn't care; I was going to make the most of getting out of the house and back into my profession while it lasted. The quality of the work we were doing together was high (enthusiasm and excitement will do that for you) and my confidence soared.

Then, after three months, Jane and the management at JWT told me that they'd looked at lots of other copywriters but they didn't like anyone as much as they liked me. Would I consider making the part-­time arrangement a permanent one?

"You're getting through more work in ​ 15 hours than the other writers are in forty."

The other writers were all male, of course; if you need something done fast and enthusiastically, ask a working mother – particularly one who has just escaped from non­stop drudgery at home.

Would I accept a permanent part­-time job back in the industry I thought had done with me forever? You bet I would.

My daughters were six and three when I went back to work. Polly was at school and Charlotte was at preschool. It would be a juggle, particularly as Ralph was still travelling all the time with his job, but I didn't care. Ralph was as pleased as I was about the offer – not that I would have asked his permission or taken any notice if he had had reservations. Frankly, I would never have married a man who felt he had a right to exercise that kind of control over his wife. I was an adult. I got to decide. If he'd had a problem, I would have suggested he cut back his own hours and pick up the slack.

Thanks to all the work I had done on myself, I knew what my rights and responsibilities were and I did not feel at all guilty about asserting them. Ralph and I were co­-parents – we had equal responsibility for our children. I was also lucky that I came from a feminist family. There was simply no judgment and no discussion about my decision to return to work. It was my choice and they'd support whatever decision I made.

As a beneficiary of that feminism, in 1994, I went back to work (almost) without a backward glance. It was only for  15 hours a week, after all.

My parents were great but I did have to hire live-­in child­ minders on occasion. I always went through reputable agencies and tried to use the same people when I could. When my working hours increased, I eventually hired a nanny for after­school care. Jan stayed with us for six years and the girls adored her. I'll say it again – when I needed help, I asked for it and it was always available. I have never seen any virtue in pretending you can – or should – do it all on your own. Of course, I was also very fortunate in that I could afford good help, although I do remember in the early days sometimes going to the ATM to withdraw the nanny's salary and realising I only had a couple of dollars left to last the week. But we managed, we didn't go hungry and, while I might have been working just to pay the child-minding fees at first, I was happier, healthier, more energetic and – as a result – a much better parent.

There was judgment, of course. Once the girls were both at school it was impossible not to notice how many of the mothers divided themselves into two groups. Some of the stay-­at-­home mothers emanated a combination of judgment with a sense of competitiveness. Some of them seemed very defensive. Not all of them, of course; there were many women who couldn't care less what other mothers were doing. We didn't see the full­time working mothers, not that there were many of them in those days, especially when their children were very young. It was us part­-time mothers who were always rushing from pillar to post trying not to let anyone down. Worse, we were also trying not to let anyone see how hard it all was, because that would just lead to more judgment.

I remember a single, childless woman I worked with saying to me over lunch one day, "Well, you've really got it worked out, haven't you? You've got interesting work, kids and a husband – a balanced life."

"You know what a balanced life really means, don't you?"

"No, except it's what everyone wants."

"It means you don't get all of anything."

This is an edited extract from Plain-speaking Jane, by Jane Caro. (Macmillan, $34.99.)

Jane Caro will speak at the National Library of Australia on October 23 at 7.30am as part of the Books at Breakfast series. $50 includes book and breakfast, $25 for breakfast only. Bookings: https://www.nla.gov.au/event/books-at-breakfast-jane-caro