Good morning! Former Meta director sues over toxic workplace, Kristi Noem wants to overhaul FEMA, and a new book redefines career breaks.
- Power pause. When Neha Ruch browsed bookstores, she saw tons of books about how to succeed at work or how to raise kids. As the founder of Mother Untitled, a community for women on career breaks, she noticed something was missing: a how-to book that spoke to women at the intersection of family life and ambition.
"There was nothing about how to walk through this unique stage of my life with a sense of financial dignity, confidence, intention, more support, and more tangible ways to grow my network and my creative opportunities on the other side," Ruch remembers.
Her new book is The Power Pause, an argument that stay-at-home motherhood should be understood as an "enriching chapter" of life, one that can live side by side with career ambition. Ruch's book makes that argument and also offers practical tips for moms who are out of the workforce right now—with advice ranging from how to answer the question "what do you do?" to reminders to call a friend when feeling overwhelmed by life with little kids to guides for getting back into the workforce or handling finances with a working partner.
Ruch's interest in this topic dates back to when she began her own career break as a mom of two kids. She had worked for startups including Zola and suddenly found herself in the middle of an identity shift. When people asked her the "what do you do?" question, she was used to having a ready answer. "'I run brand at a startup' seemed to convey so much. It conveyed leadership capacity, it conveyed creativity, it conveyed being ahead of the curve in technology," she remembers. "Then 'stay-at-home mom' just felt so flawed."
In recent years, she's seen powerful executives rebrand career breaks another way—as "sabbaticals" with nothing to do with caregiving. "As soon as you say 'sabbatical,' it has a different level of dignity and respect," she says. "'Stay-at-home mother' is so laden with tropes...We've made it seem so ordinary, and we've dumbed it down to diapers and laundry, as opposed to recognizing it as an eye-opening, mind-expanding, network-expanding, creative time for for parents."
Ruch believes that taking time out of the workforce can be its own form of ambition. "Ambition is this determination to do a great many things over the course of your life that you care about," she says. "That can be elder care, that can be mental health. We want to get to a place where career pauses as a whole are considered an enriching chapter where, while we may have shifted priorities, we are still growing, we are still learning, we are still connecting."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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