I do know what you mean, Brigid.
Jon Stewart, I think, had some sort of a routine (I remember it foggily) on "Rainbow babies". It was a riff on Madonna's adoption of David, but I think the gist was:
Let's see, I'll have an Asian one, and then an African one, and oooh, a Native American one!
I think I have that wrong, but it's drifting around my head somewhere.
On the other hand, I have a single friend who went to Lima, Peru and adopted a baby whose biological mother lived on the garbage dump. The baby was her 5th child and she gave birth to her in an alley in Lima. The police took her to the hospital...they went through all the routines of international adoption. My friend and her mother stayed in a hotel for six weeks while the newspapers ran a notice: "Will xx and yy come to zz Hospital and claim their child." After the parents never returned, the baby was released and she brought her home. The child has grown up as the doted-on only child of a very committed Mom. She's now in college, multi-talented (writes, paints, sings) and very well-adjusted. It amazes me when I see her, I always think that with a slight shift of fate, she would have lived (for who knows how long) under the buzzards circling, trying to pick out her survival from a mountain of garbage. Horrible image, and so many children live there...
Boy do I ramble. Anyway, I guess the children in daycare that some worry about so much, are so much better off than so many children in the world. When I stayed home for six months, and then was able to work out a part-time schedule, then a FT schedule that worked around my H's shift schedule, so our baby was never without a parent for the first 3 years, I knew I was very very lucky. That said, it would've been wonderful to have pots of money so I could stay home and have another. I adore babies, and in my case, nothing about any job, ever, was more appealing.
But if I'd had more fulfilling work, I know there would have been a pull to juggle both. In my case, work was interesting for a while, but mostly drudgery. I just want to write.
We once knew a novelist who had such focus that he could write every night on a little table in the LR with his children scrambling all over. Then again, he had a wife checking on them and preparing dinner...
I want a wife!
Hops