Sure, top companies are helping us be more successful. Now if we could just ditch the self-blame—well, that'd be the icing on the cake.

My default setting is guilt. It's the fodder of my before-sleep meditations and my prayers upon awakening. The initial pangs struck during my first pregnancy in 1987 (yes, I'm 53 now, but don't spread it around). Gestating a human while working in television production nearly took me down. I spent much of the early part of my days in the women's restroom vomiting. Then I would sit in meetings while interplanetarily traveling to my uncertain future as a mother. Was it a boy or a girl—or worse, something unrecognizable? Was I up to the tasks of motherhood? Was there anything good in the office fridge for me to scarf down as soon as we adjourned? Sure, other pregnant women did it better than I did, I supposed, and that just compounded my guilt of neither working to my maximum capabilities nor conducting a perfect pregnancy.

Three more times in the next five years I got pregnant and had babies. I've been a working mom for nearly all the 22 years that the Working Mother 100 Best Companies list has been published. I've been rejoicing as I've watched some of the largest corporations in the country cater to their working moms. As companies outfitted us with liberating technologies like laptops and BlackBerrys and initiated family-friendly workplace policies like longer maternity leaves and private pumping stations with refrigerators, I celebrated the sea change, trust me. And now that many businesses are knocking themselves out to accommodate us, Mom Guilt should be on the verge of extinction, gone the way of other '80s trappings like leg warmers and "Frankie Says Relax" T-shirts. But 22 years later, with corporate America all but begging us to let go, we cling to guilt. A look back at my two decades of working motherhood has me wondering why. Well, it's not exactly clear.

Secrets and Lies
We used to lie a lot more back in the day. Trying to get ten people to schedule a meeting is nearly always impossible—trying to do it when one of those people (me) had a glucose tolerance test that she absolutely couldn't miss made me seem, well, like not much of a team player. After the baby,

I lied to excuse myself from urgent meetings to skulk off to attend Mommy and Me classes; mentioning the word "biopsy" usually got me out of the office without too many more questions, but, boy, was I brimming with guilt as I weakly sang along to "The Wheels on the Bus." Today a flex schedule is the solution to my honesty issues. But as I sit here in my home office enjoying the opportunity to telecommute while someone I pay picks up my son from school and drops my daughter off at the mall, I'm not exactly feeling guiltless. Not to mention that my morning coffee cup is still sitting here on my desk and I've yet to take a shower. Am I feeling good about myself and my choices at this moment? Ask me sometime tonight after I finish picking up Vietnamese takeout.

Wireless, but Still Whipped
Sure, paid maternity leave was around, but I was on my own navigating through the pages of my benefits book to see whether I could get any paid disability leave during the months before I could squeeze my C-sectioned body into appropriate work clothes and get back to the office. Yes, we had computers, but they were used primarily by the administrative staff. So telecommuting wasn't an option, unless by "tele" we meant a telephone with a wall plug. Now I write using my laptop, often in my bed, and email my stories off to New York or Chicago or London—all while wearing my pj's, which clearly is not appropriate office wear. In the car, I've got both a BlackBerry and a cell for communicating with colleagues. My four children are all similarly equipped. We're able to stay connected 24/7, so what deep thoughts and feelings do we tend to share? Their plans and scheduled destinations and how I'm going to flex my time around enabling them.

Pumping in the Girls' Room
As all-encompassing as it felt at the time, the guilt I experienced while pregnant didn't compare to the guilt I'd face following the joyous delivery of my first baby. Who could have prepared me for the fierce lovelock he would have on me?

How could I turn him over to the care of virtual strangers so that I could go back to work? Off-ramping? Phase back?

Also not in my benefits book. And nursing was just about impossible because my first Medela was nearly the size of a beach cooler. Besides, there were no plugs in the office restrooms, let alone places to sit that weren't porcelain with big round holes in them. I couldn't fathom that one day women would have comfy chairs in private nursing stations and pump to the soothing tunes of their iPods after waving bye-bye to their babies at the on-site child-care facility. So I'd pray that my sitter didn't get my baby's flu and not be able to show up for work the next day, because then what would I do?

If I'd known about the 100 Best Companies then, I think I would have married one of them. They not only tolerate but "celebrate"—to use the word of Joanne McDonough, director of the office of diversity at PricewaterhouseCoopers—moms like me and my girlfriends. These adjustments and accommodations began informally with moms like me joining together and clearly stating their needs. I guess I can feel less guilty about all my whining since it may have contributed to the solutions. And still I whine! Why?

Craving Control
Let's see a show of hands: How many of you admit to being A-type personalities with a little obsessive compulsiveness thrown in? It's unanimous, then. We learn from the best, we aim for the best, and we're constantly tweaking our game to stay the best. Becoming a mother, says psychologist Cheryl Saban, leads to a state of constant vigilance. Are the kids fine? Are my parents fine? Is my career fine? Is my sex life fine? We are pumping out a stress hormone called cortisol to maintain this hypervigilance. (Hey, isn't that the chemical that's supposed to put weight on our middles, too? Figures.)

The companies that really rock in helping us deal with this stress and its ugly stepsister, guilt, are the ones that give us back our sense of control. They're the ones like Abbott, where more than 90 percent of employees telecommute. Working moms at this company are supported by a culture that has done away with the outdated notion that supervisors have to be able to reach out and touch you, physically, to be assured that you're doing your job. All many moms need is a good mute button so that we can silence the crying child in the background while we negotiate a deal.

Author Elizabeth Stone wrote that becoming a mother "is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." We moms know that the very things we love so dearly are also the things that rob us of all sense of control: our kids. The 100 Best Companies help us relax a bit by offering great child care. Bristol-Myers Squibb has about 1,500 kids in on-site child care. Sometimes just being able to stroll on over and look at your tot from time to time is enough to cut a mom's stress level in half.

What's in it for Them?
Okay, so corporate America may be trying to help us eradicate guilt by giving us more control and less stress, but mom-friendly work environments do not exist simply because some old guy or gal at the top was feeling generous one day. No matter how enlightened a company is, it's got to make sense for the bottom line. Lesli Marasco, director of child-care solutions at Abbott, puts it succinctly: "To us, it's about transferring knowledge and keeping valuable employees." Damn straight! If we weren't great at what we do, we wouldn't have been accommodated in this way. It's blighted thinking for less-enlightened companies to treat the condition of motherhood as a handicap. Wake up, America—60 percent of mothers of young kids work outside the home! You need us!
And we're not the only ones benefiting. The cor-porate embrace offered to moms is feeling all nice and cuddly to the nonparent employees, too. I may leave early every afternoon to pick up the kids, but Alex in accounting can come late in the mornings to get his marathon training in before it gets too hot out. What's good for this goose is good for lots of ganders, too.

These companies also know that they can keep employees happy by offering personalized help, particularly employees who feel like they're all alone in their experiences. Most of the 100 Best offer programs similar to PwC's affinity circles—groups for single moms, new parents, parents of kids with special needs and just about any other special interest expressed by two or more employees. Ernst & Young's Working Moms Network has created Brown Bag programs in many offices, where moms and dads can spend their lunch hours chatting with experts on early-childhood development.
 
When certain issues are best handled privately, counseling is available. At Abbott, for example, employees may use free professional counseling for up to six hours. Six hours probably wouldn't be enough for me, but it's a great benefit. I've built a career on my belief that we moms are happier and healthier when we're part of a community that understands and accepts us and gives us a safe space to express our joys and agonies-—and these companies encourage that girlfriend-to-girlfriend connection. Truth be told, moms working in these companies can plug into even larger and more organized social groups than those who stay at home with their kids. Uh-oh, I hope I didn't create more guilt for those moms who don't happen to work for these gold-standard-bearers.

Enough Already!
I feel guilty saying this, but most of the working moms I speak to every day feel as guilty as I continue to feel. It's still a struggle; there are never enough hours in the day, and the ancient battle of "when I'm at work, I think I should be at home, and when I'm at home, I think I should be at work" rages on. We can't be all things to everyone at the same time, damn it. We can be great moms on many days and great employees on many days, just not every single day. We're clearly more productive and more successful than ever before. So repeat after me: "I will get over the guilt."

This is an inside job, girlfriends! We're the ones who feel we're failures if we don't create Gourmet-worthy birthday cakes for the kids, keep our carbon footprints smaller than Tipper Gore's and dazzle the office elite with hot hedge-fund tips. No one who loves us would demand all this of us—and that's the point: We have no business doing it to ourselves.

As Maryella Gockel, flexibility strategy leader at Ernst & Young, says, "It's not just about making a living, it's about making a life." There are at least 100 major companies out there that have made a great start in creating a more supportive working environment for moms. It's time for us to count our blessings, not tally up our shortcomings. Otherwise, we'll miss the fruits of our labors.
Lest you think getting rid of our working-mom guilt is the key to eternal happiness, ladies, I would like to add that the next guilt obsession is already waiting in the wings: We may accept that we're good mothers and good workers, yet almost none of us think we're thin enough! But I'll save that for another discussion.