It is the moment every prospective mother dreads: telling the boss you are pregnant. For me, it was one of those times when being several thousand kilometres from head office in London was a definite advantage. Working in a bureau of three in Sydney, with two (female) colleagues able to keep a secret, I had not had to tell my editors back in the UK that I was pregnant until I was five months gone. On the days when morning sickness got too much, I was able to catnap on the floor next to my desk and no one at HQ was any the wiser.

A lot of ink has been poured for and against the ban on `ostentatious religious symbols' such as veils, headscarves, yarmulkes or large crucifixes in France's state schools. The law was voted by an overwhelming majority (494/36) by the National Assembly in February 2004 and will move this month to the Senate where its approval is expected.

When I started working for the Financial Times in 1992, the newspaper had relatively few women foreign correspondents and, of these, if I remember rightly, none were mothers. While there still aren't many, there are now a handful of us around the world from Houston, Sydney and Tokyo through to Washington DC, Oslo and Brussels and the newspaper has had to learn how to accommodate us.

In this, we have been helped by the progress of women in general within the organisation. Again, when I joined, there was only one woman among the dozen of so assistant editors the politburo that runs the paper. Now we have three and, more importantly, the deputy editor and the managing editor are both women (and mothers too).

So when I announced my news, I did not get the same response as my colleague in Brussels had five years earlier. When she informed her bureau chief that she was having a second, she was told that having one baby on a foreign posting was bad enough but to have two was unacceptable.

While it was undoubtedly inconvenient and expensive - to have to dispatch someone to Sydney for six months to fill in for me, my editors took my news in their stride and not a single person has intimated that having a baby will hold back my career.

Like my colleagues back at HQ in London, I was given 20 weeks maternity leave on full pay and the right to take up to a further 32 weeks unpaid. I opted to take six months and returned to work on September 1. With just three weeks under my belt, it's too early to say how combining motherhood and a fulltime job will work out for me. But journalism is one of those jobs that can be done from home much of the time and that is already proving to be a big advantage.

'You're so lucky!' is a response I often get when I tell people I work from home while looking after little Rory.

And they're right. Freelancing from the front room has been a great way to balance working and being with Rory. But there have been days I'd have jumped at an opportunity to leave the chaos behind for 8 hours in the sanctuary of an office and a regular pay packet.

Alongside all the regular anxieties of freelancing -- Was the last story good enough? Where's that cheque? Who's this new editor?  -- come a whole new range of challenges. Maintaining a professional phone voice as the baby enthusiastically turns the computer on and off. Dashing off an urgent email while breastfeeding. Dealing with the ear infection that develops a day before deadline. And making any kind of sense through the fog of tiredness that comes with being woken every hour or two night after night.

The irregular nature of the workload used to be part of the appeal; now it creates a headache for arranging childcare. And there's no way I can manage the breaking international news I used to write. The deadlines are impossible. I've turned to more manageable - if a little more pedestrian - features for local publications, accounting for my temporary 'unfinancial' status in the FCA.

There's not really an ideal work solution for new mothers, many of whom in the absence of paid maternity leave go back to work in some capacity long before they're ready. The need to earn money and maintain some kind of professional life while meeting the overwhelming demands of a baby inevitably leads to compromises.

For me, the challenges of writing from home are more than made up for by the fun of day-to-day life with Rory: tearing around the park discovering dogs and puddles; playing in the sandpit; watching Playschool. I am lucky. And also rather tired.