The comeback | Resuming a career after having a family

I, too, dreamt of a domestic world that was entirely under my control. Back then, I had little professional ambition – unlike my daughter, who wants to skip the stage called “lawyer” and get straight to the platform of “judge”. I imagined the number of children I would have (five boys), the kitchen I would cook in (large country farmhouse), even the clothes I would wear (beige tweeds – yes, tweeds). Today, I’m the mother of two girls, cook in a small kitchen in a flat in New York and wear an enormous amount of black.

So much for my life plan.

I recently published my first book in 15 years. It’s called The Comeback: Seven Stories of Women Who Went from Career to Family and Back Again, although there are eight stories if you include my own. My career as a journalist ground to a halt when Molly was born in 1997 and for the next seven years my existence was exclusively domestic. None of my decisions was planned. In fact, if there is one central theme that unites the stories in my book, it is that all the planning in the world is not going to give you the life you end up living.

But if you look at the richness of the years of the mothers in The Comeback, you could argue convincingly that it is the unplanned life that is worth living.

I stopped working mainly because I didn’t want to travel for stories and be away from my baby. Judith Feder, the subject of the first story in my collection, gave up her career when her twins were born prematurely with real health and developmental problems. Neither of us had any idea how long we would be away from the workforce. Judith ended up being gone for ten years before resuming her career as a venture capitalist. Both of us faced a severe loss of self-confidence during our time at home, as did most of the other mothers in the book.

If the health of her children was the reason Judith stopped work, their safety made Lauren Jacobson’s decision for her. A successful lawyer in Johannesburg, Lauren fled South Africa for London when she, her husband and her two small sons were held up at gunpoint. During her time away from the workforce, she had to create a new home in a new country for her family to feel secure in – all of which she achieved with admirable efficiency and empathy.

But if you’d told her during that time that she would work again, she would have looked at you with real irritation. With her, too, the loss of professional identity meant a loss of self-confidence. Yet today she is the managing director of the charity One to One Children’s Fund. She has had more than one job since resuming work several years ago and, with the perspective of today’s vantage point, knows that if she were to leave again she would most definitely be able to return.

It is that perspective that I have been trying to provide. In recent interviews about the book I have been asked again and again for “tips” for women thinking about resuming their careers. But what women need before they hear any tips is the confidence to be able to pick up the phone or send an e-mail or walk out of the door. I think that confidence comes from perspective.

Elaine Stone was the most confident of the women in my book during her time at home because she gave herself a finite amount of time to be away from her career. Elaine was a lawyer in Texas, married to a rabbi who found a better job with a congregation near Washington DC. The couple had two daughters of primary school age when the family moved, and for a while after the move, Elaine commuted back to Texas every week for a trial. That kind of brutal timetable – and the money it provided – meant that with the birth of her third child, Elaine stopped working and stayed at home for five years. She knew that when her new son, Zach, entered nursery school, she would go back to work. She continued to stay in touch with colleagues and resumed her career by working on short-term legal projects. This route led her to one of Washington DC’s most prestigious law firms, where she is now a partner.