When a woman gives birth to a baby, she is often faced with the dilemma of whether to stay home to care for her newborn or return to her 9 to 5.

According to a recently released report from the U.S. Census Bureau last year, nearly 11 million children under age 15 are raised by a full-time stay-at-home mom, a 13 percent increase from less than a decade ago.

Marlese Durr, Ph.D., associate professor and director of Women's Studies at Wright State University in Dayton, OH, says that this increase could simply be due to the state of distress the country's economy is in.

"I believe the rise in the number of stay-at-home moms could be due to the increase in the nation's unemployment rate. As economic restructuring continues its run from the 1980s into the new century, being a stay-at-home may not be an option, but something women do because they are out of work, or displaced and restructured," says Durr.

"For African-American women who are increasingly becoming the heads of households, whether through divorce, widowhood, or opting for single parenthood, being displaced or restructured (pre-or post-9/11) may be part of their decision to be a stay-at-home mom."

While Durr's theory may apply to many mothers, there is still a growing number of women choosing to leave their corporate jobs and stay at home to raise their children not for economic reasons, but simply because they want to.

For Atlanta mom Angela Howell, 35, a former mechanical engineer, leaving her job to stay at home with her two children, Alaina, 2, and Evan, four months, was a no brainer. She and her husband of six years, Glenn, also an engineer, had made this decision about parenting early on in their relationship.

"Before my husband and I got married it was already discussed that once we decided to have children, I would devote full-time to being a mom and just leave corporate America," says Howell, who believes that being a stay-at-home mom is the ultimate display of love and affection for a child during its formative years. "The more we talked about it, the easier the decision became. It's probably one of the best choices that we've made."

Like most mothers in Howell's position, she is able to remain home with her children because the family can afford to live on one salary.

"Peace of mind is priceless," Howell says. "Prior to our having children, my husband and I lived so that we would be able to manage on one income. Even when we built our home, we were looking in the price range that one salary could sustain.

"We always planned to live life like this, and if I ever go back to work then my salary would just be gravy."

Kuae Mattox, 38, of Montclair, NJ, quit her high-profile job as an NBC News producer after taking maternity leave with her second child. Mattox says that she always thought about being a stay-at-home mom to her children Teddi Noel, 6, Cole Benoit, 3, and Evan Simone, 4 months, while her husband Teddy worked as a magazine executive, but it was her mother's death that helped her make the final decision.

"My mom's passing was really a large part of my wanting to savor each and every moment with my children," explains Mattox. "[Her death] helped me to understand that life is very short. While I am here I'd like to be able to say that I have done as much as I can to give these children the right start in their lives."

The transition from being a career woman one minute to a stay-at-home mom the next takes some getting used to for many women and Mattox admits that it was definitely a challenge for her.

"I wasn't comfortable saying to [people] 'Yes, I'm a stay-at-home mom.' I really wanted to rattle off my resume because my career has been so much a part of my identity. It took a good two years for me to resolve that."

Mattox now fully respects and appreciates her new job but says that being a stay-at-home mom is only for a "season" of her life and that she does plan to return to her journalistic career in one form or another.

"My thought is that when my third child, Evan, goes to kindergarten, I will probably get back in the work force. It may not be the same job, but my career will always be there for me whenever I'm ready to go back to it--if I want to go back to it. My children will not be children forever."

Jolene Ivey's parenting experience is not that different from Howell's or Mattox's. As a child, Ivey, 42, was a latchkey kid until junior high school, when her stepmother retired.

"It was an amazing thing for me to come home to her. She would have dinner cooking and be there to talk. It was great! I decided then that my kids would have me at home instead of going to a baby sitter," explains Ivey.

"When I started dating my husband, I told him that I wanted to get married, have kids and stay home, and if he wasn't interested, then we didn't need to keep dating. He was comfortable with that, and it has worked out great for us." Today, Ivey and her husband Glenn, state's attorney for Prince George's County, MD, are the parents of five boys: Alex, 13, David, 10, Julian, 8, Troy, 5, and Aaron, 3.

After some time of only having her boys to keep her company, Ivey, once a press secretary on Capitol Hill, longed for the conversation of other mothers in her situation.

"Sometimes I just felt lonely for other women who were experiencing the same kind of life I was living," says Ivey.

"White moms don't necessarily look at things the way [we] do."

In the spring of 1997 Ivey and friend Karla Chustz had the idea to publish a newsletter, Mocha Moms, in hopes of connecting with other mothers of color across the country who were taking time off from their careers to raise their children. That April the first newsletter was published and the first support meeting followed in January of 1998.

The word about the newsletter and the organization spread fast.

"Word of mouth was also critical," says Ivey, who lives in Cheverly, MD. "We mailed or gave [the newsletter] to anyone we thought would be interested. I also posted notices at online bulletin boards that targeted African-American mothers. Black at-home moms just started coming out of the woodwork!"

Today Mocha Moms, Inc. has 120 chapters all across the United States with a membership of more than 1,000, including Howell, who serves as the Atlanta chapter's co-president and Mattox who is Essex County, NJ, president and the director of national media relations.

The organization has become well known and takes pride in its community service projects and volunteerism as well as its support for its fellow stay-at-home moms.

Ivey is pleased with the fact that what once started out as a simple supportive newsletter has grown into something far greater than she expected.

At that time, I had recently left my job as an associate producer at Dateline NBC to work at an Internet start-up. I had been wooed by stock options and the ability to work from home. But my company was on the verge of imploding as the dot-com bubble was bursting and I was itching to go back into television, a career I had truly adored. I had thrived on the rip of adrenaline breaking news gave me — the chase, the conquest, the addictive feeling of being a part of history. On September 11, 2001, when two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, my infant son, Jonah, was sleeping soundly on me, molded to my chest. While I watched the towers crumble on TV and smelled my delicious baby on top of me, I suddenly felt conflicted.

I wanted desperately to be covering the story, the biggest news event of our generation. As the story evolved over the next few weeks, I started speaking to former colleagues about freelancing for NBC. They needed additional bodies and I wanted to sign up. But how could I leave my infant for what would have been long days, if not weeks on end? For the next few months I continued to grapple with how I could go back into television. I was on the outskirts of this historic event and I couldn’t stand it. Instead of field producing in Afghanistan, I was breastfeeding at Starbucks.

For the first time ever my clear career path was suddenly as opaque as the Calvin Klein tights I used to wear to work. Had motherhood permanently obstructed my Big Career plans? Many of the moms I initially met couldn’t really relate to my growing restlessness. They had made peace with their decision to stay home and were getting settled into their routines of fulltime at-home mommyhood. As I became more antsy, they seemed more content. Part of me envied them for being so thrilled with motherhood and not appearing to need more. And part of me was simply bothered by their satisfaction. I just didn’t get it. I found myself getting sucked into traditional stereotypes of what defines a “Good Mother” and I began fearing that I simply wasn’t good enough.

If I were good enough, I figured, I should be relishing motherhood, not feeling a relentless churning for something more. It was at this time that the inspiration for this book evolved. I was shocked to discover that so many smart, talented women were dropping out of the work force or “opting out” as New York Times writer Lisa Belkin called it. We’re the women who were raised in an environment where anything was supposed to be possible. We’re the ones who had the doors to advancement jimmied open for us to waltz through, so why were so many women turning on their heels and leaving once they became mothers? Had all of these women embraced their inner Marthas and discovered domestic bliss and fulfillment in baking the perfect linzer tortes as some headlines suggest?

I felt desperate to find moms who weren’t dropping out but staying in — and I was equally desperate to discover how were they doing it all. As I wrestled with what to do, I looked for support — beyond the “New Mommy” group — and asked other women about how they handled this tricky work-family quandary. When I shared my concerns about how to have a fantastic career and still be a great mommy, I found that I wasn’t alone. While some moms seemed genuinely happy to take a mid-career sabbatical because they both wanted to and could afford to stay at home, many more women I met were, like myself, feeling anxious because they too wanted to work and were trying to figure out how to merge their career with motherhood.

The “balance” everyone talks about, that Holy Grail for working moms, was much more nuanced and complicated than we had ever anticipated. The dirty truth that no one wants to admit is that the world works against the Stay-at-Work mom. We were led to believe that career women could gracefully maneuver motherhood into already bustling lives. But ask any new mom and we’re simply stumbling along blindly trying to stay afoot, to please everyone, and to make sense of our suddenly conflicted identities. Every mother I met seemed desperate to hear about how other women strike that precarious balance in their lives between motherhood and career.

How do they do it? What are the tradeoffs? How do they handle the inevitable conflicts? How do they reconcile the guilt? How do they come to terms with their own ambition? Are they happy? Is there anything they regret? What are the options out there? Despite growing up at a time when more and more women worked, we had few examples showing us how we were going to succeed at being both great moms and women with fabulous careers. Ours was the generation who grew up and came of age watching

The Cosby Show’s smiling Claire Huxtable, the witty, tough mother of five who allegedly worked full-time as a lawyer but was always around for dinner and endless chit chat. She never seemed stressed or fried from work. She never bitched about clients or mentioned that she couldn’t make it to Rudy’s ballet recital or Theo’s soccer game because of a grueling caseload. But as we’ve all now learned, The Cosby Show epitomized the idyllic family sitcom, not reality TV. So how are real women doing it? What We Really Want The topic of Stay-at-Work Moms vs. Stay-at-Home Moms is an explosive one.

It strikes at the very nerve center of who we are as women and as mothers. It taps into our personal insecurities and unfairly forces us to respond to society’s expectations both in the workforce and at home. It challenges our priorities and identities and it sometimes leaves us feeling as if we simply can’t win. While much has been made about our generation expecting and wanting to “have it all,” women today are redefining what “all” means.

For women today, definitions of “success” have more to do with job satisfaction and flexibility than with prestige and position. Women want to be respected and compensated fairly in our jobs even if we work three or four days a week at the office. We want flextime, part-time and job-share to be viewed not as a privilege but as an integral part of the work culture. We want the freedom to amp up when we are ready and to cut back if we need to slow things down.

Because we often learn best through the prism of other women’s experiences I’ve chosen to share the stories of dozens of Stay-at-Work mothers, both ordinary and well known, who can inspire us and teach us the lessons they have learned along their journey of motherhood. The famous moms I have profiled each have life experiences that make them role models for the rest of us. Yes, many of their lives are privileged and undeniably made easier because they are financially able to afford more help.

But all of these women have something special to contribute that makes them real and relevant to regular women. And perhaps what’s most important about the “celebrity” mothers is that while they can afford to not work, they choose to work. We will hear from moms about how to deal with the crunch of work and family, how to assuage the inevitable guilt, how to find the courage to switch careers, how to get what you need, even in an unfriendly family work environment, and how to ultimately find that comfortable work-family ratio we are all hoping to achieve. For two years I have interviewed and surveyed more than one hundred women.

My interviews do not represent a scientific sampling. It’s what sociologists call the “snowball” method. I spoke to my friends and friends of friends. I met with working mother groups and I sent out surveys across the country. I spoke to women on playgrounds and at pre-school and even in my pediatrician’s office. I talked to women in coffee shops, dog runs and at birthday parties. The women I met crossed ethnic, racial, religious and regional lines. Most are married and all have college degrees. Author Peggy Orenstein says that “having a college education is crucial to the architecture of the female self.” It makes sense that a college education is instrumental in giving women the ability to create opportunities for themselves. So I wanted to talk to the generation of women who grew up believing that they had lots of options and that if they went to school, did well and worked hard enough, anything was possible.

The women who I interviewed grew up all over the country but at the time I spoke to them they lived in Portland, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, Minneapolis, Miami, New York and its suburbs, and the Washington, DC area. In some instances, at the request of the women I interviewed, I have changed names and those of the companies where they work. While my research was not scientific, it yielded thematic results. It is in using these themes that I have structured the book. For me, this project began as a rather selfish journey. When I started, my son was a toddler.

Having endured four months of colic with a baby who sapped all of my energy, and missing life in TV, I was anxious to resume my broadcasting career and do some interesting work again. I was prepared to work full time. I was even ready to travel. But two years after I began this project my son is three and a half and I also now have an eighteen-month-old daughter. I’ve found that as my family has grown, my priorities keep shifting. The thought of extensive traveling for work is no longer appealing. The hours of most network TV jobs are equally daunting. I now feel that dropping my son off at pre-school and watching him learn how to kick a goal on the soccer field on a Monday afternoon is as important to me as producing a story with NBC’s Stone Phillips. I see time racing by and I want to be able to savor more of those fleeting moments. This does not mean that I don’t want to work. It just means that I want to redefine what it is that I’m doing and how I can do it.

I walk away from this book realizing that there is no right or wrong way of satisfying the dual desires of career and motherhood. Similarly, there is no perfect formula and no one-size-fits-all solution because our needs as mothers are not static — they change over time and vary considerably amongst women. But what I’ve found is that all of us want more options — various ways to integrate our families with our careers.

Women don’t have to feel stuck at the intersection of career and motherhood. We need to continue demanding change in the workforce while creating even more opportunities for ourselves. I use the term Stay-at-Work Moms because this book is about women who have chosen to stay in the workforce.

Yes, most Stay-at-Work Moms also financially need their income to pay their bills and afford their lifestyles, but everyone in this book is also working because they want to have a career. Our careers help define us, they make us feel complete, they enhance our well being and our relationships and give us a more secure financial future.

It is my hope that by reading the stories and experiences in this book, moms will find solutions and options for themselves to inspire and empower them in their quest to have at least some of it — all of the time.

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