Presenter: For half a year, Sharon Trollope is a stay-⁠at-⁠home mother. But the rest of the time, she’s an aid worker in desperate situations around the globe. We asked her to describe how her family copes with the change.

Sharon: For every working mother, that moment when you open the front door at the end of a long, hard day, and see your children hurtling down the hallway towards you it makes your heart skip. But for me it’s extra special because by the time I reach my front door it is often more than a month since I saw them.

For almost three years, I’ve been on call as a British Red Cross aid worker. The phone rings and  — sometimes within 48 hours  — I’m on a flight to wherever my skills are needed most. For up to six months of every year, I’m on the other side of the world, working in desperate situations. Meanwhile, home alone in the Cotswolds, my husband Julian copes heroically with a sudden switch to life as a single dad to Rowan, who is 11, and Finnian, who is seven, and Orla, six.

Although I try never to be away for longer than five weeks, that is still a painfully long time to be separated from them all, and I know it’s very hard on them too. Julian does a fantastic job on his own with them  — while holding down a job as a computer scientist  — but five weeks is as long as any of us can manage, practically and emotionally.

At the most recent school parents’ evening, Orla’s teacher took me to one side and said that she had been very withdrawn during my last stint in Haiti. I thought I felt as guilty as it was possible to feel about it, but at that moment my heart sank to a new low.

Presenter: So, how do you feel about it?

Sharon: I do feel guilty about leaving them, about not being there and not talking to them every day.

Presenter: Then why do you do it to them, and to your poor husband, and yourself?

Sharon: The answer is because I have no doubt  — on all but the most exhausting days in the field  — that the benefits to us all far outweigh the downsides.

After my family, aid work is what I am most passionate about. I have a degree in development studies and a Masters in irrigation, and soon as I graduated I started working abroad. But then, later in my twenties, I met Julian and realised that I wanted to have a family, I decided I’d better switch from aid work to teaching, to make it possible. I taught for a short while but my heart was never in it. When Rowan, our eldest was about one, I got a job with the British government in Botswana, so we moved there as a family for a year.

With just one, very small, child, it was possible to live that life. But as our second and third children came along, I felt as though I had to accept that aid work and motherhood simply don’t mix. I was unemployed for a number of years and although I loved being a mum, I felt that having lost my work I’d lost a really big part of who I was.

Presenter: Was it easy, to find yourself again?

Sharon: Well, even if you’re keen to return to the field, as a woman with children it’s very hard to find agencies willing to take you on. The job requires the kind of flexibility and commitment a lot of men and women with families would struggle to meet. But Julian saw how important it was for me to get back to doing what I do. I was qualified to do it and, until I became a mother I had relished the challenges that every assignment threw at me.

He saw the effect that not being able to do it was having on me. It changed me. My confidence was sapped and I felt so frustrated. Thankfully, he didn’t want having had kids to cut me off from such an important part of my life. We didn’t want to set that example for the kids. He wanted to find a way to make it work, and without his support it just wouldn’t have been possible.