by Leslie Morgan Steiner

The good news about returning to work after staying home to raise children.From Stay-at-Home-Mom to Career Woman After the mommy track and the off-ramp, there’s a bracing reality: the empty nest and bank account. If you’ve been out of the work world for a while, read this — but don’t despair. We have plenty of good news to help you plunge back in.

Bonnie Landes Beer’s years at home ended with 45 minutes in a toy store. As she stared at a display of teddy bears to pick out the perfect gift for a child she hardly knew, it hit her: She needed more. Seven years earlier, she’d left her job in marketing for a large beauty company in New York City to take care of her kids, who were then 4 and 1. “I was stretched too thin,” she says of her decision to quit. “I wasn’t being a good mother, partner, or employee.”

But as her kids grew, she became frustrated by days filled with errands and car pools and started thinking about returning — after all, she had a master’s degree from the Kellogg School and plenty of professional ambition. “I wasn’t sure I was ready to ditch my ripped jeans and pull myself together every day. I didn’t know if I could balance the needs of my family with a job,” she says, “but I just wasn’t satisfied without work.” It took three months for Beer, now 44, to edit her resume to emphasize her skills and work experience rather than job chronology. “Writing it was torture,” she says. “I had to confront the reality that years of volunteering at my kids’ school and managing our household budget were meaningless in the work world.” In just a few weeks, however, she landed a consulting job in her former field. Soon after that, she was asked to go full-time. Now, only three years later, Beer has been promoted to vice president at Elizabeth Arden. After her initial uncertainty, she says, “Going back to work felt like getting back on a bike.”

Many of the best and the brightest women choose to go home in the middle of their high-earning years (between the ages of 37 and 42), says Myra Hart, a professor at Harvard Business School. Fifty-seven percent of them are considering going back to work, reports the Boston-based research firm Reach Advisors. How hard is it for them to get rehired? To read some news accounts, it would seem that once women quit, they’re off the job path permanently.

In a famous May 6, 2004, article entitled “After Years Off, Women Struggle to Revive Careers,” the Wall Street Journal profiled several women who had failed to find jobs, including a former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office who became so discouraged after 100 rejections from law firms that she applied for an administrative assistant position, which she didn’t get because she failed the typing test.

Similar horror stories have appeared in the New York Times and on 60 Minutes. Returning to Work The numbers, however, suggest a different story. In research conducted nationwide in 2005 among 2,443 college-educated women of all ages, the Center for Work-Life Policy (CWP) found that 74 percent of women who want to go back to work do manage it. And when MORE talked with hiring managers, headhunters, and dozens of women across the country, we discovered some encouraging news. In our survey, women were able to find full-time jobs — often only a few weeks after sending out their resumes. The difference in the findings most likely stems from MORE’s deliberately narrow focus: women over 40 who had been out of the workforce three to 10 years and who had achieved a certain degree of professional success before leaving. Perhaps most important, we looked at women who were completely committed to finding a new, full-time job. Our methods were admittedly unscientific — and obstacles certainly exist — but our conclusions are supported by a number of hiring professionals. “We’re finding that women who want to come back are having great success,” says Eliza Shanley, a cofounder of Women@Work Network, a resource center for women looking to reenter the workforce. “This is not the story of the woman with an MBA who has to work at Starbucks. You can come back.” Headhunter Julie Daum, from the executive search firm Spencer Stuart, echoes, “It’s important to realize that leaving for a few years is very different from dropping out.”

In some cases, stay-at-home mothers are even sought out by companies. Firms need women in high-ranking positions, and many prestigious consulting, marketing, investment banking, and law firms have begun corporate outreach programs targeting stay-at-home mothers as an untapped pool of talent. In the past few years, top-tier business schools — including Wharton, Harvard, and Dartmouth — have also started programs tailored to high-powered stay-at-home mothers. And new companies, many founded by women with children, are helping place mothers in part-time positions and on temporary projects that may lead to full-time jobs. “Our clients are incredibly excited about these A-plus players coming back to the workforce,” says Sally Thornton, a cofounder of Flexperience, a San Francisco-based company that matches talented mothers with such employers as Levi Strauss & Co.

“No company has too many star employees.” Her point is backed up by Jane Marvin, a senior vice president of human resources for Ross Stores in Pleasanton, California, who has hired three people from Flexperience: “These women are targeted, efficient, focused, and have a kind of flexibility that’s often lacking in someone more junior or someone more concerned with a traditional job path.”

Sometimes on the way back in, though, there are false starts. For example, Beer enrolled in a program toward a degree in social work and dropped out after finishing one class. Part of her disappointment, she says, came from realizing that if she changed fields, she would be making much less money than before. (During her time at home, her family was able to live on her husband’s salary.) As she says, “Figuring out what I didn’t want to do gave me the courage to go back into the beauty business and compete with the perky 25-year-olds.”

Starting a Business

While Beer returned to her old stamping ground eventually, other women feel so changed by their time at home, they want to reinvent themselves. Jodi Dehli Peterson, 44, earned an MBA from the University of Chicago and worked for nine years in sales at a large Minneapolis investment bank before leaving to stay home with her children. When her daughters were 3 1/2 and 2, a tragedy took the life of a friend’s 10-month-old son. Peterson quit the same day. “I realized life was too short to spend doing something that took me away from my kids,” she says. During her five years at home, Peterson’s former employers and colleagues would occasionally call with offers of full-time work. She always turned them down. “I didn’t want to go back to the days when my daughter’s preschool used to check my ID because no one there recognized me,” she says. “I couldn’t imagine a job so compelling that I’d wake up in the middle of the night with ideas about work. And a job had to be that good for me to consider spending that much time away from my kids.”

But one day in November 2004, after she had dropped off her kids at school, Peterson spotted a for-sale sign on the lawn of a house she itched to get her hands on. She had always had a passion for renovation; she’d studied art and architecture in Europe after college and had redesigned her own home. She bought the house and found a partner in architect Ralph Rapson, and their collaboration ultimately landed photographs of it in three luxury-home magazines. Last May, Peterson sold the property, and now her company, Dehli Development, is in growth mode. In starting her own business, Peterson was determined to create a working environment that met her need for flexibility, since a grueling schedule with a lot of travel had been one of the reasons she had left her former employer. “The first thing I did at the site was build a playground so my kids had something to do when I was there working,” she says.

Despite the well-known risks (95 percent of small businesses fail in the first five years, reports the U.S. Small Business Association) and the need for capital, “Starting a business gives women more control of their time and an easy entry back to the world of work,” says Monica McGrath, PhD, academic director of a new reentry program for women at the Wharton School of Business. Says Peterson, “The job was flexible in ways work had never been.” The Volunteering Boost Some women find that their involvement in volunteer work naturally transitions into full-time, paid work. This is most often true for women whose volunteering builds on skills they developed in their professional lives. “Women have gotten very smart about volunteering strategically,” Shanley says. “If they come from PR, they take on the PR job for the fund-raiser. They are bringing to bear all their education, all their critical thinking, all their business skills on those projects — and it can help them make the move back to paid work.”

Jennifer Brown, 42, had been volunteering at the private school her son attends during the five years she stayed home to care for her two kids. Previously, she had been the director of marketing at the International Association of Food Industry Suppliers, in McLean, Virginia. The skills she picked up there came in handy when she was asked to direct alumni involvement at the Maret School. Even so, she was restless. “I was starving for a challenge,” she says. So in 2004, when a friend from Maret recommended Brown for a consulting project at the Washington Scholarship Fund, a K-12 scholarship organization, Brown leaped at the offer. The WSF had just been awarded a $15 million federal grant to pilot the District of Columbia school voucher program for low-income families, and Brown’s consulting job soon turned into a permanent position as chief program officer; she’s just been promoted to interim president. “Getting hired wasn’t difficult,” she says. “It was essentially irrelevant that I had been a stay-at-home mom.”

And while many women do suffer an income penalty from their time out of the office — a CWP study found a 37 percent salary decrease for the first new job women had taken after being out more than three years — Brown also managed to nearly double the salary she’d had before she stopped working. That too is not unusual for this select group of women. Says Shanley: “We are seeing many women get rehired at a comparable salary to the one they left.” Brown did suffer some emotional fallout from the dramatic change she’d made, but her commitment to her professional life made the feelings relatively easy to resolve. “About a month after I returned to work, I realized that I didn’t know all my children’s classmates and I couldn’t volunteer,” she says. “But I don’t want my kids to know the agitated stay-at-home mom desperate for a challenge. For me, going back to work was like taking a bite of a sandwich and suddenly realizing I hadn’t eaten in years.”

The Ambivalence Factor For the most part, high-achieving women who are committed to going back full-time are able to; it’s women with a need for flexibility who are forced to make tradeoffs in salary and risk. “I could find 100 full-time jobs tomorrow,” says a 52-year-old former law firm partner with four kids who has been out for 10 years. “But what I haven’t been able to find in two years of looking is flexible, part-time work that allows me to contribute at a meaningful level and still be there for my kids.” This holds true across diverse professions and geographic locations, says Ellen Galinsky, a cofounder of the Families and Work Institute: “Truly flexible jobs can be difficult to find, especially for people who have been out of the workforce.”

Leaving work to care for children still raises a red flag for some employers, and plenty of unsubtle questions about commitment and reliability get lobbed at women who have spent time at home. Women reentering the workforce after a long absence may also get blindsided by age discrimination, which most likely was not an issue the last time they were out job hunting. “Women over 50 face an additional challenge to their confidence when confronted with a young hiring manager who views them as a potential healthcare drain running from an empty nest,” Wharton’s McGrath says.

Even so, for many MORE readers, the truth about getting back to work is that landing a new job isn’t the tough part; overcoming ambivalence about going back in the first place is. If I go back to work, how will everyone survive? Will my kids resent my absence? And what happened to my dream of scaling back and learning to paint? Fail to resolve these issues, recruiters say, and you’re in trouble. As McGrath puts it, “Even the best company doesn’t want to sense that someone is ambivalent or insecure.” Answering these questions can take months, years — or as little as an afternoon. Jeri Curry Thorne, 39, who had been home for five years after leaving marketing positions at MCI Telecommunications and the Washington Post, recalls, “I had extremely mixed feelings about going back to work full-time but knew that if I didn’t, I might possibly lose my mind.” Her indecision turned into drive when, she says, “during one very, very bad day at home with my two toddlers, I heard that a friend with kids the same ages had been promoted to vice president at a major bank. I brushed up my resume, e-mailed it to a consulting firm, and got a full-time offer within 48 hours.”

Working mother of three Leslie Morgan Steiner is the author of Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families. She currently writes the washingtonpost.com blog On Balance, about work and family.

Originally published in www.more.com as Back in Business: Stay-at-Home Moms Return to the Workforce.