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When I started to approach my second maternity leave, five years after the first, my main feeling was not excitement or freedom but dread. That low, leaden kind of panic, which grew inside me alongside my son’s new fingernails and feet. I’m thinking about it again, another five years on once more, as Radio 4’s Emma Barnett publishes Maternity Service, a book centred around the idea that maternity leave has never been accurately titled. Instead of the holiday it’s billed as, she writes, it’s hard work. It’s “a period of leave from all you know: taking leave of one’s mind, body, job and relationships”. And it’s a period that “doesn’t end when or if you return to work. It’s just the start”.
I felt, back then, if not quite shame, then certainly, a sharp awkwardness describing my fears of maternity leave as my due-date neared. Because, really, I had it good. The fact I had maternity leave at all, and a job to come back to, felt like a privilege. In the UK up to 74,000 women lose their job each year for getting pregnant or taking maternity leave, a figure (reported by campaign groups Pregnant Then Screwed and Women In Data) up from 54,000 a decade ago. In America, women get no federal paid leave, no guaranteed financial support and no universal services. But beyond the practical, there is the idea that this is meant to be a simple and beautiful time.
It’s talked of as a blessing, a dreamlike window of love and rest and milk, but much of my first maternity leave was shadowed by loneliness and fear and a series of identity crises that crawled over me in the night, without work, without sleep, without time to wash my hair. I found it hard to remember what I was for, or who I was – nurses insisted on calling me “Mum”. And I know that even those who didn’t scrabble through grimly like this will have had days of boredom, or anger, or pain, or insecurity, watching their colleagues become enamoured with their replacement. In the same way that it has slowly become acceptable to admit, radically, that there are parts of parenting that aren’t delightful, Barnett is insisting we acknowledge that, regardless of what people regularly tell new mothers, we don’t, in fact, need to “make the most of every second” of maternity leave. That there are parts of it that are simply shit and that’s OK – it doesn’t make you a bad parent to say this out loud, and it doesn’t make you a bad person.
I recently returned to the columns I wrote about that year, my closest thing to a diary, and was shocked to realise I’d been describing postnatal depression. I wrote of the baby, “The thing I feel for her is physically painful. It’s an awful love… A bruise being pressed, continually, by a strong thumb.” I was talking about the kind of love that was, “two centimetres from grief,” an inescapable, destabilising thing that followed me round the early-morning east-London streets and unmoored me from the person I’d been. So I was determined to make sure my second maternity leave was different.
After some gruelling administrative mishigas, eventually I got an appointment with a counsellor, scheduled for the week I’d go on maternity leave. We planned to talk about birth trauma, mental health and how to populate this maternity leave, so it felt as different as possible to my first. While there were many things I couldn’t plan, there were some I could – I would schedule time alone, we would ensure our care responsibilities were split more equally, that sort of thing. Shared parental leave was introduced a year after I had my first child. It was designed to give fathers a greater role at home, but research by economists shows the policy has fallen flat, so it’s still on parents to structure their families in equitable ways that, at the very least, don’t leave one of them seething blankly at windows.
Anyway, everything was in place. The baby was due, the counselling booked and then, the day my dreaded second maternity leave began, the country went into lockdown. All bets were off, we were spitting into the wind. And, despite everything – despite the five-year-old at home, despite my mum not being able to visit – the maternity leave itself turned out far better than my first, partly because everybody else in the world was similarly unmoored, and partly because it couldn’t have been more different.
Barnett is right – the cultural idea of maternity leave is not fit for purpose. There are plenty of things employers and government can organise in order to make sure it doesn’t feel as though women are disappearing when they have a baby, including introducing real flexibility, legally required data collection to track how they’re being treated around maternity leave and an enthusiastic embrace of paternity leave. And, of course, if women’s postnatal bodies were celebrated, and their conflicting feelings around motherhood and identity were understood, it might be easier to advocate for policies that protect and support them.
Maternity leave takes a strange bite out of a life. You leave work, you leave youth, you leave your body, somewhere in a room in Archway. You leave a part of yourself behind and are not sure for some time quite what’s left. But while it’s certainly not always the dream it’s pitched as, there are plenty of opportunities to make maternity leave less of a nightmare.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk
