Women at Work - Your Parental Leave Stories

0:00You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael. I'm Nicole Torres. And I'm Amy Bernstein. Earlier in this season in our episode about how to manage parental leave, yours or someone else's, we asked you how you've managed it. Several of you told us about your experiences and they are not happy stories. There are stories about how inadequate leave policies hurt women, families, and companies.

0:33They're also about how these women may do with whatever benefits their company gave them, or that they negotiated for. We hope their stories will help you manage parental leave a little better, and we hope they'll propel the decision makers listening to think about how they approach parental leave in their organizations. First up, a story from a woman who found out she was pregnant a few months into a new job. She tells us how she coped at a company that wasn't used to people having babies.

1:00When we found out we were accepting, my husband and I were very excited, but I was so nervous to bring it up to my new boss because I barely knew him. And I am the youngest one at my organization by probably about 25 years. So I was the first person ever to even broach the subject of maternity leave, and I really didn't know how to approach it at all.

1:29with a train wreck. I just went in there and was like, I'm pregnant. I'm so sorry. He handled it okay. We probably didn't take the advice that was on the last podcast of not trying to figure everything out right at the beginning, because immediately he started asking, you know, are you going to be wanting to work from home? What do you think this means for your family? And I really didn't know. So I think I jumped into it really quickly.

1:59basically said, no, no, no, I'll definitely come back. And then from that point on, they just kind of forgot about what maybe I needed and it was all about how I was going to help them while I was gone. At the time, she was getting her masters and working part-time 32 hours a week. Her company was small enough that it wasn't required by law for them to offer her three months of unpaid time off. They did have a parental leave policy, but it was only for full-time employees, so she didn't qualify for it.

2:28time to talk about what my leaves would look like. They assumed I would take six weeks and that it would be unpaid. I agonized over whether or not I should ask for more. I did research. I asked my family is it just so selfish of me being only here for three months to say I really need some of this paid or I want to take more time. I mean I really thought I was just this demanding Millennial going in there saying you should give me more Which is looking back now is just so sad that I felt that way But eventually I did I went in and said I want to take eight weeks and I would really like for you to consider Paying something to help me out during that time And so they they agreed they would pay half of my pay my normal pay for two weeks So it was still not a lot, but

3:26It was something. And they reminded me often that they didn't have to, but that they were out of the kindness of their heart. She ended up having an emergency C-section and complications. She took the eight weeks of leave she had negotiated and then used some of the vacation time she had built up. All in all, she came back to work nine weeks after giving birth. During my time that I was gone, I got text messages and emails from them pretty often, just reminding me.

3:56of my date of return, asking me if I was going to come for client events. I did come to one Christmas party while I was gone. It was over the holidays. And I brought my baby with me. And they were asking me, you know, there's another client event. Maybe you could just get a babysitter. And I mean, he was three weeks old at the time, four weeks old, something like that. I kind of let it out. Like, are you?

4:26Serious and got a little bit snippy with them and they're like ooh those hormones must be it was rough I think a lot of women feel this way that they put the needs of their family first before themselves And so you do what you have to do to take care of your family and at the time I was making the majority of the money for my family and I couldn't just have the luxury of telling somebody off and having to be back on the job market right after having babies So I sucked it up and didn't say anything and I think I will definitely set myself up prior for the next time. Be in an organization where I feel more safe and secure. I even thought about going as far as being self-employed just so I don't have to deal with the politics of all of it. I think there's always something to learn in every situation you're in because unfortunately the world isn't perfect and no job is perfect.

5:27So you have to learn how to work through things and make the best of the situation. And especially when you have a family to think of. Coming up later in the show, we hear from a woman who spent the first two years of her son's life utterly exhausted. I had to fit that on at one point. And I took it off when I looked at the average sleep duration that I was going to work on with two hours and 45 minutes of broken up sleep. So that's not a stretch of two hours and 45 minutes. That's like 30 minutes here, 20 minutes there.

6:03But before that, here's a story from a mother whose difficult second pregnancy made her rethink parental leave length. When she emailed us, she said, after my first, I would have said 10 to 12 weeks was plenty. But after this most recent pregnancy, I needed so much more. We had a very complicated pregnancy with identical twins, and we ended up losing one of our twins.

6:30So I got put on bed rest after that, hoping that the surviving twin would do well and he did very well. I still went into labor early. So I went into labor at 33 weeks, which is not abnormal after those kind of complications. Obviously that early, he's seven weeks premature. He needed NICU time. And he was also born with a clubbed foot, which we actually knew we were diagnosed at 16 weeks in utero.

6:57Um, so we knew that was coming and it was very minor in consideration. Um, then we also like, I felt like at that point started grieving the loss of our other twin. We were so focused on our surviving twin that at that point kind of started that process. She started going to therapy a week before she went back to work and reluctantly she put her 10 week old son in daycare. A newborn who was.

7:22essentially you go by like adjusted age so he was three weeks adjusted at that point so he should have been three weeks old and taking him to a daycare in the end of January in one of our most terrible flu seasons. So that was hard emotionally I always say I love work and I want to get back to work but when you've been through everything we went through it was a lot harder for me in that moment to get back to work plus we were dealing with his foot so he had to have surgery the week I went back to work. So I still had to be dedicated to my job though and still balancing coming right back and trying to get myself back in the groove and visiting accounts and just being happy to be there even though my mind was somewhere completely else. So luckily I had a great boss.

8:14but there's HR rules and so there's still things you have to follow and it being so early in the year I had to make decisions on how much time off I was going to take when he potentially would need more care throughout the year and potentially more like appointments and surgeries but they were very open and let me talk with them but I still felt that like it's probably more of an internalization it's probably more me but I felt I need to be completely dedicated to my job and I can't let them know my mind is elsewhere. So if I had the opportunity to actually have more time away, that was, you know, with my leave to get through and work through that, I would have been much more dedicated to my job, not just saying I was and trying to show I was and not feeling pulled in a million different directions. Her son's 10 months old now and healthy.

9:10And then me mentally, I'm doing great as well. So I, I tell everyone therapy is amazing. I mean, I'm now dedicated again to my career. And I feel like I can put my energy there, but still give my kids energy and the happy mom that they need. One last story. It's from a woman who wonders if she could have solved the two year mystery of her son's illness much sooner, if she had just been able to stay home with him a little bit longer. She was pregnant with her second child.

9:44and her company was just starting a merger. As marketing director, she was in charge of a lot of the changes that had to happen. My son wasn't named for 12 hours after he was born, and I joked that I was so busy naming a company that I forgot to name my child. I mean, that wasn't entirely true, but I mean, it was a very busy pregnancy, and my children are only 17 months apart, so I also had, you know, a toddler at home. So it was a lot. She took 13 weeks of parental leave.

10:13Some of it paid, some of it unpaid. She was scheduled to go back to work right after the holidays. And that week between Christmas and New Year's, her husband was off work and at home with her and the kids. And I really think having him home, which was completely just happenstance, you know, just timing of when our baby was born. But having him home for that last week, I feel it gave me the support to go back. I felt like it gave me a little bit of extra bonding time with the baby.

10:42when I wasn't trying to run double duty with my toddler. But prior to him being home for that week, I remember distinctly telling him, I think I need to call them and tell them I can't come back yet. I just need a few more weeks. And I can't even point to exactly why I felt that way. I didn't feel that way with my first child. While I would have preferred to have longer with both children, I felt prepared to go back with my daughter as prepared as you ever are.

11:12with my son, he just still wasn't sleeping well. It just didn't feel right is the best way to say it. But after 13 weeks, she went back to work and her son went to daycare. And right away, he did not want to eat. So even though he had taken bottles prior to going to the daycare center, just giving him a bottle and I was still breastfeeding. So it was breast milk from a bottle, but he just kind of went on a feeding strike, which again, now I know that that's somewhat common. So that right away was stressful.

11:41And I would stop down there during my lunch breaks and feed him and then go back to work. But then I think it was within two to three weeks of him being at daycare, he got RSV. It's a respiratory illness. You or I could get it as an adult and it inflames your airways. And our airways are big enough that when they're inflamed, the symptoms are like a cold. But for a baby because their airways are so small, the little bit of inflammation really constricts there.

12:10So he got sick, we weren't sleeping. He was never a good sleeper prior to this, but we went completely backwards on sleep. And because of that, what I ultimately decided to do was go back on SMLA. So it was unpaid, but I just, I had a team that worked for me, and I was sat on the leadership team at the company, and I just felt like every day, it was not a productive use of anyone's time to get up and say, hey guys, I'm not gonna be at work again. I felt like if I could just say I'm not gonna be at work until future notice that everyone could be a little bit more efficient. And I think within about 10 days total, he went back to daycare. And we decided to introduce formula because I was not sleeping and my husband then would have the ability to get up and help with middle of the night feedings.

13:04and the formula introduction did not go well at all. I think the very first formula about all he ever drank, he like projectile threw it up. It should have been a sign right there. There were other things going on, but you know, the doctor kind of told us that he just probably didn't like the taste because he had been exclusively breastfed. And so I continued to nurse, but we would try to supplement with formula from there forward because he never really got to a consistent sleep pattern for the next two years. I had a Fitbit on at one point and I took it off when I looked at the average sleep duration that I was going to work on with two hours and 45 minutes of broken up sleep. So that's not a stretch of two hours and 45 minutes, that's like 30 minutes a year, 20 minutes there. I felt like because I couldn't get my baby to sleep,

13:59I was a bad mom, and everyone just said, oh, you know, just shut the door and let him cry. But they weren't there in the middle of the night when it was so clear that he wasn't just crying because we had held him a lot. He was crying because something was wrong. And so I just felt crazy for two years. Like, he continued to get sick. He would randomly break out in hives, and we were told, you know, that babies do that sometimes, and that allergies can kind of come and go with babies. They grow out of them really quickly, so while they can be allergic to something today, it can be different next week, so because we couldn't connect it to anything consistent, we did a lot of things to try to figure it out. We took him out of daycare for three months. We had my sister, who's a teacher, watch him for those three months, because she was off during the summer. I thought there was maybe as immunity is just shot.

14:55That didn't work. He ended up going on a daily steroid because they diagnosed him with asthma. He got tubes in his ears, so we had a surgery in there. I mean, we were just fighting things constantly. That was all, I think, in the first year. That wasn't even into the second year. A lot of days, she worked from home. She says the whole time she was trying to figure out her son's mystery illness, her company was very supportive. I think the cost for them, like, obviously absenteeism but presenteeism, I mean, Every day I was just Racking my brain for what could be wrong with my child and so you can't be engaged With your work the way that you should be if you're constantly distracted So how it resolved was I ultimately left my job. So I quit my job last July For a lot of different reasons things going on in the company just things for me professionally on where I wanted my career to go

15:52but also frankly, I was just burnt out. I was so tired. And I don't think it's a coincidence that once I left my job, I picked up. So I was interviewing for a job, looking for kind of what was my next step with my career. So my kids were going to daycare on the days that I would have interviews or different things going on. So I picked up the two kids one day from daycare and we were heading to the park and I handed both of them, a couple of Larabar brownie bites as a snack in the car. And they're dusted with coconut flour. And immediately, Weston's face was covered in hives, and he threw up in the backseat. And so, luckily, those particular bites had six ingredients. So I said, well, it's one of the six. And so, I went back through my phone, all of my photos,

16:49and looked at the pictures of Weston when he had broken out in Hive. And I would just sit there, it was like the visual cue to take me back to what were we doing that day, what did he eat, and then I would connect to coconut every time. One time he broke out really bad and we were at urgent care, his eyes were completely swollen shut.

17:13We had given him coconut milk that day and when I looked at the picture I remembered another time his entire face was covered in like one giant hive and I had made muffins with coconut oil. The last thing that was gnawing at me was him throwing up formula and so I finally googled the ingredients of infant formula and to this day I've not found one that doesn't include coconut oil. So he was never asthmatic.

17:42he just was allergic to coconut. It's impossible to prove anything in retrospect. But, you know, I go back to when I went back to work and so quickly Weston got RSV. If he wouldn't have gotten RSV, we probably would not have started supplementing with formula so early, which means he wouldn't have come in contact with coconut so early. So, you know, all the hard costs for my family would have More than likely gone down. Again, I don't know. But then, you know, for my company, they had this in a leader, frankly. I was on the leadership team. I led a team who was not present, was not engaged and ultimately left. I just, I think it will forever haunt me. You know, what if, what if I could have taken more time off? Today, she's a partner at a firm she started with a couple of former coworkers.

18:40It's just the three of them and so they don't have a parental leave policy right now. But when they do, it'll be good. We'll leave you with one more thought from her. While my story was terrible and to live it was terrible, I'm actually very fortunate. My husband has a very good job and so I was fortunate to be able to take some unpaid leave. We were in a financial place where we could do that.

19:09I was fortunate because I did have short-term disability. I was fortunate that I had banked up paid time off to take. There are a lot of other stories that might be similar to mine and how hard it was to come back where those things weren't there.

19:40Our audio product manager is Adam Buchholz. Maureen Hoek is our supervising editor. We get production help from Rob Eckhart and Isis Madrid. We normally make a discussion guide available for each episode, but this time we're going to point you to what we already put together for our episode called Managing Parental Leave, Yours or Someone Else's. That guide covers a lot of ground, and we hope it helps you exchange ideas and stories with colleagues and friends. If you're looking for another place where you can discuss parental leave, Check out our Women at Work online group. And you can email us about anything else women in work related. Our email is womenatwork at hbr.org. Thanks so much for listening.