Tag: work

When Maternity Leave Hits Home

My daughter dragged my lofty Feminist principles down to earth.

The cold slap of reality came with a note from her 2nd grade teacher. Just over a month into the school year she was announcing that she’s pregnant and will be going on leave around her due date in February. Presumably, she’ll be out until May.

Now, my first reaction was a very human one. Good for her — there certainly was nothing as rewarding in my life as being a mother. And who does not love newborns?

My second reaction was equally — but less proudly — human. My daughter will have to adjust to a new teacher midway through the year.

This is a girl who’s already pretty shy. She’s very bright and genuinely wants to follow rules and be a good kid. That tendency to follow rules and do what’s expected leads her to identify strongly with the authority figures in front of her. To suddenly displace this figure and swap in a stranger for three months would be a pretty violent blow to her sense of world order.

The timing isn’t ideal either. Second grade is where the educational rubber begins to hit the road. Math commands a significantly greater share of classroom time than previous years. Reading skills are assumed and developed. The unofficial but unavoidable labeling known as Tracking, by teachers, fellow students and self-creating individuals alike, begins to form. And, lest we forget, the very official and equally unavoidable standardized tests begin at this stage to lock students into the academic trajectories that will propel them through the rest of their lives. These are not stakes to be trifled with.

Maternity leave, however, is sacrosanct. My own was crucial. When this same daughter and her twin sister were born ten weeks premature, my leave at the time allowed me to spend eight weeks at her side in the hospital NICU and then another two months bonding at home.

After giving birth to her younger sister February of this year, I took full advantage of my law firm’s three months full pay and one half pay, and tacked on another, painfully unpaid, month. That leave gave me the chance to exclusively breast feed my new baby, a relationship I have been able to continue while working because of our strong start. Breastfeeding was something my first daughter was too underdeveloped at birth to ever really get the hang of.

Women need this time. Infants do too. I look with envy at some of the countries that realize this while we in the U.S. lag. In Sweden parents split 480 days of paid leave at 80% salary between birth and the child’s eighth birthday. Our Nordic friends manage this while reaching a 5.5% GDP Growth rate in 2010, nearly doubling the 2.9% registered by the U.S. in the same year. Their economy is a fraction the size of ours, but clearly, valuing family during that period of a child’s development isn’t devastating their bottom line.

The United States is, after all, one of only three nations in the developed world with policies that exclude paid maternity leave. (We are in the company of Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.) My daughter’s teacher’s leave will be unpaid.

So after reading the note I asked my daughter, “Are you excited that your teacher is having a baby?”
The gloom settled immediately onto my little girl’s face. She looked away, mumbling that she didn’t want to talk about it. Further pressing went nowhere. Appeals to her 6 year old commitment to forward leaning public policy, I feared, would be fruitless.

How can I tell her that it’s good that her teacher will be gone for three months? How can I tell myself it won’t make a difference at all to her education? Can anyone truly reconcile the human cost of political ideals?

This is where I have to begin: in all likelihood, everything will be fine. Beginning one day this winter the kids in my daughter’s class will have to learn math from someone else for a while. Maybe the kids can all write letters to the new baby and do art projects and this can be a thread that pulls together the many chunks of learning that might otherwise fall away. Maybe. But even if it’s not, it’s still the right thing. Call it Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand or the Golden Rule, I want the same right to those critical first few months after childbirth and so I will defend that right for others. The benefit is worth the cost.

My daughter may have to study harder this winter to make up for the disruption to her classroom routine. That’s not a bad thing. The broader lesson is better yet. I don’t want her to suffer in any way. But I’d be happy if, by getting pulled between grounded reality and high ideals, she managed to grow.

Posted in the Huffington Post

Motherhood as a Step on the Career Arc

When U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand was a member of the House of Representatives and sat through marathon committee sessions the day before she gave birth to her second child, she got a round of applause from her colleagues. She returned to work three weeks later.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin gave a speech at a governors meeting in Texas as she was on the verge of labor. She reportedly took off only three days after delivering her son.

As satisfying as it is to see the acceptance of pregnant women and new mothers in the workplace, is this workaholic model the only one women in their childbearing years have?

Sometimes it looks that way. But highly visible women — notably House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi — as well as more ordinary workers, have begun to change the traditional male career arc that has dominated our workplace for the past 250 years.The old paradigm is based on the idea that one can work grueling hours in one’s 20s and early 30s and then begin to take on leadership roles throughout the next two decades. For a mother to do this, she must, as Gillibrand and Palin did, work almost as if she did not have a uterus.

Some women do not want to slow down, and they should not have to. For many others who want a pause or a deceleration of the pace in their professional life to birth and raise their children, it is certainly not ideal.Pelosi, though active in politics when her five children were young, didn’t hold her first elected office until she was 47, when her youngest daughter was graduating from high school. Yes, her family status and wealth helped her inordinately. But her life choices are still relevant.She did not proceed step by step up the corporate ladder. She was with her kids when they were home. Then, at a time when the old model dictated that her peak was about to be reached, Pelosi was ready to drastically quicken her climb.

Before the newest member of the House of Representatives, Kathy Hochul, left her job in Washington some 20 years ago for western New York, she is reported to have confided in her boss, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, about her struggles with working long hours with a baby at home.

He told her that, decades from now, she would not remember being in the office but she would remember her time with her child. My guess is that today, riding the wave of her election victory with her college-aged children by her side, she can confirm he was right.

Pelosi’s and Hochul’s models are exaggerated, for sure. And not every woman who spent much of her 30s and 40s raising children, or who has spent just a little less time on her career than her peers, is qualified for the job she wants in her 50s. But many are, and the “brain drain” — the highly educated mothers who opt out, and stay out, of what they perceive as an inflexible work force — is still leaking talent. A model entrenched for two centuries is not an easy one to bend.

It is laudable that Gillibrand was so dedicated to her job that she worked until the last hours of her pregnancy and returned soon after. Every ambitious woman, however, should not have to do the same.

Gillibrand herself has been an advocate of flexible work arrangements and has said that her quick return to the Congress was not ideal. Let’s extend the round of applause she got to those mothers who succeed in their fields with a pause for the demands of motherhood.

Originally appeared in Albany Times Union as “Let’s Hear it for the Women who Thrive at Two Vital Jobs”