The date was September 9th, exactly one month and three days after Walter was born when I received an email from my former boss titled “Anna’s return schedule”. The email spelled out my return schedule back to work just six weeks after Walter was born. To be fair this was clearly stipulated in the employee handbook that I had signed a year and a half ago. However when signing an agreement to company policies and procedures regarding maternity leave when having a child is the last thing on your radar six weeks seems a more than adequate amount of maternity leave compensation. It wasn’t just the hormones that made me cry uncontrollably, as I read the email, it was the fact I knew if I went back to Dynamic Computing I would be sentencing myself to a dead end career, there would be no getting out. And I owed a little more to my family and myself.
I must preface my next action by adding, in between the time I became pregnant and receiving this email I had been doing my homework on baby development. And what I was finding was pretty definitive, a mom and a baby need one another. They have a very unique symbiotic relationship for the first year of the baby’s life. Knowing this and knowing that I did not want to go back to a work environment where I would work myself into a dead end did not seem appealing. One quick caveat: right before getting pregnant I had decided to go back to school part-time after work and get my prerequisites for nursing and in a year or two be in nursing school.
So I did one of the ballsiest things I have ever done before. I took stock of everything in my life and reasoned if I was going to deplete my savings on day care, I might as well be the one taking care of Walter and bettering myself by going back to school. It took me two days to gain the composure to reply to my boss “I don’t think I can come back”. To this he went ballistic. He hurled some really hurtful insults and remarks to me, which ironically cleared up any doubt as to my return or not, why would I ever want to go back to work for a man who thought so lowly of me?
This is my part of a story made up by millions of women that illustrates a broader issue surrounding mothers all over this country. That is one of maternity leave. Twelve weeks unpaid, that is all FMLA guarantees a mother. Now since I worked for a company under 50 employees my former company was not required to follow FMLA laws and give at least 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave. I could have been required to go back to work the very next day. At six weeks a woman is just barely healed physically from a vaginal birth and not quite yet healed if she had a cesarean. How does it make sense to go back to work? Twelve weeks is hardly enough time to adjust, or god forbid, what if you are having a hard time adjusting? You now have to deal with work shit on top. No thank you!
I think the decisions that mothers have to make each day regarding maternity leave lends itself to a broader question, in a country that professes its family values over all other countries. How on earth does twelve weeks of maternity leave make sense? Ask any working or formerly working mom, it is the hardest decision that has to be made when and if to go back. And no woman should be made to feel incompetent, a bad mother, or uncommitted to her family for the decision she makes for herself and her family.
There are women who have to return back to work at six weeks and cried the first week back, there are women who lost their jobs because of taking an extended maternity leave, there are women who go back after six months and cry because they will never be the same in their careers again, and there are women who decide to stay at home. No decision is better than the other. And each decision is made with the same amount of regard for her family and probably with the same amount of angst.
Its 7 months now since I made my decision. And on a recent trip back to LA to visit friends and family I ran into a couple of people who didn’t know I had a baby and after the shock of Walter in my arms wore off they inevitably asked “What are you up to these days?” Ahh the loaded LA question, you have your day job (Starbucks, waiting tables, ect.) and your acting/directing/editing/directing/wiring career that you tirelessly work on in your free time. Each time I answered proudly “I am a mom”. And each time Walter would as if on queue smile his charming smile.
