WITH a successful career, she thought she was empowered to do anything, and that motherhood would be a cinch.
Until post-natal blues hit former newscaster Diana Ser on the third day after she gave birth to son Jake.

Jake is Diana's first child with former-actor-turned-banking executive James Lye.

"I was still in hospital then, because of my caesarean operation. I kept crying for no good reason... I was having major freak-outs, and it lasted a good two months," Diana recalled.

Besides losing control of her emotions, paranoia also seized her. Once, when she saw her confinement nanny and domestic help chatting in the kitchen, she was so convinced that they were talking behind her back that she ran straight to her room to cry.

"I thought I was suffering from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder! I would cry over bad things and happy things. Even when my mum presented Jake with a golden anklet for his first month, I burst into tears."

It didn't help that Jake had very bad jaundice when he was born and that Diana had problems breastfeeding him.

At the back of her mind, she understood that she was going through post-natal depression.

Thankfully though, she was lucid enough never to vent her frustrations on her baby.

" When it came to his feeding time, he would cry, I would cry. But I would take a walk, calm down, and then go back inside to try again."

It took Diana, 35, two months to pull herself out of the rut.

As her contract with Channel NewsAsia ended just before the birth of Jake, Diana was originally toying with the idea of becoming a full-time mum.

"I wanted to be there for all his 'firsts'."

But now she admits, the idea of taking care of Jake 24-7, actually scares her.

"It's stressful to be a full-time mum. Being a working mother makes me feel more alive even though it's physically tiring."

Diana recently bought into a marketing solutions consultancy IMSG, where she now sits as director. There are no plans for her to return to TV anytime soon yet, but she says "it's still in my blood".

Her new job, which entails Diana training corporate clients on the finer ways of dealing with the media, allows her to work from home.

And when client meetings takes her out of the home, she makes it a point to make it home in time for six-month-old Jake's meal and bathing times.

Mother-and-son bonding time is their nightly tickling sessions before Jake goes to bed.

As for James (Diana calls him and Jake "my two babies"), he is apparently already trying to teach his young son the golf swing.

Weekends for the couple are also now spent shuttling between the two sets of grandparents.

The couple have not made plans yet for Mother's Day celebrations, but Diana said that they plan to go away to Hong Kong for a quick getaway at the end of the month, just James and her.

"Having a child is a life-changing event. It feels like you can just do about anything now ."

This story first appeared in The New Paper on May 13, 2007