The Modern Maternity Leave: What Does it Really Mean to Have it All?
There’s been plenty of talk in recent years about how women can have it all. They can have a career and a family and not have to sacrifice any one thing for another.
But many women have found that it’s more complicated than just having it all. It’s a constant balance and reassessment for aspects of their lives to get the attention they need when they need it.
One of the first challenges women with demanding careers face, often along with their partners, is deciding how much time they will need, and what form that time will take, to give birth and build the base for a family. Women bearing children are making decisions like which partner will take leave, when and for how long, whether they will stop working completely or still contribute part-time and what their home life will look like when maternity and paternity leaves are over.
In New Brunswick, a pregnant employee is eligible for up to 17 weeks of unpaid maternity leave, 35 weeks of child care leave, a maximum of 15 weeks of maternity employment insurance benefits and a maximum of 35 weeks of parental employment insurance benefits. We spoke with three women, who constantly balance their careers with a healthy home life, about what worked best for them.
Laura O’Blenis – Founder and chief strategist of Think Stiletto, mother of one
O’Blenis hadn’t had her consulting firm established long when she became pregnant. She had worked hard for three years to get the firm to where she wanted it and was in the middle of an innovation strategy for the province. Two weeks before the strategy came out, O’Blenis was finalizing details for the premier’s office from the hospital where she’d given birth.
Because she didn’t have the option of a replacement at her business, O’Blenis took about a month mostly off while still having her hands in the business a bit. After that first month, which her husband took off as well, she started back to work full-time at home and weaved together the responsibilities of having a newborn child and running a consulting firm.
“People knew I had just had a baby and were very understanding and thought it was kind of funny that I was burping my child or feeding my child while I was on national conference calls,” O’Blenis said.
“It was part of the experience. I don’t feel as though I missed out because for the first two and a half years of her life I was able to have quite a lot of flexibility with her so I just worked in the evening or I worked when she slept.”
O’Blenis says doing things the way she did wasn’t so much a choice as it was just what made sense for the way her life worked. She says having a supportive spouse and taking advantage of whatever other support she could was crucial.
O’Blenis explains that the first 18 months of a business are the toughest and that if she had stepped away from her business for an extended period of time, she would have had to start from square one and would not have been able to get through that again with the added responsibility of a child.
“It worked better for me to work a bit and weave that into my life with a child than to stop 100% and then try and start all over again,” she said.
“For me as a business owner if I were to have more children today then I would do the same thing that I did with Anna because it really worked well for our family and for me in terms of balancing the need to be stimulated intellectually…”
O’Blenis says she doesn’t completely agree with the common statement that women can have it all. She thinks that you can’t have it all at the same time and that compromises need to be made to have balance in other things, but that being able to have both a career and a family is possible.
“You don’t need to just be all business and there is a real gift and a growth personally and professionally that you experience when you become a parent because you do look at things a little bit differently both in your work and in your life,” she said. “The definition for success for me is just being able to have options.”
Krista Han – CPA and partner at Grant Thornton LLP, mother of three
Krista Han’s first two maternity leaves were a bit more traditional than her third. Han planned to take six months’ leave with her first child but took eight when she gave birth two months early. Her second leave worked out more to plan and she took six months, splitting a standard one year leave with her husband who took six months after she did.
Since Han became a partner at Grant Thornton between her second and third children, taking leave the third time around wasn’t as simple as hiring a replacement for a few months. Han gave birth to her third child this past January and took three months away, before which she worked with the other Grant Thornton partners in New Brunswick to figure out how things would work for her situation.
“There’s no specific policy in place. It’s up to me to consider what responsibilities I have in terms of my client base and working with my other partners that are here, particularly for me being in this province,” she said. “It was up to me to figure out how I wanted to take my maternity leave and then just to negotiate that, which was very easy to do.”
Han credits much of being able to take a shorter leave to having a partner she’s in sync with at home. After the birth of their second child, Han’s husband stopped working and became the family’s full-time stay at home parent. Han says this partnership helped them decide how much time to take off for their first time around and continues to be a source of strength in the family.
Han also believes that this sort of equal partnership needs to be supported in workplaces as well, that men should be as supported in their roles as parents and caregivers as women are.
“There’s something I think about supporting men in their roles as parents that will actually advance women,” she says. “If we can do that here at our firm where we support the men in our firm, that will support the women, wherever they are in their lives, whatever career they’re going for, even if they’re at home.”
Han considers the best approach to a parental leave is for people to go with their gut feeling about what they want or need out of that time and ask for it. She’s says taking the amount of leave that made the most sense for her and her family has worked out well.
“I really focus on when I’m with my kids to be present. It’s not necessarily about quantity of time, it’s about quality of time,” Han said. “I could lament time I don’t spend with them but I do know that when I am with my kids, in almost all respects, I can get to a place where they can get the very best of me, which I love. The time I spend with them is really fun and it’s really great so at this point I don’t think I would change anything.”
Susan Holt – Government of New Brunswick chief of business relationships, mother of two
For Susan Holt, having a challenging career is a huge part of her identity. The three months of leave she took with her first child proved to be a whole new challenge. Since she’d had 36 years of building up a certain identity, with a large portion being her professional identity, not having that part of her life during leave left her feeling lost and struggling with her new identity as a mother.
After her first experience with leave and with a partner who quit his job to be home full-time, Holt felt a bit more prepared when it came time to take leave with her second child. She was able to transition back to work more gradually after two months and even bring her young daughter into workplace situations. She talks about one instance where she brought her daughter to an important council meeting at a previous job.
“I asked my husband to bring me the baby at an appropriate lunch break and then contemplated how I would position that with the members,” she says. “I brought the baby and I introduced Molly to the members … many of these esteemed CEO and chairmen wanted to hold her and were very receptive and only one of them was sort of like: ‘what are you doing with a baby in this environment’ and you know furrowed brow and very uncomfortable.”
Holt says she thought a lot in the beginning about the choices she had made and watched the ways she was judged because of them. She questioned what going back to work more quickly than some might say about her skill set and maternal tendencies.
“Those are questions that I used to ask myself but now I really just try and asses like everybody does, balance: do I think I’m doing the right things for my partner, for my children, for my friends, for myself, for my career, for my health,” she says.
“I’m a better parent when I’m appropriately satisfied by work. That scratches an itch that I couldn’t figure out how to scratch in the three months that I was home and it helps me do better with the kids. I am very fortunate to have a spouse who is very paternal and delivering exceptional childcare to our kids. That’s the balance for our family and it would be a really different story if I had a partner who was different.”
Holt’s advice for parents facing similar decisions to hers is to seriously consider what is needed to make things work and to not be afraid to ask for it. She also recommends picking a partner wisely, someone who will have conversations about expectations and get on the same page.
“I think we all just need to be more flexible but it starts with women asking for what they want and then the whole system supporting employers and families to deliver it. We have to be able to ask for it and say ‘this is the model I think is going to work for me’ and then be flexible if it doesn’t work too and be prepared to change.”