Born in the USA

Teresa and I were chatting tonight, and got off on a tangent that made me mad and sad at the same time. It's the problem with U.S. maternity leave. Our system sucks, to put it mildly. If you work, your benefits depend entirely upon your job. What about FMLA, you ask? It doesn't apply to women who work in a place with less than 50 (I think) employees, like me. They can't even be guaranteed the 12 weeks off, much less with any sort of compensation, which FMLA doesn't provide. Many women go back to work before 12 weeks - I saw today that you can send your kid to daycare at 6 weeks!

So instead of new mom's staying with their babies, getting to know them and letting them set the pace, there is an immediate push to get the baby on a schedule, get your milk flowing at top speed so you can start freezing breast milk, and certainly no time to let other things in your life go - you have to make the most of those few weeks at home!

Inevitably, you end up with an even-more-exhausted-than-normal mom who feels like she's failing at everything she tries. The baby won't stick to the schedule - it just wants to be fed and held all the time (shocker!). All the stress and lack of sleep contribute to making breast feeding harder, not easier, the woman starts to doubt her ability to care for her child, just when our corporate system tells her TIMES UP - Back to work! So she goes, cries for a day, then realizes that it's not so bad to go back that early. She gets time to "be herself" again, everyone around her admires her for her strength and dedication, and heck, the baby is doing fine! It must have just been that being home just wasn't for her. She is meant to work, not nurture. Rinse and repeat a million times, and you've got our system.

Don't get me wrong, I do NOT think that women should stay home permanently after they have a baby if they don't want to. My point is that they should be able to stay home for much longer than our system currently allows - emotionally and financially - so they can heal themselves and nurture their child. Instead they are forced by corporate greed and government complacence to head directly back to work, lest they be deemed a "slacker" or "unmotivated".

All this, and women still get paid less for the same work. Something just doesn't add up.

Incidentally, there are better ways of doing it. Canada gives 12 months of leave at something like 66% of your pay - you can split it any way you want between the two parents. Some European countries are even more liberal. In France, the government sends you a mother's helper for a few months. I like the French.