Six years ago I left a career in television even though I lived it, breathed it and loved it. But the hard, cold fact is that after spending 16 hours a day on the job for years there came a time when my body and spirit could not do it any more. I wanted a life outside the office. Heck, I craved it. So when I started to cut back, when I dropped from 16 to 14 then to 12 hours a day, management began to question my loyalty. And there were consequences for my decision. Suddenly I was not given the plum documentaries and the coveted shows to produce, and it was rumoured that I could not handle the stress of an upwardly mobile career.

I don’t blame the organisation. Instead I blamed me. You see in my early twenties when I lived in Boston, I believed in a mantra told to me by the Vice President of a Fortune 500 Company. Naturally he was a man - hey, look at the title - and I admired his discipline and drive. At the time he said that if I wanted to amount to anything in life, career-wise, I would have to use my twenties and devote all my energies to my job so that I could be truly successful. He often said that he mortgaged his twenties and early thirties so he could build his personal empire. He certainly appeared to have it all by age 35: a 3- level home in a Boston suburb, a SUV and a two-door Saab in the driveway, 3 children and a beautiful wife, who was also my friend.

So I believed him and lived by the recipe he dished out. Work became my mantra; I worked morning and night, went to school, got a masters degree and worked again, morning and night. I came back to Trinidad and followed my friend’s instruction to the last ingredient. I accepted the projects, took on the leadership roles, and was praised by management as the model employee. And then I woke up after a long 17-hour day and realised that I had mortgaged my twenties, had refused two marriage proposals because it would have derailed my plans and ended up with a high flying career but no relationship. At 30, I did not have it all and I was on my way - if researcher and author Sylvia Hewitt is to be believed - to becoming a statistic.

In her January 2001 survey in the US, Hewitt discovered that 49% of ultra achieving career women aged 41-55 did not have children and 33% were unmarried. So I was faced with the real deal that in my twenties I had been duped. My friend in the rarefied upper reaches of a high altitude career where the air is thin had an easier time finding oxygen because he was a man, expected to put less time into family and household commitments than his wife, and of course with no ticking biological clock.

I had cause to reflect on this rainbow past last week because I was asked to be part of a panel of three women who discussed on national television the status of the professional woman and can she have it all: the career, the relationship, the husband, the children. The complete life.

I looked at my peers, professional women between the ages of 30-40, and I see first hand the challenges; the women whose corporation told them when they signed a contract that they had to postpone child-bearing, the women who are at the top of their professional game but are divorced or seem isolated, the women who have had to forsake their careers to raise their children, and even the women who juggle the two but whose life seems riddled with one sacrifice after the other.

It is true that the professional woman has made significant strides, but I think the time is ripe for more change however incremental it may be. Perhaps it can only happen when business leaders in the aggregate are lobbied by their female and male professionals and when government shows the wherewithal to legislate for things like flexi-time, unpaid career breaks with job assurance upon re-entry into the work place, reduced hour careers, re-structured retirement plans without penalties for career breaks, staggered work hours and day-care facilities on the job.

And for the women of their twenties, I say seek those organisations that emphasise work-life balance and you will find that as you grow older that you can order the cake with the frosting on top. Or here’s another thought, you could create an organisation of your very own.

Judette Coward is the principal consultant at JudetteCoward & Associates. You can email her at judetttecoward@consultant.com