IntoFactories.NET

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This approach tries to combine the best of both worlds. It recognizes that a full-time job is not the most important thing in the world, but moms are also interested in things outside the home. So instead, you can combine various parts of a fulfilling life by having your children and spending time with them while you (and they) are young, then bringing them along during your ride through the career world.

Will everything go perfectly? Probably not. If motherhood means anything, it’s accepting a certain messiness. This philosophy also relies on enlightened men who want their wives to have it all too, and who are willing to indulge less in the cult of the career themselves to make that happen. Fortunately, the culture seems to be moving that way. One of my favorite Baby Blues cartoons shows husband Darryl MacPherson watching a 1950’s TV sitcom, wondering why it’s inherently funny that the father has to take care of the kids for a weekend while mom is out of town. What is he, incompetent?—MacPherson asks. I once interviewed a molecular biology student on a biotech research track who informed me she planned to have a fight with her husband over what they both saw as a privilege—“which one of us gets to stay home with the kids.”

HP’s research raised a million other questions—such as what companies can do to help valuable employees who happen to be moms. Probably a lot. It’s always amazed me how few corporations offer emergency day care for parents when something goes awry, even though the current solution—parents taking “sick days”—probably costs the company more.

But the most important idea to take away from HP’s book is that if you want both kids and a career, you can make it happen, as long as you don’t buy completely into either cult mentality. You may have to make adjustments on both fronts. One profile of Mark-Jusbasche, for instance, noted that she felt bad about missing some aspects of her boys’ growing up, and ultimately she scaled back her career to spend more time with them (just in time, it turned out, to miss the worst of the Enron mess).

But you can do both if you define your priorities, and find a way to make it happen. Said Hewlett herself on the Today show, “In the end, it’s in the hands, I think, of the individual woman.” And no individual woman’s life needs to be all one way or the other.