Perhaps you left your job to stay at home with your kids and never looked back. Perhaps you've been living with an insidious, nagging feeling that you should be doing something more ever since you turned in your office badge. Perhaps the recession has hit your family in unexpected ways, and you have no choice but to launch a job search. Perhaps you just put your youngest on the bus to kindergarten (congratulations!) and finally have time to pursue that business idea that came to you so many thousands of diaper changes ago. Whatever your motivation, you can learn from these stories about mothers who overcame obstacles (psychological, logistical, financial) to find their way back into the workforce. Each took a different path, but they all used the most valuable tool in their maternal skill set: improvisation.
Scenario #1: I always loved my work, but the hours? Not so much. How will I ever keep up that pace?
When Nicole Knox, now 36, finished at Northwestern Law in 1999, she headed straight to New York City to join white-shoe law firm Latham & Watkins. "I loved being a corporate lawyer in Manhattan," Knox recalls. "I was working on big deals and transactions and meeting interesting people on all sides. You can get addicted to that lifestyle." She got married a year after she started there and three years later got pregnant with her son, Jackson. Before she had even purchased a crib, she began worrying about how to balance having a baby and her typical 80-to-90-hour workweek. "Maternity leave went really fast," she says. "I was supposed to return right at the point when Jackson was responding, and all of a sudden it was like, I can't leave him!"
She knew that given the intensity of her firm, even its part-time options would feel like full-time, so she gave notice while she was still on leave. But the decision gnawed at her. She reassured herself, thinking she could go back & someday: "I mean, I had all this education. I'd worked so hard. I just didn't have a plan."
Knox wasn't the only one. In the past six years, mothers with advanced degrees have been leaving the workforce in record numbers to be home with their kids. In 2004 the Center for Work-Life Policy launched its Hidden Brain Drain task force, which found that while highly educated mothers were indeed "off-ramping," 93 percent of them eventually wanted a way back in. The only problem? Nearly 30 percent were unable to find positions that matched both their career ambitions and their flexibility demands. Finally, only 40 percent found a job that allowed them to slip out to a pediatrician appointment, a holiday pageant, a Gymboree class. The workplace, as these women knew it, had not caught up with the needs of working parents. Knox herself was unwilling to sacrifice her daily involvement, especially after having her second child, Rachel, two and a half years after Jackson's birth.
"We've all been on the same trajectory since we were little," says Cali Williams Yost, author of Work + Life: Finding the Fit That's Right for You (Riverhead). "We understand success in narrow ways: doing well in school, getting a job, getting promoted." But with kids, she says, we are suddenly forced to adjust our standards for achievement. "We get derailed, because we think there is only one right way to do it." Williams Yost counsels returning moms to redefine what "doing well" means in their new lives: "Maybe it's not working for one of those big companies. Maybe it's project work, or working for yourself or for a small local business." But the first step in getting over the hump is acknowledging that you are a different person now. "You can't take advantage of opportunities if you don't let yourself see them," she says.
Knox found her way back at first by helping a friend of a friend with some basic contracts. "It was a little scary at first," she recalls. "I was like, What the heck am I doing? I'm doing this on my own? How will I do it without the resources of the firm?" Bucking her anxiety, she refused to take on too much. In the first six months, she worked just a scattered 20 hours a month to get a feel for the rhythm. She hired babysitters part-time to get in some daylight work hours and assessed how much she could do after the kids' bedtimes. Now, five years after hanging out her own shingle, she works from home 20 hours a week—a quarter of the hours she once did. "I took it at my own pace," Knox explains. "I do more work from home than ever, but I'm at the point where it naturally fits."
Scenario #2: In this economy, my family could really use more money (especially if my husband's job is in jeopardy)—but won't some newly unemployed candidate get the job over me?
You'd be surprised. In a down economy, paradoxically, women returning to work can have a salary advantage. When a company can't offer supercompetitive payment and benefits, it tends not to attract applicants who are doing better at their current jobs (or did at their terminated ones). But when you haven't been drawing a salary, and the offer is a three-day-a-week job for $50,000, "managers will see you as a cost-effective hire," says Michele Kedem, a senior partner at On-Ramps, a job-placement firm for mid- to executive-level hires. "You're less expensive for them." Bear in mind, too, that there is a reason the current downturn is referred to as a "man-cession": The industries hardest hit by unemployment, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, are housing and manufacturing—both of which are dominated by men. The sectors with the steadiest employment, meanwhile, are education and health care, which are, you guessed it, mostly staffed by women. (Plus, the unemployment rate for college-educated workers is half that for those without college degrees.)
But perhaps most important is knowing where to look: There is a shortage of nurses and teachers, for instance, and social services and nonprofits also tend to be hiring, says Kedem. In this cellar-dwelling, Madoff-ed financial climate, nonprofits are especially looking for people who can generate revenue or fund-raise. (Just don't feel compelled to do a Mother Teresa act in your interview: "You don't want to sound too fluffy or insincere, like, 'I always wanted to do good,'" Kedem says.)
Worried about mounting monthly bills, Philadelphia mother of two Esther Feld, 40, considered working at the mall before she found a part-time hourly-pay job at a local university's enrichment program for elementary schools. "My husband thought it was ridiculous, since I have an MBA," Feld says. "But I was surprised at how much better I feel about our security by earning a paycheck, however small." Best of all, the job is flexible and lets her be home by 3 p.m. "It's important to me to be there when my girls get off the bus, to be able to show up for a poetry reading."
