Return of the Mat

You may have noticed a recent uptick in the number of blogs I’ve been writing, almost as though I’m not as busy at the moment and wrapping things up. You would be correct! I am starting my second period of maternity leave today.

I think when you have young children, you become particularly attuned to the many, many articles about falling birth rates and what we could possibly do to reverse them. Its interesting to read about how ‘lavish’ family subsidies have little impact while you navigate life with a small child.

In my experience, choosing to have a child came from a position of privilege. Having a second required more privilege. Its hard to look down the barrel of more years of toddler illness, balancing work with exhaustion, and all of those milestones and think you want to go back to the start. But we have. And we will.

I have already talked about my experiences with post partum anxiety and how it affected me on this blog, and I do absolutely credit maternity leave and being able to take shared parental leave with my husband for getting through that time relatively intact. Maternity leave, for me personally, was a time to heal. I healed from physical injuries - it took a week for me to manage a slow walk around the block - and I healed from my own expectations of myself as a mother - a work still in progress several years later.

We used the Huckleberry app to track our daughter’s feeds and sleep and nappies and temperatures and growth. I have so much data that I sometimes go back to look at, and out of interest, I looked specifically at nursing. I ended up nursing exclusively which was something I enjoyed and felt we both benefited from. For reference, I work 4x8 hour days for Edinburgh, and nursing alone ate so much of my time in the early stages of my maternity leave.

I have no idea how people manage when they don’t have parental leave afforded to them. The set up that allows me to have another child, i.e. having enough leave to take off a full year and sacrifice leave to my partner, is only possible because we have the funds to do so. UK statutory maternity pay is a joke.

If you really want to make babies an easier business, people need more flexible work spaces (back in the office? Yeah, sure, and give up my ability to actually make a dinner each night?), more statutory maternity pay, more time off to raise the kids, and more childcare. Family friendly policies are really just people friendly policies. Work needs re-evaluated, in my opinion, especially if you want to help the growing number of young people who are out of work due to mental health issues find employment.

Pregnant Then Screwed have a good overview of Labour’s new proposals for family friendly policies. Simply saying these things are available do not make them happen. For my part, all I can say right now is how very important it is to have this period of time off, how I don’t think I would be having a second if I wasn’t able to have so much time off, and how important it is for me personally to have the option of KIT days etc. Because I do actually like my job, and I will go back to it after this period away with new ideas, new abilities, and new skills.

Everyone, regardless of whether they’re having a kid, deserves time away from work to try something different.

I have taken the opportunity to update my life in months repo with this chart:

See you on the other side.