Whether you return to work happily or reluctantly at the end of your maternity leave can be a true test of the career you chose in your 20s or late teens. Some women like the identity their work gives them.
They miss it when they're not doing it and they feel like it's something they do well. For others their interest has waned and they feel no enthusiasm about returning to their former job.
Some occupations can be extraordinarily difficult to combine with families and can raise crucial questions about your career choice. Is it so great that you want to go back full-time and not change gears at all? Have you reached a certain seniority where you can work flexibly if you want to?
Being at home with children can focus the mind about what your real drivers are, says life coach Fiona Miller, of Coaching International. "What I do is encourage people to identify what their values are and find their way from there."
The conclusion might be that you tweak the hours or the environment you are working in to fit in with your interests. It could be a matter of not changing your occupation but finding a different workplace.
Many of us make our career choices when we are young and don't know our true talents. Often we are influenced by what our parents think.
Motherhood can make you more sure of what you want and don't want.
"We keep evolving, we're getting to know ourselves better," says Miller.
Meanwhile, the more talents you have, the harder it can be to choose the career that will suit you best.
Justine Munro, always a high-flyer, was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University after her University of Victoria law degree. One of the bright graduates scooped up by management consultancy McKinsey in Sydney in 1996, she had high hopes for working in public policy with then-Prime Minister Paul Keating. Instead she found herself visiting aluminium smelters in the Howard Government. A stint working for a boutique law firm helping with Aboriginal land claims was much more to her taste.
Back in New Zealand with her first child, Grace, Munro went back to contracting in treaty law but her heart wasn't in it. She felt she was in danger of becoming a "second-rate, part-time lawyer".
At that point she branched off , and worked instead on a number of socially-motivated projects. Involved in the Knowledge Wave Leadership Forum of 2003, she went on to work on an ambitious project to help develop venture philanthropy in New Zealand, then another with the University of Auckland looking at how to get kids from low-decile schools into university, known as the Starpath Project.
After this she was called in by think tank the New Zealand Institute to help identify some key social policy issues. She came up with the idea for an incubator to nurture pressing social projects in New Zealand, which would involve government, the private sector, and community partners.
With the departure of David Skilling from the NZ Institute, Munro was on her own again, but so enamoured of her social incubator idea that she decided to set it up herself and the NZ Centre for Social Innovation has now been launched.
The well-connected CEO has attracted support from foundation partners Gen-I and Kordia and she's identified three big projects to start the incubator off: the future workforce in South Auckland, an independent agency which will help keep the elderly in their own homes, and new ways of engaging with youth.
The Centre draws on her strengths. "I have big-picture thinking skills," she says. She's also good at "how can we drill down and make that happen?".
In hindsight, it looks as though Munro had her career all planned. But, she laughs, it wasn't at all - there were tears and doubts along the way.
"Now all that experience fits together - sometimes you just have to trust yourself," she says.
Munro, a mother of three, is a strong believer in tapping into where the action is in her area of interest. "You've got to seek out where the energy is. If there's no energy, you can't affect change _ you've got to work out where things are ready to take off," she says.
"Being a social entrepreneur is like being a business entrepreneur _ you dream of making it happen. No one appoints you."
Some working mothers out there are still waiting for inspiration. Louise Cooper, an accountant currently on the job market, has discovered her creative side whilst home with young children. She doesn't regret her first career choice of accountancy, a complete accident after deciding against valuation whilst enrolling at university.
"It was a good, solid career with flexibility which is why I chose it. I never thought I would be the head of some great corporation," she says. "There are aspects of accountancy that I really enjoy and aspects that drive me insane, like the routine." In the meantime she will return to accounting, but with a company which produces something interesting like food, wine, fashion or textiles.
Managing a small business is another idea. One thing she is clear about. "I've got to get some emotional benefit from it versus financial."
Life coach and former lawyer Martin Wilson, of Wellington-based Self-made Coaching, often helps women like Cooper come up with a vision for their future.
Commonly it is a transition rather than a change because people will often end up in something allied to what they were doing.
Taking action is crucial to help achieve the next step, he says. Once you start to make some connections in a possible area of interest, the pieces of the puzzle can all come together, as happened in Munro's case.
A good question women might ask themselves is how career and family could complement one another, suggests Wilson. "Look for the crossovers."
The coach has been advising former corporate lawyer Helen Mackay, helping her transition from in-house lawyer to something related but different. She recently left her position at New Zealand Oil & Gas to run CLANZ, the corporate law section of the NZ Law Society, as executive director.
CLANZ is the fastest-growing section in the Law Society - 20 per cent of lawyers are in-house lawyers, she says. And a lot of people in this part of the profession are women because it tends to offer more flexibility than private practice.
Although Mackay had managed to work flexibly after her first two children, she was under pressure to go full-time after her third child. Four days a week was do-able with a husband in flexible employment, grandparents and a nanny. Five days or 50 hours a week was possible but "just not enjoyable", she says.
Although she will be using her contacts in corporate law, Mackay's job, which she will do 2.5 days a week, will call on new skills in communication and marketing. She's excited about the new position and realises it is a relatively rare opportunity to have an interesting part-time job. "I speak to a lot of women about getting appropriate senior work rather than regressing your career."
Mackay has no idea if her lawyering days are over - this may be the beginning of a whole new portfolio career for her.
"I'm open to exploring different areas. I'm not sorry I made the choice to do law - I think it's a fantastic foundation," she says.
Gill South is the author of Because We're Worth It, a "where to from here?" guide for today's working mother. gill@southosullivan.com, www.gillsouth.com
