Apparently children of working mothers aren’t only higher achievers, but more emotionally developed.

Years ago, when I was 36, I fell over, dropped like a dead weight for no reason at all. BOOM.

At the hospital, they checked for everything (including HIV, as I had been working as a scientist on the body fluids of Australia’s first AIDS patient), advised me to wean my baby as a precaution, and guess what?

It turned out I was just exhausted.

Gael.

Just exhausted. Just. Exhausted. Like every working mother in Australia.

Now, having crawled to the rock of perspective and rest, after 25 years of child-rearing, I look back through the corridor of time and those years seem like a whirling frenzy, barely glimpsed through a haze of fatigue. Like every working mother.

Fatigue, we can do. It’s our reality, whether we work at home or in the workforce. But if we work outside the home – as two-thirds of us do – what cuts through the exhaustion, interrupts our sleep in sharp pangs and lays a quiet hand of burden across the breadth of our lives, is guilt. How much does our absence, our displacement of infants and children to the care of others, impact on their delicate little psyches?

Is our quest for fulfilment, of equal rights to autonomy and financial independence, or our need to pay the bills, at the expense of our children’s healthy mental and emotional development?

Here are some kick-arse, well-known working mothers. (Post continues after gallery.)

Kick-arse working mums

Leigh Sales

Annabel Crabb

Mel Doyle

LIsa Wilkinson

Jessica Rowe

Holly Wainright

Mia Freedman and Sarah Macdonald

Kylie Gillies

Tanya Plibersek

Tanya Plibersek.

Kate Ellis

Bec Sparrow

Kate Hunter

Em Rusciano

Clare Bowditch

Clare Bowditch

Cate Blanchett

Cate Blanchett in her Oscars acceptance speech highlighted women's niche role in movies and the great future for women in film.

Nicole Kidman.

Dannii Minogue

The other Minogue, Dannii, is a singer/songwriter and panelist.

Olivia Newton John

Missy Higgins

Anna Bligh

Sarah Hanson-Young

Penny Wong

Quentin Bryce

Christine Milne

Chris Bath on Sunday Night

Image: Instagram/@chrisbath

Carrie Bickmore

Yumi Stynes

Logies perfection

Sonia Kruger

Jamila Rizvi

Well, in a major miracle, a stroke of entire good fortune, a finding that amazingly was not splashed as banner headlines across all (male-owned and dominated) media around the globe, it turns out th