I was raised by both a working mother and a stay-at-home mother. Perhaps that's why I'm so unsettled by ongoing debates about combining career and parenthood.

Perhaps we should all be unsettled by them.

For the first decade of my life, my mother went to college then taught elementary school. My parents divorced when I was about 10, and a few years later my father married a woman who stayed at home while raising her three sons. She was mostly home with me while I was a teenager.

I thought of my mothers and my father when I read a recent New York Times article about women at "elite colleges" (Yale, in this case) whose career trajectories were aimed for motherhood.

And it only took a few sentences for me to get angry. The third paragraph of the story reads:

"My mother's always told me you can't be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time," Ms. ( Cynthia ) Liu said matter-of-factly. "You always have to choose one over the other."

You always have to choose one or the other, she said.

There is cause to question whether this piece truly reflects a trend, and there is cause to question its accuracy.

But what I question more than anything, as a college graduate and working mother, is the way The New York Times article -- and subsequent discussion of it -- dichotomizes women's options: "You always have to choose one over the other."

When in the history of feminism did we give up on creating more choices for us all and instead start judging mothers for the choices they make?

The proliferation of acronyms to describe today's parents -- SAHM, SAHD, WAHM, WAHD, WOHM -- might make it appear we have many options. Yet in our public discourse and in our private lives, they seem to resolve themselves into two: work or have a family.

Making that choice is like deciding between having a right hand and a left foot. I can't write with my foot or walk with my hand. I need both body parts.

I need both my family and my career.

In a piece that appeared in The American Prospect, Garance Franke-Ruta noted the 39 percent gap between the labor-force participation rate of college-educated women and women with less than a high-school education. She believes the gap "reflects the major incentive that an interesting, well-paying job provides to women workers to stay in the labor force."

I've been blessed with the kind of work that satisfies my intellectual curiosity and my desire to extend myself. And I know that all three of my parents would have it no other way. They encouraged my ambition. They enabled my growth. They paid for my education.

I feel an obligation to do no less for my son. That means I need to work.

If education is the new inheritance, my income helps ensure my son's.

So why the paradox? Why does providing financially for my son seem to suggest that I can't provide equally well emotionally for him? Why make me feel inadequate rather than exploring the inadequacies of the choices that are available to parents?

We talk about "opting-out" and "sequencing" and "flextime," but for how many women are these meaningful, desirable or possible? How many employers support them? How available is the affordable, quality child care that would be required?

Even under the best of circumstances, how many of us believe we spend too much time at work thinking about our families and too much time at home thinking about our jobs?

Sometimes choosing both feels like choosing neither.

But what are the alternatives?

As Franke-Ruta says, "...no woman, despite the many options available to her in American life, has the option of having been born a man. She can only decide to be more or less successful as a woman, to pursue a rigorous education or not, and to seek out the best life possible for her as a woman during this still rather unsettled moment in the history of gender roles. That visions of the good life vary is not news."

I wondered about my 9-year-old son's vision of the good life and asked whether he thought his life would be different if I stayed home with him (my husband freelances and is usually the one doing carpool, homework and guitar lesson shuttling).

My son said if I weren't working, he wouldn't have met his best friend when we relocated to Florida for my job, or gone to private school, or had as many books to read. He recognized the opportunities and benefits available to him.

And yet, like his mother, he is ambivalent.

The other night at dinner I asked him, as I do each evening, "What was the best part of your day?" His answer: "You coming home."

I asked him about the worst part of his day. His answer: "You coming home (dramatic pause) late."

So, I live with the consequences -- even though I sometimes hate them -- because the alternative is no choice at all.

Julie Moos is a fortysomething who lives with her husband and son. Her column appears every other Thursday. To read more of her thoughts, visit MomInTheMirror.com.