You sound like a wonderful mother, and I bet when your daughter IY”H has a baby of her own she’ll be singing a different tune!
However I am shocked by the overall gist of your post. I don’t know anyone (although I’m sure they do exist, infrequently) who “don’t hesitate or mind going back to work as early as 6 weeks postpartum”!! I cried hysterically the entire way to work when I returned at 6 weeks, not because I wanted to but because we needed the Parnassah. Many of my friends and co-workers did the same. I don’t know what type of job you had, but in the U.S. many employers do not pay any salary during maternity leave (none of mine ever did), so the only money I received after a baby was via disability insurance which only pays for 6 weeks (8 with a c-section). And a U.S. employer is not even obligated to hold your job for more than 12 weeks (under FMLA), so taking off a year may mean you have no job at the end of that year! Additionally my health insurance was through my employer, and I would have lost that as well if I took off more than 12 weeks.
The only thing keeping me going was the fact that I believed having a husband in learning was worth it. This was a decision I felt strongly about — but it certainly wasn’t easy. I’ve discussed many times with friends in similar situations that the true “mesiras nefesh” we have for learning has nothing to do with histapkus b’muat and less money — we were all fine with that. It was the heart-wrenching pain of leaving our young babies to come to work that was true “mesiras nefesh” — really giving up our very “nefesh” for the sake of what we believed. Maybe I just travel in different circles than you, but I find your implication that mothers who go back to work at 6 weeks don’t want to spend time with their babies to be very off target. (There were points when I had 3 or 4 co-workers with newborns pumping together, and that underlying current of being torn in half was ALWAYS there.)