how much will it hurt me to take a few years off from my career?

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager .
It’s the Thursday “ask the reader” question. A reader writes:
I will preface the question with a warning: I’m currently enormously over-privileged in that we are very financially comfortable and I don’t have to work. I am a well-regarded mid-career specialist; I have always worked in the non-profit/multinational sector and make a decent amount of money by those standards. However, my husband makes at least five times what I do through the business he started, and while my contributions help pay for luxuries (nanny, a cleaner, more savings, etc), we will be absolutely fine without my income. So my question is, in a gist: to work or not to work? Also known as, how hard is it to get back into your professional, technical career after some years off for health and parenting reasons?
My current consulting position is a working mom’s dream: it’s completely remote, average of 20 hours a week (varying depending on the demand – some weeks are more like 40 hours, and some closer to 10), with a lovely consulting contact (i.e. “boss”) who is a mom herself and is based in Europe, and encourages a healthy work-life balance. The job itself is meaningful, interesting, and prestigious. It’s in a large multi-national organization, so it is rife with politics and can be enormously frustrating with conflicting expectations, glacial slowness of approvals, and all that jazz, but I can normally let that roll off my back. I worked my behind off for over a decade earlier in my career to have exactly this position at this point in my life, and I am so lucky to have it. And yet…
I am so, so exhausted and defeated. I am struggling almost every week to concentrate or produce anything in the hours I work, and I am absolutely not bringing my best to work. I think largely due to the aforementioned politics and the consulting structure, and partly due to the “not bringing my best,” I’m feeling under-utilized, untrusted as an expert, and isolated. I also have three chronic health conditions, two of which flare up unexpectedly and one that just adds general background misery, in addition to anxiety and depression (somewhat well-controlled with meds right now), and I have gotten to sleep through the night only a handful of times since our toddler was born because of his many sleep and allergy issues. There are some other income-generating things I do on the side that also take up a bunch of time out of the blue, but I’m well into the plan to wrap those up right now, since they’re a lot of stress and very little return. Overall, between the caretaking, the mental and daily load of the household (which is 90% on me because my husband is so busy with the business), health issues, and just generalized burnout, I am really struggling to work and dream daily of quitting. We are going to start trying for another kid shortly, and the thought of working through a high-risk pregnancy on top of everything else makes me want to cry.
So, I guess my question is: how badly would I be shooting myself in the foot in terms of my career if I take two to three more years off? My work history in the past three years is already very spotty – I got laid off with a third of my coworkers during covid, and only worked seven months total through consultancies over two and a half years because of a high-risk pregnancy, a bad flare up of one of the health conditions that required several surgeries, and just wanting to be a stay-at-home parent for a bit. I’m worried that if I add another couple of years of no work to that, I will look (and be!) out of touch. The vast majority of people in my field work full-time and only take the allotted maternity leave, so almost no one else has any gaps in their resume. I am not so well entrenched within my current organization that I can count on coming back here, and do not feel like I can count on getting a position easily through previous contacts after so many years. It’s a big priority to me to not damage my career in the long-run; I generally love the work and do well with it.
I also hate the thought of relying on my husband financially for the rest of my life or not having substantial savings to fall back on. My mom had to go back to work after 14 years as a stay-at-home mom when we became refugees and came to the U.S. (years of taking on credit card debt to pay for basics, some food stamps, and all that fun stuff), was not able to get back into her previous field, and both my parents are still working well into their retirement years at very tough, unpleasant jobs. I never want to be in that position. I am also not cut out to be a stay-at-home parent, so I’d be asking my husband to shell out for childcare costs or paying for them from my savings, and would struggle to feel like I was contributing anything to the family. I think my husband also finds it stressful to be the only breadwinner, even if my financial contributions are tokenistic at best.
I’d love to hear from those who took some years out of their career or decided against it, and how it worked out, both professionally and personally. Would be great to hear from hiring managers too with honest takes on how big gaps in a woman’s resume affect her hiring chances.
Let’s hear specifically from the groups the writer mentions: people who took time out of their career or decided against it, or hiring managers with honest takes on many-years-long gaps in employment.
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