Re: 9 weeks, 4 days
Thanks for your message! I’m away from the office right now, elbow deep in newborn diapers, and will have intermittent access to sleep for the next two years.
So far, this leave has felt more like, well, I’ve actually left something behind, and that’s a good thing. The first time around, when I MacGyver’d four months of paid and unpaid parental leave for the birth of my daughter, it felt like the clock was ticking the minute she was born, and we both needed to get in fighting shape mentally, emotionally, and physically before time ran out and the Slack chimes called me back to work. (Cue: Training montage of bottle feeding, pumping, sleep training).
My return to work loomed over every attempt to get her to nap, wake, and eat on a schedule that could potentially sync with my work-from-home schedule. I feared a future in which I would hand off a baby to her caretakers (a network of pandemic social-bubble benefactors; also MacGyver’d) who would find her inconsolable, unable to eat or sleep in my absence, and I made it my mission to avoid that (the mission was futile, but the baby books didn’t mention that part). I can’t imagine the immense pressure of preparing myself and a baby — so new and small she can barely hold her head up — to go back to work in less than 12 weeks.
How did we land on 12 weeks as a generally OK amount of time for a parent to be allowed to heal or care for a family member or ease a freshly minted human into the world, anyway? This incredible timeline juxtaposes maternal and infant health milestones with various policy allowances, which are cruelly mismatched. Might I recommend giving it a quick scroll as you contemplate what amount of time we should maybe allocate instead?
At five weeks postpartum, I have a list on my phone of daily activities: shower, read, walk, write, drink more water. And above that list the title says, “Just pick two today,” because that is the bar for what I can accomplish (and hitting all two is a big, big day). I also have daily alarms on my phone throughout the day to remind me to use the bathroom, because that is the joy of a postpartum bladder. We could make it so parents don’t have to add “Get dressed in work clothes that don’t fit you any more, find the magic unicorn that is accessible newborn daycare, and be a fully functional member of the workforce” to the list if we tried.
But I’m burying the lede — I have a new, squishy, baby boy roommate, and I swear his breath smells like a field of flowers. And this time, without that imminent return-to-work deadline, I feel more free to focus on smaller but still momentous hurdles. I let the diaper rash air-dry, I coach him through tummy time, remember to shower, take self for walk, drink water.
Anyway, I will of course reply to your message when I return. If you have any further questions about how “baby vacation” is going (an actual term an actual former coworker once used to describe parental leave), please refer to this technical document.
