What does your bag say about you - High-powered female executive, or Mommy CEO? Is it the traditional Coach briefcase? The super fancy look-at-me-I'm-a-Mommy designer bag? Maybe you carry one which can manage both baby and work things? Or quite possibly, you've given up on style and just haul around the free one they gave you at the hospital?
As conversations go regarding the Mommy Wars (working moms vs. staying-home moms, and the My-Way-is-Better catfighting between them that the media likes to propagate...), there are really only two topics. Do you leave your career permanently and dedicate the rest of your life to raising your children? Or do you maintain a career and raise a family? Is one a martyr and the other selfish? No. Either stance holds truth and consequences. And nevermind that there is actually a spectrum of choices in between the two.
Technology has brought us the Mompreneur, the Mommy-blogger who makes money from her ads, and a new generation of party consultants like Pampered Chef, Passion Party and Arbonne that make Tupperware and Avon look like relics from the June Cleaver age, a modernizing problem both are trying frantically to solve. And corporations have changed in these modern times, too, offering more employee-focused benefits like flex-time, job-sharing, and providing laptops and crackberries for free, actually increasing productivity by making their employees available to work 24/7. It is possibly to do both career and raise a family, and live to tell about it.
But when the conversation turns to "taking time off" to raise kids, with the intention of going back to your career someday, most opinions become negative. Most people believe leaving work for a few years to stay home full-time and raise kids is career death. But then why are so many doing it?
The trouble with returning back to work after a mid-career break isn't finding a new job, most studies show. Its finding a new job which will give moms the flexible time they think they need in order to maintain the accessibility for their families that they enjoyed while not working. But here, we go back to the same issues surrounding getting hired into any job, at any point in your career. Its not about your needs, its about how you solve problems for that employer. If what you bring to the table solves the right problems for that employer that no one else can, you can get what you want.
However, most companies won't negotiate upfront what you want or need in the way of flexibility and family priorities, unless its clear upfront what you bring to the table. They want to know that as an employee, that you are focused on their needs, not your family's. Most companies want you to prove your worth, first, and then after a trial period may be prepared to offer you more flexibility. So be prepared to go back full time, normal office hours, just like everyone else in that office who doesn't have kids (or have responsibility for them). Get daycare lined up, it won't kill them (it may even help their immune systems). Or if you have family in town, get them to help with the kids. Do whatever you have to do to be able to accept a full time job that puts you back on your original career path.
