Hundreds of thousands of people each month search on Google for “work from home jobs” (yes, I checked.) “Work from home” is one of the most popular searches right here on Workitmom.com and sites that claim to list work from home jobs get tons of traffic (whether they are actually listing good opportunities or not is another question all together.) I, personally, get many emails each week from our members asking if I could suggest jobs they can do from home.

Why do so many moms want to work from home? (I know that many non-moms do too, but we’re a community for moms, so let’s talk about ourselves, shall we?)

Let me start with somewhat of a confession: I kind of hate working from home.

I’ve now done it for a year and a half, ever since I left my office finance job to launch Work It, Mom!. Since we’re a bootstrapped start-up we didn’t want to spend money on office space so it made sense. We also don’t have a huge team that works in the same place.

At first, I was really excited about it. We’d just moved from a tiny apartment in New York City to a nice little house in Boston suburbs which had a quite, sunny little third bedroom, which I made my office. I painted it an awesome warm color (Casabella, if you’re curious), hung up my favorite Modigliani print, surrounded my desk with many photos of my family and even got a few French lavender candles for that ooh-la-la touch.

I loved being able to take my daughter to school in the morning and then come back, make a nice cup of coffee and sit down at my computer with sun streaming through the window. I loved being able to make my favorite breakfast every day — egg white omelet and toasted English muffin with peanut butter and sliced bananas — and to be able to sneak away to a Pilates class in the middle of the day. I loved being able to pick up my daughter from school, drive her home, and then when the babysitter came, go upstairs to do more work.

I loved all of this until I began to feel extremely isolated. Until even my organizational discipline began to fail and I would find myself making dinner in the middle of the day because well, I was home and I should make a stew (but really I was cooking off some stress.) Until I began to despise the complete lack of separation of my work and non-work life — since my work was at home I could always be doing it, and if I weren’t doing it, I was thinking about it, my laptop luring me at all hours of the day and night. Until I realized that my favorite breakfasts were quickly followed by my favorite snacks and my favorite lunches and I was packing on some pounds. Until I became endlessly annoyed with friends and family who would call me during the day and if I didn’t pick up the phone got upset because “you’re at home, why can’t you talk?”. Until I got tired of explaining to people that just because I work from home does not mean that I don’t have a real job with real responsibilities. Until I had to leave the house every afternoon to work from coffee shops and the library because my daughter and her babysitter playing and singing outside my office became too distracting.

Yes, there are surely benefits to working from home: Flexibility, not wasting time commuting, ability to work in your pajamas on those off days when you can’t deal with getting all dressed up, and if your kids are a bit older, not having to take off when they are sick because they can watch TV while you get work done next to them. I completely appreciate those.

But it’s not a perfect arrangement and telecommuting doesn’t work for everyone. (Check out this great discussion about the pros and cons of working from home.) I think having the ability to work from home some of the time is a huge, huge benefit, when your kids are sick for example or when your daycare is closed or the babysitter can’t come. But my advice, learned from my own experience, is to not idealize working from home and to think very carefully about whether it’s something that will really work for you.

Sound off: Do you work from home and like it? What are some of the downsides? Do you prefer to work in an office?