The beautiful grind
I’m coming up on being halfway done with my second maternity leave (😩), and since I spend all day on maternity leave, I also spend a lot of time thinking about the idea of it.
Parental leave is a very lonely place, even if you have friends and family nearby to help and check in on you.
You’ve gone from a 12-hour schedule where you spend some time relaxing, some time sleeping, some time working, to an extended on-call period, where any time of day or night is fair game.
When I started leave, I wrote,
I’m home from work for six months (three paid, three unpaid), and my husband is also home for a month, but we’re not on vacation. Maternity and paternity leave are a special kind of shadow world apart from society, where you’re home, but both living at day and at night, blending time, fully in the world but also entirely not a part of it, on your own schedule as you learn your baby’s rhythms at three in the morning.
Every time you think you know your baby’s schedule, it changes. Your baby might not want to eat, or may want to eat and eat and eat without taking a break. They might be fussy and you can’t figure out why, or they might sleep for hours and you’re too afraid that they’re going to wake up to enjoy the time off. Nothing is certain.
You’re not in control - your baby’s primordial intuitions are, and both of you are guided only by what thousands of years of human instinct have imprinted in our genetics (and whatever you decide to buy on Amazon at three in the morning.)
Just look at this blanket that a father made out of his son’s sleep schedule for the first year of life (made with BabyConnect, Python, Javascript, and a web app that allowed him to keep track of the weaving). Something about the ceaselessness of the patterns, finally settling down into normal sleep, is so beautiful to me and so indicative of the amount of work that parents put in.
A visualization of my son's sleep pattern from birth to his first birthday. Crochet border surrounding a double knit body. Each row represents a single day. Each stitch represents 6 minutes of time spent awake or asleep #knitting #crochet #datavisualization
In general, I see maternity leave as a time of brief spurts of beautiful joy (when your baby smiles at you for the first time, when you hold them close, when they learn to roll over,) punctuated by horrifying monotony that you grind through alone, day after day, as you mold your child into a human being. (The hardest part for me, personally, as an introvert, is always talking to the baby. )
Given how many people generally become parents in society (as a very conservative estimate, at least 50% of the population), I also see parental leave as vitally important to talk about with friends, but particularly in work settings, as well, to build empathy and mutual understanding.
Since I consider Twitter to be an ambient extension of discussing work culture, I was really excited to see tweets like this in my timeline, from Gregely (check out his engineering blog, too), who works at Uber:
What I think is exceptional about this is two things.
First, that, even in today’s America, dads don’t get and don’t take leave. It’s bad enough that mothers get, if they’re lucky, three months, which is barely enough time to establish any kind of remotely consistent sleep patterns. For example, my son just recently started doing five hours at a stretch and I am in no way yet capable of concentrating on moving code eight hours a day.
But in general, only fourteen percent of American employees get any kind of paid leave. Almost 40% of men didn’t or couldn’t take any leave whatsoever. This puts women at an enormous disadvantage when interviewing - why hire a woman when she could “risk” getting pregnant? And, it’s bad for dads, too. Bonding is so, so important, and, just as important, building empathy for the experience of how hard it is to raise humans (as demonstrated above) is really, really key, as well, not just for moms.
Second, no one talks about parental leave as being extremely boring, hard, and testing the limits of your physical and mental sanity. It’s not a vacation, it’s a marathon. And yet, it is of utmost importance to have as an experience for new parents in establishing a bond with their kids.
I could do a whole book on American corporate parental leave policies and how terrible they are (and maybe I will in future Normcores), but what I want to leave this particular post with is the general idea that the more we talk about what leave is like, why it’s important, and what it means, the more we can, very slowly, move public opinion and, in the absence of public policy, pressure companies into granting us this time with our newborns.
And maybe if not us, then the next generation of working parents, moving into that blessed, cursed sleepless zone of work to raise new humans.
Art: The Sleeping Seamstress, Jean-Francois Millet, 1845
What I’m reading lately:
The Jeff Bezos Washington Post just expanded its parental leave policy to 20 weeks:
The New York Times and other major publications are not linking back to source, and it’s a problem.
“Tech platforms are where public life is increasingly constructed, and their motivations are far from neutral” (h/t Normcore reader John. Thank you! Please send me good links if you find them. )
Reddit asks, What’s your favorite machine learning research paper title?
Cool collection of free open doodles:
About the Author and Newsletter
I’m a data scientist in Philadelphia. This newsletter is about tech topics I don’t see covered in the media. Most of my free time is spent kid-wrangling, reading, and writing bad tweets. I also have longer opinions on things. Find out more here or follow me on Twitter.
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