How Shannon Miles Built a Thriving Career And a Happy Family by Creating a “Third Option”

The following is an edited excerpt from the new book, The Third Option: Why a Woman Doesn’t Have to Choose between a Career and Family, but Can Actually Have Both and Succeed by Shannon Miles.

Maybe it started when I found my dream job.

By my mid-twenties, I’d steadily worked my way up to the job I’d always dreamed of: I was in sales, with its fast pace and its dependence on relationships, at a company that manufactured and sold medical software. I was incredibly happy.

Or maybe it started when my husband, Bryan, and I decided to start a family.

Working a dream job and having a baby were both extremely important to me. I wanted them both. The problem was that they were totally incompatible. Eventually, the tension between the either-or of my world needed to be worked out.

Maybe it was that tension that started everything.

I had no idea at the time, of course. We became pregnant and made the logical time-honored plan: I’d go back to work as soon as possible, back to the amazing position I’d just been given. We lined up a nanny. Our lives looked perfect…on paper.

Our daughter, Rainey, was born in September 2005. I took the standard three-month maternity leave and went back to my dream job. And suddenly, nothing was simple anymore. I had a career I absolutely loved, but I also had this amazing little baby I had to leave at home. Other people could care for her, of course, but it broke my heart every time I went to work.

That feeling of not wanting to be separated from her took me completely by surprise, because I’d never in my life wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. I loved working, and I loved being a professional. Frankly, in the past, whenever I’d thought of staying at home, my instant reaction had been, “That’s great for my friends, and I admire people who make that choice, but I’m not that girl.”

Still, making choices isn’t only about work per se: it’s about the kind of work you do, too. The kind of work we were doing wasn’t kid-friendly, in the sense that one of us was almost always away. We were both in sales, and both of our jobs involved travel, Bryan’s even more than mine. As we came to find out, it was extremely difficult as new parents to work in sales, let alone to feel like we were doing any of it well.

Beyond that, the truth is, I’d had a change of heart from thinking this separation would be easy. I was pulled in two opposite directions: Should I stay home and watch my baby grow, or continue pursuing an exciting professional career?

I thought I could have both, but when I returned to work, I wasn’t happy being away from Rainey. We started talking about what to do, weighing pros and cons to decide what immediate plan would be best for our family. About four months later, when she was seven months old, we made our decision.

Somebody needed to quit their job. We looked at our finances, however, and realized we couldn’t afford for that to happen — but we also felt we couldn’t afford not to either.

We both made about the same amount of money, but Bryan’s position had more upward mobility and opportunities, so we decided it would be best for me to quit. While I felt some relief once we made the decision, it was still a difficult one, not to mention scary, because I didn’t know what that future looked like. Decisions like these also affect a lot of other people; for example, we’d hired a nanny who had given up working with other families to be with Rainey, and now we had to tell her we didn’t need her anymore.

There I was, in the middle of an all-too-common dilemma: I didn’t want to give up my time with my daughter, but I didn’t want to give up my job either. Why did I have to choose one or the other?

There had to be another option.

That was the point at which I went from climbing the corporate ladder — traveling, taking on more and more responsibility and bigger territories — to taking a step back, focusing my energies in a different direction, clarifying what I wanted from life, and going part time.

When I tell it like that, it sounds smooth, as though everything fell into place right away. Of course, nothing is that easy!

But the more I lived within this option, working part time from home, the more I realized there was a viable alternative, something between working full time in an office and not working at all. That it wasn’t necessary to give up something in order to have a fulfilling life. That people could balance work and family in a way that made sense for everybody involved.

It’s what I call The Third Option.

For a completely new vision for balancing career success with a growing family, check out Shannon’s book, The Third Option.