I did nothing on parental leave (I'm lying)

To start: It is not “nothing” to help a human go from newborn to a walking, babbling, belly-laughing little explorer with skills, opinions, and an astounding sense of humor. Caregiving is not “nothing,” and the fact that most institutions still view it this way has to change.

I mean that I did nothing professionally – or wish I had. I took 13 months of parental leave, and I should have spent it exclusively on my tiny human.?

Instead, I combined full-time parenting with running seminars and speaking at conferences, scoping businesses and attending investor meetings, mentoring and hiring, and and…

In retrospect, I regret it.

The first year is hard, and crucial. Babies learn to hold up their head, roll over, sit up, reach, grasp with intention, point, smile, associate. They grow 1.5 times in length and triple their weight. Their brain doubles in size, building 1,000,000 synapses per second.?

They are also remarkably un-self-sufficient; for a simple comparison, recall that some species can walk the day they are born. A human baby’s progress is entirely dependent on their caregiver. As caregivers, we are responsible for fundamental, momentous stuff. It is worthwhile, and commendable, to spend time exclusively on teaching a baby to eat, sleep, and communicate.?

Yet I felt I should do “more,” and I am not unique in this. A recent study found that two-thirds of women in academia continue to work while on parental leave. A 2018 survey found that 80% of women in tech feel pressure to end their parental leave early. This makes sense, given the extensively documented motherhood penalty they face. It took me 10 minutes to find these statistics; we all know that there are lots more.

As caregivers, we feel pressure to do more because caregiving is not valued. Most employers discount life experience in job applicants; this is especially scary in a poor job market. Companies see parents taking leave as vanishing resources, instead of valuing that some of their people embark on a challenging and deeply humbling journey that will impart more lessons than all their corporate trainings combined. Society fetishizes strength, multitasking, ruthless prioritization, and self-sacrifice – things seen as the opposite of caregiving, even though they are also intrinsic to parenthood.?

Don’t get me wrong – everything I did this past year was fun and worth it, baby un/related. Still, stretching beyond what I initially planned also resulted in mediocrity: Some weeks, I was less present than I wanted with my son. Other weeks, I made professional commitments I later had to renege on. This is because I was answering to internalized pressure rather than my own beliefs. No matter how much I had looked forward to an uninterrupted year with my tiny human, too many voices (loud and subliminal) had convinced me that if I cared about my career at all, I was not allowed to take it.?

I will probably keep parsing my thoughts on this delicate balance for the rest of my life. In the meantime, as I return to my professional pursuits, I can commit to this:

• As an executive: To modeling healthi(er) boundaries between work/life.
• As a leader: To championing others to take their personal leaves in alignment with their own preferences, without explicit or implicit pressure from anybody else.
• As a person: To advocating every chance I get that we shift our institutional and societal views on caregiving; learn to integrate it into our understanding of professional growth and personal development; and refuse regressive labels like “career gap.”?

Please hold me accountable.