Comments on: Crafting the self-employed maternity leave

By: Day2DayBlogs

Day2DayBlogs — Wed, 27 May 2020 04:02:05 +0000

Thank you so much for sharing this amazing information Do you want to be self-employed? Then you need to know about freelancer

By: Angela

Angela — Sat, 28 Dec 2019 13:28:03 +0000

I love this post. (Truth be told, I love your work!). I have been away from reading any blogs for a while and I had NO IDEA you were pregnant again until I read a comment on a fb post about work/mom life ‘balance’. I am always recommending your work and blog to other people, so I was ecstatic to see someone else mentioning it too. And it reminded me to get back to reading your blog!
But back to this post, the very reason why I love your work is because you love what you do and it shines through. I love the part where you are explaining why you don’t go dormant with your work- you enjoy it! Love, love, love that!!
Thanks for continuing to share your perspective!

By: Laura Vanderkam

Laura Vanderkam — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 12:30:15 +0000

In reply to Beth Henary Watson. @Beth - thanks!

By: Beth Henary Watson

Beth Henary Watson — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 20:31:51 +0000

Congrats on baby #5 !!!!

By: Laura Vanderkam

Laura Vanderkam — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 17:47:50 +0000

In reply to Rinna.

@Rinna – probably 35-40 hours a week is about right for me. So that is where I would aim to land. It does tend to go up and down depending on what I have going on…

By: Rinna

Rinna — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 05:29:41 +0000

Really interesting post, Laura. Personally, however, I’m even more interested in how you will set up your work life post-infancy. For example, how many hours do you really think you will be working once you are back to “full strength”? I think you’ve mentioned that you have been logging about 35 hrs/week for the last little while…is that where you think you’ll land again once baby isn’t, well, such a baby. Hope you’re feeling well!

By: BethC

BethC — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 21:52:35 +0000

In reply to Anonymous. I am super impressed! I finished my dissertation a week before my first was born, and thank goodness for that because my brain was mush afterward.

By: Laura Vanderkam

Laura Vanderkam — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 19:21:43 +0000

In reply to omdg. @omdg - this is true that work done in the throes of sleep deprivation may not stand up to later scrutiny!

By: Diane C.

Diane C. — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 15:37:08 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as someone who is seasonally employed and just had a third baby (I work as a stage manager in the performing arts). For my second and third children, I went back to work less than a week after giving birth, both times for commitments I had made before the positive pregnancy test. When I discovered I was pregnant, I did briefly consider pulling out of those gigs, but then I thought it through and decided I wanted to make it work – my parents came to help, I got out the pump, and I figured I can do anything for eight weeks, knowing I had a month or two with no work lined up afterwards. I shifted my “maternity leave” to when my kids were 12 weeks old. Or rather I reframed a typical period of unemployment as “maternity leave”. I don’t technically work for myself in that I need to be hired by a performing arts organizations, and there is a limited amount of career crafting I can do in my niche; if no one is producing opera in my area, there is not much work for me, so there is an urgency to taking contracts when they are offered. I did lose a regular out of state summer gig after I had my second. I had worked from the time my son was born until he was 12 weeks old, and decided I wanted to take the summer for “maternity leave.” My summer gig (where I had been for ten years), told me that they would not guarantee that they would hire me back the next summer, something I am still annoyed about. I guess that’s a risk of opting out of one season of work, and though I loved that gig, I’m actually glad to have my summers free now that my oldest is in elementary school. I know maternity leave is always a choice, but I can’t decide in my mind if being freelancer it means I have more choice or less choice? Or perhaps it just means that I need to be very purposeful in my choice of how I spend my time employed vs. unemploymed. (Never mind that, particularly in this country, for many workers there is no maternity leave choice at all)

By: omdg

omdg — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 14:18:47 +0000

Yes… with one caveat. I was so sleep deprived that first month after my daughter was born that I basically had to discard all the work I completed during that time because I made too many mistakes. My thinking was just not right. If you can hire a night nanny, that probably helps with that problem significantly, and I would recommend doing that. May not be necessary for people who only need 4 hours of sleep per night, but definitely would have been helpful to me.