Excerpt: 'The Comeback'
Emma Keller's new book explores women who go back to work after having kids.
Sept. 5, 2008 — -- In Emma Keller's new book, she examines seven women who led fulfilling lives with high-powered careers. Then they decided to step back to have a family.
Then they were faced with a question that thousands of women have struggled with: As far as careers go, is there career after birth?
Each chose to try to get back into the working world they left behind despite the many extra challenges that a family brings. They all succeeded and Keller's book tells how.
Read an excerpt from the book below, and also read other excerpts featured on "Good Morning America" by clicking here.
You can have it all, but not all at once. - Arlene Cadozo
I was thirty-two when my first book was published in 1993. This is my second book. I haven't been working on it for fifteen years, but it does contain much of my experience from that time. To put it another way, if it weren't for those fifteen years, this book wouldn't exist.
My first book?a biography of Winnie Mandela?took me three years to write. During that time I did nothing but work on the book. No vacations, no romances, not much social life. My work was my world, and when it was published I felt a sense of loss as well as achievement. I used to tell people that handing in a book was my version of having a baby. I now had something concrete to show for all that gestation, but I was suffering from a little postpartum depression. I forced the metaphor still further by describing my book party as the equivalent of a wedding celebration. I remember getting dressed for it in a little black dress, black tights, and black heels and joking that it was cool to wear black instead of white. Instead of being married with children, I was celebrating being a successful single career woman. And that was fine. When you're thirty-two years old, that is absolutely fine.
I had always taken my work seriously, but until the book I had managed to have a vigorous social life as well. My first job in journalism was in the eighties at Roll Call newspaper in Washington, D.C., staffed mainly by twenty-somethings who didn't take themselves very seriously. The mandate of our weekly paper was to cover the Congress for the Congress. The mandate of our newsroom was to joke about the Congress for our own pleasure. My beat was to cover women members and wives of members. It was my idea. I wanted to explore the role of the wife in the changing world of late-twentiethcentury Washington.
That same idea lay behind the appeal of covering Winnie Mandela's trial in South Africa in 1990. I had long left Roll Call, first to a brief stint in the press office of Al Gore's 1988 presidential campaign and then to ABC News's Washington bureau. By the time I got to South Africa at the end of 1989, I had decided to become a freelance journalist. I only wanted to write about what I was interested in. And Winnie Mandela's life incorporated everything I liked to cover? women, politics, and crime. Writing a book about her at the end of her trial was a logical next step.
When your work is your world and you fall in love, things have to change a little, sometimes a lot. When I fell in love with Bill Keller, who at the time was the foreign news editor of the New York Times, I had to learn how to make room. By then the book had been published and I was in demand as a feature writer. I lived alone in a small, very pretty, cottage in Sag Harbor, New York. I had an enormous view of the Long Island Sound from most windows, a fireplace, a cat, and a television. I still didn't have much of a social life. My assignments took me around the United States doing magazine pieces and stories for the Sunday Times of London, then the Sunday Telegraph. I could shut up my little house and go anywhere at a moment's notice. But when I came home again, it was me, the cat, and (more often than not) a bowl of ramen noodles.
Over the years I have continuously thanked Bill for rescuing me from what I call "certain spinsterhood." He thinks I'm joking. I'm not.
How do you make room for a relationship? How do you make room for a child? Every woman does it her own way. My way, my allor- nothing way, was to ditch work completely and concentrate all my energy on my family. I gave up the cottage. The cat made the altruistic move of running away by itself. I sold my convertible and moved into the city to a large family-size apartment a block from the park. Molly was born two weeks after we moved in.
Some decisions make themselves, and some decisions aren't even decisions. You turn down one piece of work because you don't want to travel, another because you're tired, then another because your brain feels rusty?and before you know it, three years have gone by and you can list every child's activity in your neighborhood, every kids TV show, every baby food product and clothing label, and you're telling people you are thinking of writing for Sesame Street. You weigh about twenty pounds more than you ever imagined, and people who are put next to you at dinner parties ask you for your husband's opinions.
This became my life?and I loved it. It was cozy. I loved my baby and loved the novelty of being a mother. I loved staying in one place. I actually loved not having to think. But I had a friend once who after a few years of motherhood asked how it was possible that so much love and so much boredom could coexist in the same breast. And some days on the playground I knew exactly what she was talking about.
To offset the ennui of dealing solely with small children, some women live vicariously in their husband's world during their years at home. This is particularly easy when your husband's world is one you used to inhabit yourself. If you worked in finance and your husband is at a merchant bank, or you are both used to affecting government policy, or you were a journalist and your husband is now the managing editor of the New York Times, the dinnertime conversation has somewhere to go besides baby's first steps. My husband was promoted to managing editor at about the time Molly was born. We talked about news stories all the time. I didn't lose my brain, but I was losing my identity. I'm not joking when I tell you that people used to come up to me and ask me what Bill thought about X, Y or Z. Nor am I joking when I used to answer, "He thinks that . . ." before telling them what I thought.
Did I feel "invisible"? I felt too fat to be invisible!
When Peggy Orenstein interviewed women about their life choices in 2000 for her book Flux, she came to the conclusion that the women she surveyed who decided to leave the workforce when they had their children "[a]lmost universally . . . were married to men who worked long hours, earning far more money than they ever could. That allowed them the luxury of 'choosing' to quit their jobs, but it also created a situation in which they felt they had to. The demands of their husbands' jobs, which they felt were inviolable, left them solely responsible for childcare and household management. Layering those tasks over full-time work quickly became overwhelming."
As far as my situation was concerned, Orenstein had it exactly right. Bill worked long hours and earned a lot more money than I could. Someone had to run the household. I did feel that the demands of his job were inviolable, but his job wasn't a burden to our lifestyle; to me it was an exciting reminder of the world I had decided to leave for the time being.
The home I was creating for our family had many similarities to the one I had grown up in. I was born and raised in London into a world where women of my background didn't attend college. Instead?even in the 1980s?they got married. The year I went to King's College London only a handful of the other girls who were leaving my convent boarding school were doing the same thing. Today, thirty years later, almost every girl who leaves the same school goes on to a place at a decent college.
I was brought up to be more now than then. My American mother, who had gone to college in New York, had met my English father while they were both working journalists in Paris. I was a dual national, and my mother never stopped telling me that I was only "half English," just as much an American as a Brit. She was trying to give me a sense of my options, but as a young child who only wanted to fit in, I hated the reminders. Anyway, she was as keen to fit in as I was. On having her children (three in all), she did as the other London mothers she knew did and stayed home in her large white house with her family, a live-in au pair, and a nanny. But this was not the world she was used to, and she was never comfortable in it. Once we were at school, she left my father and returned to journalism. She had previously been a successful feature writer for the New York Herald- Tribune. Now she went back to the same career at the same paper, though in her second incarnation she was a freelancer, fitting in her pieces around her family. She still got quality assignments, though. I remember her trying to explain to us in the late 1960s why interviewing the Beatles was exciting.
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