The summer after Nancy Calderon had her baby she became a partner at accounting giant KPMG.

She went through quite a tough pregnancy, having to telecommute for the bulk of her nine months before the baby came at a time telecommuting was not the norm at the firm.

But motherhood and months of being out of the office didn’t send her careening onto the Mommy Track.

Why? It wasn’t a magic spell folks.

She had quite a few things working in her favor – a desire to keep her career going and understanding managers.

“I was able to be a good mommy and still do a good job,” she says.

That’s right at the heart of what so many women, and men want. To be good parents but to also excel at their chosen profession.

It’s not an easy task, but it can be done.

Tomorrow I’m giving a speech about “Staying off the Mommy Track” in Richmond at the Virginia State Society for Human Resource Management conference. And the bottom line, as far as I see it, is empowering women to fight for what they need in the workplace so they can keep their careers thriving.

I know, we need Corporate American to get on board as well. But how do we get an established system that has long catered to men who had wives that stayed at home to change? Women have to play a pivotal role.

Calderon attributes several factors to her success.

A mentor was the first thing she mentioned when I asked her.

“I had a mentor who had two children and she successfully managed a career,” she explains. The woman had been Caldernon’s manager and then the relationship turned into one of mentor and mentee.

“She really had great expectations for me, constantly encouraging me,” she says. “There were a lot of hard days when I had my daughter. She was two months premature, and she always kept encouraging me.”

Calderon also worked her butt off so there would be no way people would think she had “checked out” when she became a mom. “People would get emails from me at midnight and the early morning,” she adds.

KPMG also had a culture that wanted to support working moms, she says, and she trusted her managers.

Most of all, she was lucky enough to have a supportive family. Even though both she and her husband work, they were able to coordinate their schedules to accommodate the kids when one of them needed to travel, and their extended family also helped out.

Clearly, making it work requires more than just wishful thinking.

Calderon stresses that women have to be proactive when it comes to creating a work situation that works for them and their employers.

The problem she sees is “most people aren’t asking for it.”

On another Mommy Track note, I had the nerve to defend Sarah Palin earlier this week in a blog post on the Huffington Post.

I got so mad that everybody was dogging Palin for taking her kids on work trips I wanted to write about it.

Oh boy, did I get an earful from readers.

Basically, I made the case that if women are ever going to become leaders in any great numbers, the system would have to change to accommodate the changing family structure. Today most men and women work even though they have children at home, and unfortunately Corporate American and the political arena have not adapted to this phenomenon.

We are all pretending the structure of the American family hasn’t changed, that only one parent works and the other stays home.

That’s not the case anymore.

Leaders who are hired to run our corporations or voted into office, come to the table with a new reality…a spouse that works.

That means we have to start considering what will happen to the children of these leaders in this new mix because that impacts a leader.

We’ve all been fed a line folks, that women have to pretend they don’t have children and grin and bare any parenting hurdles that stumble into their career path. Well, most men in power never had to worry about that.

So, if we want to level the playing field it’s time to demand new rules.

Here’s an excerpt from my blog on Huffington Post:

(If women are going to avoid becoming road kill on the Mommy Track, things are going to have to change when it comes to what we’re willing to give our leaders in politics and in Corporate America.

Sarah Palin wants to bring her kids on work trips because women are still the main kid watchers and kid nurturers in most American families.

Sorry folks, that’s just the reality.

The women who are outraged that she used state funds to bring her kids along better shut up and shut up quick.

These are the types of accommodations that have to be made if we’re going to get more women in the corner offices.)

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue. Please put your feelings about Palin aside for a moment.