Staring at that thin blue line on the little white stick, I had a flashback to a former CEO (now married to his long-term boyfriend). One day he shuffled into our open plan office, with none of his usual assurance, to announce that he had had a call from the hospital about one of our PAs.  ‘She is ‘at eight centimetres’...  I have absolutely no idea what that means and, please God, can no one tell me.'  He promptly fled to the safety of his glass office.

What struck me then – and comes flooding back now – is that pregnancy and work do not mix well. So while my husband beamed at this standing ovation for his masculinity, my brain was ablaze with conflicting thought-streams: utter delight at the prospect of our baby, and pealing alarm bells about what it would mean on the other.

We've all read the newspaper columnists moaning about the selfishness of ‘modern’ women who want to earn money rather than spend their twenties nurturing the next generation.  I read something recently by Bob Reitemeier, chief executive of The Children’s Society, saying: "The aggressive pursuit of individual success by adults is now the greatest threat to our children, and we are determined to do something about that. Essentially the report brings a taboo into the open which is that we have to confront our selfish and individualistic culture.'

It's not that he doesn’t have a point.  It's that these things must be seen in their context. We’re a generation that saw our mothers not live up to their potential in the workplace, because they were so deeply committed to our childhoods. For which, in too many cases, they were rewarded with financial challenges and loneliness when their husbands left for women they met through work. If my mother instilled any single thought into my sisters’ and my heads, it was that we must always earn enough to support ourselves and any children we might have.

You can call it selfish and individualistic, Bob.  I prefer to call it common sense.

We are a generation that learned to make different mistakes to our mothers’.  Rather than breeding with ease while our bodies were primed, we worked and travelled and partied with the time we had. We invested in property (and, yes, shoot us, Jimmy Choos); we paid into our pensions and spent ten or fifteen years building the stimulating, rewarding careers that we now thrive on. And then we met someone wonderful and realised that our lives were incomplete without a child. But while we know that building a family will be a challenge, we cannot accept that our careers are ‘the greatest threat’ to our children. My job will make me a different parent to my own, for sure, but I’m not (yet) resigned to being a crap mother.

So pregnancy comes with mixed feelings: thrill at a new tiny being, apprehension at the challenges ahead and the horror of sharing biological realities with my colleagues. In what other context would a CEO be expected to make an announcement about the cervix of one of his employees?  It’s bad enough having the evidence of your sex life on constant display at the office; to combine this with a palpable sense that you could be jeopardising everything you’ve achieved professionally is... well, terrifying. All before you start to realise that pretty soon you will be responsible for a whole new person.

The Parent Project. Crikey.

Christine Armstrong is a director at ad network BBDO. On August 31 this year, she gave birth to Celia. In her blog on The Parent Project, she'll be looking back at her experience of being pregnant at work. All views expressed on this blog (or anywhere else on the site) are entirely her own, not those of her employer.