Maternity leave is not a holiday. It is not a break, a sabbatical, a retreat, a period of respite. It is not “checking out”, time off, a gap year, a lull, a hiatus, or a breather. It is not “a stop-off on the side of the road during life’s long journey”.
Maternity leave is a legally mandated and protected period of time given to a mother to recover from the physical ordeal of childbirth (if she has given birth), care for and bond with her baby. It is not even, for many women, a “career break”, because if you work freelance, have your own business, work casually, are the higher earner, have a partner who takes the bulk of the leave, or work in a career where there is pressure to return, you may not take very long at all.
Nor is paternity leave – two measly weeks! – or parental leave any of the above. Many dads face the gendered notion that they aren’t really needed at the beginning, so shouldn’t require the time away. The notion that parental leave is far less demanding than your usual paid role is a damaging assumption that many parents still encounter in the workplace.
Yet I have begun to notice a genre of article, written by childfree women, that frames maternity leave as a rest from corporate life.
Most recent was a piece that appeared on a mainstream news site titled: “Do I want a baby or do I just want a sabbatical?” (the headline has now been changed). The writer found she was feeling jealous when friends announced their pregnancies, but not because she was experiencing something as icky and weak as maternal longing. Oh no, it was “the idea of putting your brain in the ashtray for months, with no requirement to think strategically … or pretend to be constantly ‘on’ at every meeting – that was what my heart was secretly desiring”.
These demands for a “year off”, on blogs, in mainstream publications and in online forums are becoming a bit of a hallmark of childfree discourse. They are usually very quick with a disclaimer that of course they’re not saying maternity leave is easy or a holiday (insert obligatory reference to sleep deprivation here), just that a break from the workplace is quite nice, something childfree women should have too. But the implication that parents who go on leave have simply put their brain on ice for a few months doesn’t recognise that we have merely traded one form of labour for another.
I wrote this rejoinder in my head, still reeling from the misogyny of the “brain in the ashtray” comment, and while spooning sausage and mash into my son’s mouth; he was refusing to feed himself, so I let him look at his Nutcracker book (by the way, my baby loved classical music, meaning my dusty, neglected grey matter absorbed more about Russian composers in the year after his birth than in all the others put together). I realise that my maternity-leave arrangement was not the norm: I filed my first copy weeks after my son was born, writing, interviewing and researching throughout. I know other women who couldn’t read novels for months postpartum. But it wasn’t because they were suddenly stupid; it was because they were exhausted. And because their brain was doing other, amazing things.
The work of raising an infant is not easy or instinctual. “It is high-stakes work of survival which involves acquiring skills, constant learning, problem solving, strategic thinking, communication, empathy, analysis, negotiation and all kinds of intelligence and intellect from moment to moment,” says Lucy Jones, whose book, Matrescence, looks at how the postpartum period is a seismic time of brain plasticity, transition and activity. “The work of caring for a human baby and infant is so demanding that the brain in pregnancy, after birth and in early motherhood literally changes shape in multiple areas. Researchers call this a ‘fine tuning’ of the brain, to optimise the complex work of care giving, debunking long held sexist nonsense about ‘baby brain’ (the old lie that women are intellectually enfeebled by having babies).” In other words, caregiving is deep thinking work. There should be a section for it on your CV.
Of course, there is also boredom. And lovely, uncomplicated times, such as the blissful day we registered our son’s birth; the blossom shedding like snowfall from all the borough’s cherry trees. We ate seafood pasta in the sun, marvelling at this new life we had made, the gift of time in which to savour it.
There can be a simplicity to life with a little baby, but the learning curve is steep. You constantly learn new information about child development and psychology. If your infant lives with disease or disability, you will acquire more medical knowledge and skills than you anticipated. (I learned to count my son’s breaths, others have administered CPR, nursed their babies through seizures, taught them sign language. If this sounds dramatic, then you are privileged indeed.)
To reduce caring for others to “mindless” drudgery compared with paid work devalues the skilled labour of parents, especially mothers. It devalues all our childcare professionals, carers and care workers. Corporate environments can be awful. Many parents do enjoy being away from them during leave, while continuing to exist within capitalism, which depends on domestic labour. You’re underpinning the whole show, while doing the most amazing, valuable work of raising a new generation.
Mothers’ lives do not exist in opposition to childfree ones. Those who believe we all need time away from the rat race should be arguing for the liberation of everyone, including parents: in France, there exists a right to a year-long sabbatical, where a person’s company has to take them back afterwards on their previous terms of employment. Why bring mothers – already discriminated against, and the vessels for so much projection – into it at all?
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
