The Tamesis
For God’s sake, let’s sit on the floor and tell the sad story of the end of my maternity leave.
As of this week, I’m back in a world of lanyards, passwords, door codes, and staff rooms. I wore shiny shoes and a collar around my neck. I drink tea out of a cup that doesn’t belong to me and get emails about car parks that I will never use. On the other side of the cold city, in an apartment she didn’t know she had, my daughter was being looked after for the first time in her life, for money. How am I doing? To paraphrase Richard II again, ask me this question and I will write sadness on my chest with rainy eyes.
Of course, the fear is always worse. I literally cried while shopping for wrapping paper a few weeks ago because I was so excited at the thought of leaving my breastfed, non-walking, face-slapping baby in the care of someone I barely knew, sometimes for 10 hours straight. Luckily, I was standing next to an old friend who held my arm, looked me in the eyes and said, “She’s going to be okay. She will.” I was so desperate for that reassurance that when she joked, “You can’t have her surrounded by wires and tigers,” I thought I might have dropped snot on my own feet.
But now here we are. Yes, I had to walk around with a breast pump at lunchtime. Yes, I check my phone every hour to see pictures of my daughter eating toast with tears in her eyes. Yes, I spend more on childcare than I make per hour. But more importantly, the issue is time. Strict, pinstripe work time limits. No matter how much you bend and squeeze your human family, time just won’t work. I need to go to work at 8am and my husband has to go to work even earlier. My son’s school opens at 8:40am and my younger daughter needs to be taken to her nanny. I have to ride my bicycle to work for half an hour. My son’s schooling ends at 3:15pm and I don’t get off work until 4pm. Whichever way you look at it, through the kaleidoscope of neighbors, grandparents, breast pumps and bike paths, it doesn’t fit.
I was filled with anger when Dr Helen Eisenhauer, a GP, was recently suspended for setting up fake face-to-face appointments with patients she had already consulted over the phone, all so that she could pick up her children from school by 6pm. Of course, I want my GP to be honest, and I think we demand a lot from medical professionals. but also: time. Time is running out. Time makes the world an impossible place sometimes. If you have to work eight hours and your child only goes to school for six; if you can’t leave before 5:30 p.m., but your daycare starts charging extra after 4 p.m.; if you have to start work at 7:30 a.m., but your baby doesn’t really fall asleep until 5 a.m.; if you have to take an hour to go to work, but your child’s school ends at the same minute, you should be at your desk; if their after-school club ends before your shift… what should you do? Time does not bend. But you might.
Of course, there’s another problem, squirming in the soft flesh of maternity leave. If you consider any one person to be the “primary caregiver” and therefore give them the responsibility of feeding, comforting, entertaining, socializing, teaching, keeping safe, and raising a child from birth (as well as most of the household and emotional labor), and then if you exclude that person in a compartment labeled “parenthood” and expect them to stay home, squander their savings, and devote all day and night to their child for most of the year, you’re probably going to be in trouble once that person has to do that. Go back to gainful employment. If you essentially make someone (perhaps the biological parent) the de facto dictator in infancy, things can get a little tricky once that person returns to the world of formal employment.
