On the Utter Impossibility of Returning to Work After Maternity Leave
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the end of my maternity leave.
As of this week, I am back in a world of lanyards and passwords, door codes and staff rooms. I am wearing shiny shoes and have a collar around my neck. I drink tea out of a mug I don’t own and get emails about car parking I’ll never use. On the other side of the icy city, in a flat she does not know, for the first time in her life, my daughter is being looked after by someone else, for money. How am I? To paraphrase Richard II again, ask me that, and with rainy eyes I will write sorrow on my bosom.
Of course, the dread is always worse. A few weeks ago, I actually burst into tears while buying wrapping paper because I was so worked up about the prospect of sending my breastfeeding, unwalking, face-patting baby to be looked after by someone I only slightly know, for sometimes 10 hours at a stretch. Luckily, I was lined up beside an old friend who held my arm, looked into my eyes, and said, “She’ll be alright. She will be.” I was so hungry for precisely this reassurance that when she joked, “You aren’t leaving her surrounded by electrical wires and tigers,” I think I may have dropped snot on my own foot.
But now we’re here. And, yes, I am having to walk around at lunchtime with a breast pump down my coat. And, yes, I am checking my phone every hour to look at photos of my daughter eating toast with tears in her eyes. And, yes, I am spending more money on childcare than I’m making per hour. But more than that, the problem is time. The rigid, pin-striped constraint of hours. However much you bend and squash your human family, the time does not fit. I need to be at work at 8 a.m. My husband has to leave for work even earlier. My son’s school opens at 8:40 a.m. My baby daughter needs to be taken to her childminder. I have a half-hour bike ride to work. My son’s school day finishes at 3:15 p.m. I don’t leave work until 4 p.m. Whichever way you look at this, through the cut-glass kaleidoscope of neighbors, grandparents, breast pumps, and bike paths, it does not fit.
The recent story of a GP, Dr. Helen Eisenhauer, being suspended for booking in fake face-to-face appointments with patients whom she had already consulted over the phone, all in order to be able to pick up her children from school by 6 p.m., filled me with a claggy rage. Of course I want my GP to be honest, and of course I think we hold medical professionals to high standards. But also: time. The time does not work. Time sometimes makes the world impossible. If you have to work for eight hours and your children are only in school for six hours; if you can’t leave until 5:30 p.m. but your nursery starts to charge extra after 4 p.m.; if you have to start work at 7:30 a.m. but your baby didn’t really fall asleep until 5 a.m.; if you have to travel an hour to work but your child’s school opens at the same minute you’re meant to be at your desk; if their after-school club ends before your shift… what are you supposed to do? Time does not buckle. But you might.
There is another issue, of course, squirming away in the soft flesh of maternity leave. If you deem any one person the “primary carer,” and so load onto them the responsibility for feeding, soothing, entertaining, socializing, teaching, keeping safe, and growing a child from birth (along with most of the domestic and emotional labor), and if you then sideline that person into the compartment labeled “parenthood” and expect them to stay at home and roar through their savings and dedicate all day and maybe all night too to their children for most of a year, well then you might struggle once that person has to go back to paid work. If you essentially make someone—probably the birth parent—the de facto dictator of infancy, things might get a little crunchy once that person returns to the world of formal employment.
