For people who’ve never had a baby, there’s this broad conception of maternity leave as an open canvas that you can use to enrich your life. You’re making a lifelong connection with your newborn while also getting a few months to "yourself" that you can use to learn a foreign language and go on adventures. One woman told me her colleague kept making references to her upcoming maternity leave as her sabbatical. While she was pregnant with her first baby, Katie Duffy, the CEO of Democracy Prep Public Schools, told everyone she was going to watch 90210 episodes all day; she joked about it so often that her team bought her the boxed set.
But here’s the unfortunate truth: many of the women I spoke to said they were unhappy or unsatisfied during much of their maternity leave. They often felt adrift — and they didn’t like it. Duffy explained, "I’ve always worked, since I was sixteen." For her, maternity leave felt like a void, and this makes perfect sense. If your identity is tied up in your professional life, and suddenly your professional life is on hold, who are you? Another woman told me, "I had no idea what people did all day if they weren’t working."
There’s lots of time alone in your own head. There can be boredom or frustration that you’re doing the same thing over and over again. One woman told me she knew she’d completely lost her bearing when she called her husband at the office to tell him about that day’s mail. "We’d gotten some kind of credit card offer. I actually picked up the phone to ask his opinion about this piece of junk mail." She was that hungry for human contact and something to talk about that wasn’t the baby. Another said, "There’s this idea out there that you should 'cherish every moment.' It puts a lot of irrational pressure on you. It doesn’t make you a horrible parent to wish that you had your old life back."
Morra Aarons-Mele, founder of Women Online, had her first baby during a snowy winter in Boston. "I had this image of maternity leave being cozy and snug and domestic goddess-y," she said, "but I don’t know anyone who had that experience." She found herself watching the clock all day and wondering when her husband would be home. Another woman told me that she cried when her mother went back home after the baby’s first four weeks. "I just didn’t know how I was going to do it alone."
My friend Margo’s husband took two weeks of paternity leave. On the morning he headed back to work, his first meeting was at Margo’s favorite breakfast place. "When he left for that meeting," she told me, "I was just sitting in my rocking chair with greasy hair. I hadn’t taken a shower, the baby had just spit up on me, and it was a hot summer day." She melted down in tears. In between sobs she said, “I want to go to work!" She saw their life in black and white: “I was starving, he was off to a breakfast. I was dirty, he was freshly showered." It felt terribly unfair, and she just wanted some semblance of her old life back.
After my son was born, I felt unmoored because I didn’t have any kind of measure of my productivity. I needed to have something to do. I tried to shoehorn my baby into a schedule because I thought that would help give me a sense of accomplishment and structure. (With no set schedule, it’s easy to obsess about just how to survive the day.) But when I didn’t achieve military-level precision in our feeding times and naptimes, I felt like a failure.
A music teacher from Boston shared: "In the early days, it was just so damn hard, and in the later days, it was mind-numbingly monotonous." In hindsight, she wishes she had created more of a schedule for herself and been less concerned about the baby’s schedule. "Join moms’ groups and go — frequently. Go to the breast-feeding support classes, even if you aren’t having trouble. Go to baby yoga even if you have to drive forty minutes to get there." And most of all: "Forgive yourself if you don’t find maternity leave to be amazingly blissful."
Excerpted from Here’s the Plan: Your Practical, Tactical Guide to Advancing Your Career During Pregnancy and Parenthood by Allyson Downey, published by Seal Press (c) 2016. This book is available now for purchase.
