I make my living teaching women how to own their ambition in a society that has a double standard. It's our prevailing cultural paradigm: ambitious men are go-getters, but ambitious women are bitches. I define ambition as that which drives our creative existence, provides an outlet for our talents and passions, defines who we are, and allows us to earn our full worth without apology. I walk my talk. But just like you I take hits. In a moment of trauma, I too succumbed to those deeply ingrained cultural beliefs about how women are supposed to behave. It happened to me when my son almost died. On July 14, 2005, two weeks before my book, Ambition Is Not A Dirty Word, was due to my publisher, I was awakened at 4:30 a.m. by a phone call. My seventeen-year-old son, Devin, had been hit by a car and was lying in the trauma unit of a hospital 2,500 miles away from my New York City home. His condition was unknown. I numbly threw some clothes into suitcases and barely managed to catch a 7 a.m. flight to the San Francisco Bay Area to get to him. In between hourly calls from the airplane phone to Devin's father at the hospital, I ticked off the items on the guilty mother's checklist. Dumped my child in daycare more than I'd have liked? Check. Dragged him through a difficult divorce? Check. Denied him the fancy bicycle and fancier private school while I earned my degree? Check. Remarried? Check. Moved away from my own son? Check. But all that paled next to my biggest sin: For the last several months, I'd consistently put work ahead of family. The kicker: I'd bailed on the family vacation to finish my book. Who cared that I'd logged a lifetime of being a good, sometimes great mom? Who cared that I loved my work with a passion, that I'd helped thousands of women realize their lifelong dreams? Clearly, the gods were punishing me for being too ambitious, and Devin was paying the ultimate price. Of course this was crazy, irrational thinking--but that's what we women do, isn't it? Isn't a good mother one who has the grace to feel guilty about any choice beyond putting family first? Like you, I understand on a deep, visceral level--one that can't be duplicated by intellectual reasoning or academic polemics--what it means to live daily with the dialectical tension of loving your work every bit as much as your children and family, of trying to nurture mutually exclusive yet equally sacrosanct priorities. I've lived a complex and non-formulaic life as a deeply devoted (and deeply flawed) divorced, single mother, as well as a determined, ambitious professional woman. Your story is doubtless no less complex. What we share as high-achieving women is the challenge of valuing our pure ambition in a culture that tells us that doing so is going to bring us down hard, sometime, somehow. We absorb the message that there will be hell to pay for loving our work with a grand passion. Read more.