Maternity Leave Is Not A Vacation

You will not get work done.

Today is my last day of maternity leave.

I thought, before I had my baby, that I would use the time off from the deadlines of my regular gigs to get some longer term projects done, like work on the comedic tech dystopia novel I've written about 100 pages of, or write a TV pilot about the time I was the state president of the Future Homemakers of America, or read Gravity's Rainbow. I would do this in my "free time" while the baby was napping.

Reader, none of this happened. Because maternity leave is not a vacation, or even a break. Not even a little bit.

Last year, a self-anointed right-wing social media provocateur /chucklefuck who I will not name tried to disparage paternity leave by pointing out that there isn't much for fathers to do with a newborn baby, since fathers are not the ones with breasts.

The comment was originally meant to be a homophobic jab at Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who had taken paternity leave after he and his husband adopted premature twins (the fact that I have any brain cells devoted to this specific Bad Tweet brings me great shame... but I digress). The Twitter mob pointed out to the original commentator that babies require a lot more work than simply providing them with breast milk and that paternity leave is a necessary and healthy part of a family's growth. In the end, everybody lost-- the good hearted people who tried to explain why the chucklefuck was wrong wasted their time on a person incapable of being a decent human being, the desperate Twitter right-winger at the center of the controversy got even more attention for acting like a jackass online. People got their ya-ya's out but nobody learned any lessons.

But something genuinely informative did come from that exchange: a few people posted this chart from data scientist Caitlin Hudon. Back in 2020, she recorded how she spent her time before and after becoming a mother.

Note how much time she spends tending to the baby during the day. Breastfeeding takes up a significant portion of this new mother's time, but it doesn't take up all of the time. Much of her daytime hours are spent on the ominously titled "taking care of the baby." There is no "free time."

I was still pregnant when I saw Caitlin Hudon's chart in the context of the bad faith paternity leave discussion, and my first thought was, "That can't be right." It wasn't that I thought Caitlin was being untruthful about her own experience, just that it wouldn't be reflective of mine.

After Juniper was born, I downloaded an app that enables parents to document their baby's activity in the anticipation that eventually a pattern would emerge, and that understanding that pattern would be useful in achieving the elusive free time my pilot or novel or challenging read required. Ideally, I would have gotten a chart that looked a little like Caitlin's, but less depressing. But before a pattern could be established, I discovered that entering data into the app was too cumbersome to continue.

The last entry is from November 16, when Juniper was just 10 days old. "Juniper was breastfed for 25 minutes!" says the ap at me, tauntingly. It is the only entry from that day. On November 15, there are no entries besides "Juniper had a poo." It's pathetic. I ran out of time for the app that was supposed to help me manage my time.

In my ten weeks of maternity leave, I've discovered firsthand that the difference between having a job and having a baby is that you're only expected to be at a job on a relatively predictable schedule, and when you're done with work you can go home (or, if you're working from home, close your laptop) and fuck off. You can take vacations, or call in sick, or online shop between zoom calls with a job. With babies, there is no fucking off. It's like being the personal assistant to a terrible celebrity. You are on call 24/7. There are no holidays. Babies can sense when a parent is about to relax and watch an episode of Yellowjackets (no spoilers please, I'm behind because I have a baby), or eat a meal, and they will not allow it.

It's true that babies sleep a lot, but they do it in small increments, seemingly randomly. Their brains are not developed enough to understand the difference between day and night until they are many weeks old and their parents are approaching Geneva Convention violating levels of sleep deprivation. A three hour sleep is a reason to celebrate. Every time they are left alone their primate brain thinks they've been abandoned in a cave, and they scream. Juniper is currently in a phase where she will not fall asleep in her bassinet; she must fall asleep while on or next to Josh or me, and then we have to sneak her into her bed and turn our sound machine up to its highest volume. And even then, she could wake up in five minutes. Every time I put her down for a nap, I feel like Jason sneaking past the serpant that was guarding the golden fleece.

My baby isn't great at following a predictable eating schedule, either. Sometimes she wants to eat a lot, sometimes she doesn't. Sometimes she eats a lot and throws it all up, cries, and wants to eat again, like an attendee of a decadent Roman banquet.

Nor, obviously, do her bodily functions follow a schedule. As with all babies, there's no way to guarantee that there won't be a diaper emergency as we're running late for a doctor's appointment.

The end result of a newborn baby's unpredictability is that it's impossible to schedule anything around it. She might sleep for 5 minutes, she might sleep for 4 hours. When she's hungry, it might take her ten minutes to eat, it might take her 45 minutes. I have never had a long indefninite window of my own time to sit and find my mental groove. I cannot carve time to nurture my brain out of a moving target. I barely shower.

So, to provide an epilogue to my marshmallow dreams from the intro paragraph: no. I did not get any projects done. I did not write any more pages of that novel. It should almost go without saying that I did not read any Pynchon. Babies do not come with free time, and maternity leave is not an opportunity to get more work done. It is, itself, work.

If you're an expecting parent looking forward to tackling some long-term projects after the baby arrives, consider adjusting your aspirations. And if you'er a boss or employee about to temporarily lose a coworker to parental leave, don't tell them to "have a good break." The next time they see you, they'll be exhausted and sleep deprived, and can't be held accountable for their actions.

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