A high flying lawyer took just 10 days off on maternity leave with her first child and only a fortnight with her second - to prove women can run a business AND be a mother.

Caroline Swain’s children, now aged one and two, were born 13 months apart and were in childcare from the age of six weeks old.

Having built up her business, BPS Family Law, from scratch, the 31-year-old was determined that having children wasn’t going to stand in the way of professional success.

She said: “I wanted to show that you can work and run a business as well as be a mother. I didn’t want my work life to change just because I’d started a family. I didn’t just want to become a mum, I wanted to carry on building the business as well as being a wife and a mother at the same time.”

Caroline had help in the early days from mum Kay and husband Sam, who spread his paternity leave out to take on childcare some mornings and some afternoons.

After being with a childminder from six weeks old Blake then went to nursery when he was six months. His little sister Sofia joined him there when she too was six weeks old.

Caroline with stepdaughter Sienna and daughter Sofia

Caroline, who is getting ready to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the Hale and Manchester city centre-based practice, said: “We all know clients want a solicitor who knows the case and has built up the case for them. So that’s another reason why I wanted to be back at work as soon as possible.

“It’s my passion and I love doing it. If it was a nine to five office job with restricted hours then it would be different, I wouldn’t have been able to do that, but to some extent I could work the hours around me. If I needed to leave at 3pm, I could.”

The former Sale Grammar School pupil, who lives in Warrington, represents well-known celebrities in multi-million pound disputes and also works on children disputes, grandparents’ rights cases, civil partnerships, injunctions and cohabitation disputes.

She said: “When I tell people that I didn’t really take time off I get mixed reactions. I never put work before my children but if I didn’t work they wouldn’t have the life they have now, we wouldn’t have the nice house and be able to go to nice places and they wouldn’t be able to go to the nice schools that they’ll go to.

“I knew I wanted to have the children close together so if I’d have taken a long maternity leave I would have been off for more than two years having them back to back. I would have been completely starting from scratch.

Caroline with son Blake

“A lot of our work comes from referrals and the firm is growing really quickly because our clients are happy. If I’d have stayed off we wouldn’t have had that.”

Caroline worked right up until she was due with both of her children. In fact, she was still in work on the day she had her first child. A midwife appointment later in the day revealed her high blood pressure was worsening and she was booked in for an induction.

Caroline admits she sometimes feel guilty when she sees how quickly her son and daughter are growing, but was afraid that if she’d taken any more time off she would have lost the business she’d worked so hard to build.

She said: “I look at them and see how big they’re getting but I don’t remember feeling massive guilt about leaving them.

“It’s not an easy decision to give up or carry on work when you’ve had a baby but I just think about where the business would be if I’d have stayed off and where we would be as a family. It’s about all of us.”