Guilt

Despite coming back from my winter break feeling motivated, I am having a really hard time at work recently. I need to write it out to find some clarity and a way to snap out of this.

I think partly is that the working parent guilt is catching up. The crazy part is that I don’t think it comes from within me, but rather from social pressures and expectations.

So, for one, I sometimes feel bad that I don’t have that much to do at work, and yet I am here from 8-4…everything feels like I waste of time. Hopefully, things will pick up at work and I will soon be busier that I am right now and therefore the guilt of not being very productive at work, while also sending my kid to daycare will subside.

The other part is reading articles and comments from other parents regarding parenthood which leave me feeling slightly inadequate. I recently joined a group of grad school classmates that have become parents. They all talk about how hard it is not to sleep in bed with their babies, or how hard it has been to go back to work, and it makes me feel inadequate. When I went back to work I don’t remember having a hard time. I only got 6 weeks off, which sucked because it took me 4-5 to get the hang of staying home with a baby, and I had to go back very soon after that. Maybe part of it is that I had absolutely no help. Nobody cooked and brought me any food, my mom was there for the first week, which actually ended up being stressful for me due to the relationship I had with her at the moment. On top of it, she stared at me while I tried to breastfeed to make sure I was doing it right, never cooked for me, always took the baby away from me or told me I was holding her wrong, criticized me for not getting my hair brushed or makeup on…and we actually ended up getting into a fight. My husband’s family didn’t help either. They were actually mad at me and engaged in a full blown war over a number of things ranging from me not wanting anyone but my husband at the hospital before the baby was born, to my mom and sister being at my house when they wanted to come meet the baby. My mother in law made a few meals with explicit directions that they were just for my husband as the ingredients may cause the baby gas and the entire time I obsessed about the house being clean, laundry being done and life being in order….so in retrospective, going back was probably a lot less stressful and fun than staying home. Part of it is that by the time I had to go back, my mom came back and took care of the baby and I was able to do it gradually, so I started with a few hours a day and ended with however long I needed. Part of it was that when the time came to send her to daycare, I tried to look at it from a rational perspective, which was that they had more experience caring for babies than I did, therefore she was probably in better hands. Shortly after I went back, I started a new job at a terrible terrible place…and that was a bit harder. I remember there were days when I just lingered forever when I dropped of my daughter at daycare, or sat and play with her and the other babies for a few minutes before I left.

I just saw a petition to make maternity leave with partial pay for a whole year mandatory and ,against all my principles and core (believe me,  am shocked about this), I am completely against this. I sort of got into a debate with someone about it and the arguments for it were that “maternity leave, aside from being good for children (and therefore society), encourages mothers to go back to work after having kids - many women don't because they find leaving a 6-12 week old in daycare unthinkable and because daycare is so expensive. And women going back to work is extremely important for GDP and income tax revenue. So really it makes sense for everyone, even employers and those without kids, to expand maternity benefits”. And while it all sounds nice and good, I still could not agree with it…so I decided to analyze in a little bit more depth.

Let’s leave the maternity leave being good for children and society statement for last and concentrate on the economics of the issue. Economically, daycare doesn’t make sense if your salary is less than the cost of daycare, so this law would be financially helpful if the partial pay represents more than the difference between salary and childcare. That may be the case for a lot of low income people, but there are other ways to financially support women going back to work after having kids. The main reason that I would advocate in favor of other solutions is that a year of maternity leave would put a lot of women at a disadvantage when looking for a job. Any employee would much rather hire a man than a woman who could potentially stop working for an entire year, while still receiving a salary….and as much as I hate to admit this, I think I agree with that. I have been trying to come up with scenarios and this is the best one I can come up with….let’s say that I finish my post-doc and get a great idea that I am able to use for a start-up company. Let’s say that I am going to need clinical trials and animal studies and therefore need to hire a highly specialized employee to take care of that. I find Cindy, a recent PhD graduate with all the necessary qualifications and experience….everything is going great and then, boom, Cindy tells me she is pregnant and will be taking a whole year of maternity leave… But this is a start-up company..it is a unstable situation and I hired Cindy because of her highly specialized skills…so now, I have to find someone as specialized to replace her..Probably have to bring that person in before Cindy leaves in order to have enough time to get trained and then continue paying her and Cindy (partially) for a whole year. This in itself is a big stretch to my budget and therefore I can’t commit to hiring the other person for more than a year, upon which the poor soul has to go back to being unemployed. And what happens if after a year Cindy decides that she doesn’t want to go back to work? Do I get to ask for the money back? Wouldn’t it make more sense to maybe hire someone without highly specialized training and ask Cindy to work part-time after let’s say 12 weeks of maternity leave…. that way I can hire someone at a lower pay rate to be supervised by Cindy who gets to spend some considerable time with her baby and everything is good! Other solutions (that big companies can implement) is having subsidized in-site daycares, allowing some flexibility to telecommute when the job allows for it, and a number of other solutions that could financially and emotionally help support mothers without implying a huge loss to companies.

So, now for the part where maternity leave is good for children and therefore for society…. it just strikes a chord with me… Although it doesn’t quite say it, it implies that mothers who go back to work are not as good as mothers who stay and that children of mothers who go back to work are damaged goods. Look, I support your choice to be a stay at home mom if that is what you choose. It is your life and your priorities are different from mine, so I have no right to judge or tell you what you have to do, but all I ask is the same in return. The way I see it, there are advantages and disadvantages to both choices. In my case (from the perspective of a mother who chose to work and the daughter of a mother that worked a lot too) being a working mom instills certain values in children. My mom worked really really hard, and granted, our relationship has had some ups and downs, but her career was actually one of the things that has created a bond between us. Growing up I was so proud of my mom! She was so hardworking, and smart, and her lab was so cool, and I wanted to be just like her when I grew up. I spent so much time in her lab, and she was always able to help me with my science fair projects, and with my science classes in school! These days my work is a common topic of conversation for us and something that brings us together. When I finished my PhD, it meant the world to me to have my mom sitting during my defense and telling me how she thought my work was beautiful and she was so proud of me.

From the perspective of a mother who went back to work,  I see the advantage of making me an equal partner to my husband in all senses. Not only I feel good about the fact that I financially provide, but it has also made us equal partners in terms of childcare. My husband changes diapers, and is getting great at doing my daughter’s hair, and sometimes is in charge of bath time. If she gets sick or has a doctor’s appointment, we share the responsibility of making alternative plans. I often hear other mothers talk about how hard motherhood has been for them, and, don’t get me wrong, there have been challenges, but it has been relatively “easy” for me, and I wonder how much of that I have to attribute to the fact that my husband is more than just someone who helps….he actually shares the responsibility equally with me.