Moxie

Q&A: maternity leave question

Thank you guys for the birthday wishes. I had an enjoyably fattening day!

Beth writes:

"My wife is six months pregnant with our first baby and we just moved for her to take a great new job. After a year and a half trying to get me pregnant, my wife got pregnant instantly (yay!) but now our new baby is due, at the absolute outside, two weeks before my wife hits the one year mark at her job.  It's a nice company so they aren't pitching a fit about her taking leave so soon after starting there but, because we won't have hit the magic one year date, it will only be 60% paid for five weeks at best (short-term disability) and most likely not paid at all though they are willing to let her be out of the office for 12 weeks. I am scraping together as much money as I can to cover us while my wife is home but we have no idea how much leave she ought to take and her company would like some kind of estimate. If you factor childcare issues out of the discussion, (we had long planned for me to stay home and, in fact, I am already there; she got pregnant so soon after our move that I hadn't found a new job yet and then it became clear I was no way going to get anything for only nine months in a new place with no contacts) how much leave have other people felt they wanted/needed? How much leave do you think we might need? What factors proved important? Can you tell we are flailing here?

If it is at all important to this estimate, my parents will be coming to stay for at least two weeks after the baby is born and our best friend will be living with us for the entire summer."

Wow. Congratulations on the quickly-achieved pregnancy for your wife!

My advice is that she should take as much leave as she possibly can without putting major financial strain on the family or derailing her career.

It is impossible to express how difficult and time-consuming it is to have a newborn, while also recovering from pregnancy and childbirth. It's just physically exhausting, to start, and then the whole first few weeks are pretty much a non-stop batch of worry about everything from feeding to diaper changes to whether the umbilical cord is healing well to what it means when the baby hiccups to pacifiers to basically everything. While I know there are women who have to do it, five weeks seems absolutely inhumane to me, and I would do whatever I had to to get to 12 weeks at a minimum. (And yes, I know there are some of you out there who did it on much less, but I'm betting you'd have had an easier first year or two if you'd had more time to catch your breath before having to do two jobs.)

Please note that I think you are going to be fabulous with the baby, and that I'm assuming your parents and best friend are going to be enormously helpful with the baby. My concern here isn't really for the baby, since it seems clear that s/he is going to be well cared-for by all of you. My concern is for your wife, who really needs time to recover physically and to get her confidence as a mom and have enough stability before she starts burning the candle at both ends. It will help her to have other adults around during her leave, as she'll actually be able to catch naps and have other people do everything so all she has to do is nurse and sleep and stay hydrated. But, again, there's no way to describe how exhausting (physically and mentally and emotionally) those first few months are. The more space you all together can figure out how to give her, the less chance she'll have of getting so exhausted that she falls into PPD.

Do you think her employer might be open to the possibility of giving her her 12 weeks of FMLA time in chunks, so that she could go back part-time starting at 9 or 10 weeks and not start again full-time until 14 or 15 weeks?

What do the rest of you say? How long did you get to take off? Was it enough to recover? How long would you take ideally? (And yes, everyone at home with a newborn secretly or not-so-secretly wishes they could just leave all day at a certain point. Taking care of babies is HARD, y'all.)

Lost talk, belated

I know something enormous ad huge happened, so talk about it if it's not too late.

I'm tired of coming up with titles for posts

I would like to publicly make a request for Peter Gabriel and John Legend to do a collaboration. A soundtrack would be acceptable, as would an opera or basically anything they decided they want to do. They just have the most awesome blended sound, as evidenced by John Legend singing Peter Gabriel's song last night on the Oscars, and I want more more more.

I have so much going on this week I'm not convinced I'm really going to make it through! The beacon at the end of today is tonight's Bachelor. It's "The Women Tell All" tonight (talk about making you feel *really* dirty, Kate).

Lost Talk

So I apologize for not putting up a Bachelor post Monday night. I was still with my boyfriend, and he decidedly does not watch The Bachelor, so I had to wait until I got home to watch it last night.

Oh, and hush, while Bill Compton is an awesomely hilarious suggestion as a fake name for my boyfriend, he is neither skinny, befanged, nor undead, so it would somehow not be fitting. I told him I was going to call him The Rock because he's a big mountain of a man, he's absolutely solid in character, and he's also quite stubborn. He suggested that I refer to him as Granite McQuartz, but I think I'll stick with The Rock. Partly because he looks nothing like the wrestler The Rock.

But on to The Bachelor. I am liking Jason more and more, as I think he makes better and better decisions for himself. While I would rather be married to Jillian than to either of the others personally, I absolutely agree with Jason that you can't get very far in a marriage without a whole lot of sexual attraction. I've done it the other way, and it absolutely doesn't work. Which is not to say that sexual attraction alone can keep things together, but if that's missing, there's really not much hope. At least in my experience.

Now I don't know who to root for. Molly is a ticking time bomb. But Melissa has strange parents. What a quandary...

I so do not want to see Deanna again. She even looked mean when she was talking to Jason. He deserves way better than her.

you know what would make this season of the Bachelor more hilarious? If Tatiana Del Toro from American Idol had been one of the ladies.

Lost Talk

By special request for hush.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

So I've been working on a freelance assignment for what feels like forever but has actually only been January and this part of February, and I was this close to done with it, and now the specific program it uses has decided to generate a fatal error every single time I open it and won't run.

Kill me now.

Fortunately, I have just gotten a new laptop (a teeny tiny one that I'm going to review next week when I've had it for more than a day or two) because my regular laptop runs Vista (which I'm sure is the cause of the fatal errors and every other problem including global warming, the bad economy, and my never-ending cough) and this one runs XP.

So now I've installed the program on Ava (the new computer; my Blackberry is Stella) and am transferring what seems to be the latest version of my file to see if I can continue or if I'm going to have to go jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.

Which would suck, because this weekend I am going to visit the Person of Interest, who has been elevated to actual boyfriend. Which I guess means he needs a fake name for internet purposes? And I'm all pedicured up and excited and would really hate to have to fall on my sword because my work has ground to a standstill because Bill Gates is the Devil.

Wish me luck...

Thoughts

OK, I don't even know where to go with the dad-as-Jesus-freak vs. mom-as-reincarnation-freak dynamic of Naomi's divorced parents. It certainly explains the divorce, though. ;) And, yeah, some of us get way closer to JC during the divorce process. But that doesn't explain the whole dead dove and "serious interest" in reincarnation.

Remember that woman a few seasons ago who hired actors to play her parents acting like asses? It was really uncomfortable at the time, but in hindsight it was funny.

Anyway, I'm back to Jillian again, after hesitating last week and thinking maybe Melissa. Her parents should be ashamed of themselves. If it's one thing I've learned in these almost 7 years of being a mother, it's that you just suck it up for your kid. Puke in the eye, no sleep for three years, suffering through endless birthday parties, permanent indentations in the bottoms of your feet from stepping on Legos, selling hot dogs in the blazing sun to support the Little League team, getting a hideous perm because your daughter wants you to look "cool" in 1986, etc. And if your kid needs you to go on national TV having dinner with some guy on a reality show, you suck it the eff up and say "What should I wear?" and start flipping through your recipe book.

Molly, who smiles and pretends everything is Ok because that's what she has to do for her family, is going to have a major midlife crisis in approximately 15 years, and will leave her family-approved husband, spend two weeks camping in Taos, and come back to spend the rest of her life with a guy who rides a motorcycle and refuses to wear a hat.

I miss Stephanie and her insane clothing.

A modicum of closure

The long national nightmare may be over, as my drug-seeking behavior finally worked and I got some antibiotics today. About freaking time, I say. I think I can feel them working already, but that's probably either the placebo effect or a yogurt high from all the Fage Total I've been eating to combat the negative effects of the antibiotics.

How do I love The Bachelor? Let me count the ways. I predict it's Naomi's time tonight. Maybe when she leaves the show they'll give her a hair elastic so she can pull her hair away from her face so she doesn't look so much like Jan from The Muppets anymore. As my grandma would say, "She'd be a pretty girl if she'd brush her hair."

Feeling groovy

Yeah, I'm just happy. Not much more to it than that. Sorry I'm so boring, but things are really nice in my life right now. Too much work, not enough time to do it all in, a never-ending cold, but I have funny happy children and amazing friends who love me, am seeing someone who keeps impressing me more and more every day, and I can help people. What else could I want?

I think about where I was three years ago, and I'm just grateful grateful grateful. Grateful for all the worry and pain and sadness that brought me here and turned me into me. And grateful that that's not my life anymore, and won't be again. If life was like slogging through thick cold mud back then, it's like skinnydipping in a warm lake on a moonlight summer night now.

I hope you guys have a wonderful, relaxing weekend. Mine is probably going to be a little bit nuts, but that's perfect.