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Recently at Mommytrack'd, Leslie Morgan-Steiner wrote about companies offering to let new moms bring their babies on the job. And for the thousandth time, I wondered if I ever would've been able to pull that one off.
Leslie wrote:
Most of the companies offer the option only for the first several months of life, while infants are relatively quiet and sedentary. However, talk to new parents and it’s clear that those months provide invaluable time to bond with baby, maximize breastfeeding, and figure out the family’s unique work-life balancing act in a more rational, measured fashion than “Maternity-leave-is-over-what-am-I-going-to-do?”
And I thought to myself how that first few months back to work felt. Here's an excerpt from my first week back to work, back in 2004:
Well, it's my first week back working for the man. Here are the things I am learning this week: 1) There is a special, eighth level of hell especially reserved for new mothers who have to leave their young babies at daycare. I used to smile sweetly when a new mom would tell me she cried every day for a week when she had to leave her little angel at daycare for the first time. I thought it would feel like when I have to board Sybil at the vet's when we go home for Christmas. I did not realize it would feel more like someone had borrowed one of my limbs for a few hours and told me to function like a normal, smiling human being without it while my heart crawled into my little toe and cried.
Oh, right. I wanted to die.
Would taking my daughter to work with me have helped? Mentally? Physically? I wasn't breastfeeding her any more at that point -- breastfeeding and me didn't really ever go hand-in-hand -- but I know that's one key area in which many new mothers would benefit immensely from taking their babies to work. The other key area? Emotional salve.
Maybe. Or would having your baby there, all cute and sweet, be even worse than forcing your attention onto whatever task is at hand?
There are so many things to consider. What's your baby's personality? Is she quiet? Needy? Like to be held a lot? What's your job? Clearly this isn't going to work if you run the fry machine, which makes the whole discussion privileged, at best. Bringing a baby to work would never work for any dangerous or extremely manual job.
Then there's the question of who else is in your office -- because it would probably be an office, even if you worked in the medical sector. How would your co-workers feel about a baby's presence?
And then finally -- for me -- there's a question of focus. I've always had fairly technical/writing jobs that required my complete attention for blocks of time. Minimizing distractions is always one of my biggest challenges and the reason I work better from home in the first place. At three months of age, my daughter was rocking out a lot of the time, and I can't imagine her being in any sort of condition to come to work with me IN AN OFFICE.
Small business owners have been bringing babies to work for years -- child care providers, accountants, store owners. I could totally see it working if you had the sort of job where you could start and stop and had a quiet spot in the back where you could bring a bassinet and a bouncy seat and some stuff to keep baby quiet and happy for short blocks of time while you interacted with clients or the public. It would be tough, but working parenthood is tough. Also, you'd be in charge, so you could surround yourself with people comfortable with a family-friendly policy.
It's certainly a topic that gives me pause. I know I was miserable when I had to return to work. I spent several hours a day thinking about my baby and how much I hated being at work. (There *may* have been some undiagnosed post-partum depression going on -- I have no guesses about how other women handled it inside except for bloggers who have shared their stories.) I know if my employer had offered me the chance to bring my girl to work, I would've done it in a heartbeat. And I would've found a way to make it work, even if it killed me.
And ... it might've killed me.
Family-friendly work policy isn't
