These days, your CEO wears diapers.

The executive office smells like talcum. You know, because you're summoned there round the clock on a moment's notice.

Your boardroom contains a bouncy chair at the head of a conference table crusted with dried cereal. Your power suit is stained with spit-up and the only paperwork you know is of the towel variety, but you think you've got the World's Best Job.

That's because you've stepped off the job track to be a Mom. Someday, though, you'll have your career back. There's time.

The Comeback, by Emma Gilbey Keller; c.2008, Bloomsbury; $27.50; 228 pages.

You hope.

In the new book The Comeback, by Emma Gilbey Keller, you'll read about mothers who quit their careers to raise families, then found new, more fulfilling employment years later.

When she was twentysomething, Emma Gilbey Keller says she immersed herself in her journalism career to the point where she had no social life. Then she met her husband, fell in love, sold her cottage and moved to the city less than a month before the birth of her first child.

She was glad she had the opportunity to stay home with her girls. Keller's husband had a good job and she says she kept in touch with journalism via his stories and visits to his newspaper office.

But when her younger daughter mentioned that Daddy goes to work and Mommy goes to the gym, Keller knew it was time to return to a career.

In this book, Keller tells the stories of seven different women who stepped out of their careers to raise their children - their challenges, their surprises, and how they handled their returns to work.

Judith Feder of Manhattan stayed home to become her young twins' best advocate after they were born prematurely. Now teens, the twins are enormously proud of their mother, a sentiment that makes her cry.

After a near-deadly confrontation with a criminal, Lauren Jacobson fled with her children to London while her husband stayed behind in South Africa. Jacobson held the family together, while wondering if she could do the same to a career.

Amazingly, Jacobson had a comeback - and then quit!

And lest you think that a "comeback" is only for women whose husbands make lots of money, read on. One woman went back to medical school after her divorce at age 48.

While the stories in The Comeback are inspirational and will undoubtedly encourage any Mom who longs for a 9-to-5, the real worth of this book is in author Emma Gilbey Keller's asides.

"If you want to stay at home and take care of (your kids) full-time," she says, "then do it. It doesn't mean you will never get another job. It's a finite stage.

"There is nothing wrong with serial comebacks. If you can do it once, you can do it twice or more."

If your CEO doesn't COO any more and you're ready to go back to work, read this book.

The Comeback will give you the oomph you need to get out of the playroom and back to the meeting room.

(Terri Schlichenmeyer can be reached at schlichenmeyer@businessedge.ca)