What I Learned From My First Parental Leave, The Second Time Around

This morning, I’m returning full-time to my role as Chief Marketing Officer of Mirakl after two months of parental leave. In early November, my husband and I welcomed a beautiful baby boy - our second, Henry Michael - into the world. His arrival has brought more love and more joyful chaos into our home than I could ever imagine.?

I’d vowed to handle things differently than I did around the birth of my first son, which was bookended by work emails in the delivery room and conference calls in the days immediately following. The Puritan New England work ethic is a hard one to temper.

During the past few weeks, I’ve been asked by colleagues and peers to share thoughts about my experience as a father and as an executive. Sharing personal details doesn’t come naturally to me in the professional realm. I prefer to talk about technology. However, it was during my last visit to Paris - while at dinner with the amazing Mirakl marketing team - that I had discussion after discussion about parenthood with Kelly Gow , Hélène Kehren , Hugo WEBER , Julie Horville , Angela Morel Troccoli and many more. So, I’m pushing through my personal boundaries for them. ???

Here’s what’s top of mind as I reflect on the leave, jump feet-first back into work, and consider how companies can support healthier families - a prerequisite for having successful workers.

What I Wish I Knew About Parental Leave the First Time Around

The most common question I was asked when I was expecting my first son was “Are you ready?” The honest answer was, of course, “no”. One is never ready for life’s big moments. Having a second child was indeed easier in many ways. But my different experiences with each birth - taking only a few days off with my first son and a longer pause with the second - have had a major impact on my outlook on life. Here are three things I’ve learned about parental leave:?

• It’s 99% about your family and 1% about you. When a child is born, it needs you. Your other children need you. Your partner or spouse needs you. The arrival of a new child shatters the family structure that was in place before. During the weeks after a birth, you need to hold the new pieces together so the glue can set and create a whole vessel again. You set the pieces together by being present. Lose the guilt, if you feel it (I did … and admittedly still do). Parental time is not an indulgence. It is the basis for a “forever foundation,” which will make you a better performer in any work capacity.
• You need to determine, and communicate, the boundaries. It was important for me to ensure that I continued to “show up” for Mirakl even as I focused on the family event of a lifetime. I would not have enjoyed or appreciated the personal time without keeping one hand on the steering wheel of our incredibly dynamic industry and business. Before Henry’s birth, I established clear guidelines with my colleagues and team about what I needed to remain involved in during my time away - e.g., 2023 planning - and under what circumstances they should call me. Those were captured in emails and discussed in meetings before my PTO. A live, midpoint check-in with my boss and teams after one month enabled me to provide guidance and continuity. While the actual boundaries of each leave period will vary by individual, the need to agree on and communicate them is essential.
• Leave is a misnomer. You will NOT come back “refreshed,” and that’s OK. Yes, I’ve been asked this. Hiking in the mountains of Bhutan for several weeks is accurately described as a “leave.” Feeding a newborn every couple of hours, 24/7, with just enough time to change diapers, do laundry, and wash dishes in between, as progressive sleep deprivation sets in, is not. Time away, however, is essential to providing stability and reliability to a family. Bonus: On the other side of things, your intense career, with its lack of bottles, diapers, and recurring tears, looks like an oasis of tranquility!

Vive La Rentrée

Speaking of oases, focusing on small humans has a way of calming other noise. I am more excited than ever to jump fully back into the online marketplace fray this week.? I love what Mirakl does and consider myself fortunate to spend my days charting the course for the innovations that we have pioneered and the economy that has risen around our amazing products and customers.

Making the weeks ahead as successful as possible - so the months and years ahead will be as successful as possible - requires recognizing that the full return to work is a stage with an identity all its own. It’s not as simple as a flip of the switch.

As usual, things that are emotional and human are poorly described in American English. “Return” is a noun that describes a static moment in time, accompanied by nothing, completed as soon as it’s uttered. We can thank the French for having not just a word, but a nuanced understanding of the phase that accompanies one’s return: la rentrée. La rentrée most commonly refers to the period that bridges the end of August vacations and the return to school or work. It contains emotions of leaving behind and resuming, not to mention the rituals that accompany both. And it is intense - leveraging the repose found during time away to open and accelerate new chapters.

It is, therefore, the perfect mindset to embrace as you open that office door (or that Zoom call, depending on your company) for the first time. Mindset is everything, but it is also nothing without actions to deliver on it. Therefore, my rentrée comes with a plan to quickly re-center on the most critical business outcomes and reconnect with the colleagues who will deliver on them together.?

Stronger Families, Stronger Businesses

My boss at ReliaQuest, founder and CEO Brian Murphy , often says, “There is no perfect, but there is a better.” Those words apply to so much in our lives, and I replay them in my mind on a regular basis. Family life and work life are inherently imperfect, never mind the efforts to synchronize them. With that in mind, I transition from this time off with recommendations for a few ways we can collectively improve:

• Leave is about children, not only parents. If we treat parental leave as being about the child/family as much as it is about the parent, we will make better choices. Countries that tend to take a societal long view are good at this. The US? Not so much. Earlier in my career, so-called paternity leave was often discussed in the same breath as foosball table-caliber employee perks. This, despite the fact that studies of exceptional employee performance going all the way back to Napoleon Hill correlate it with strong family support.???
• Families have changed. Policies must acknowledge it, too. Once you center a policy on the needs of children, the identity of the parents doesn’t matter. My two sons have two dads. Men in the US take an average of one week off around a baby’s birth - clearly that wasn’t going to work in our household. All couples pursuing adoptions or surrogacy to bring children into their families fall under the banner of “non-birth parents” in some companies - an ugly description that translates into a couple of weeks off. There are many kinds of families, and efforts to categorize or characterize them in a blanket HR policy benefits neither the child nor the worker.

Finally, check your culture. Successful, high-growth scale-ups are full of stories of the superhuman dedication that allowed them to take off. Many of these become cultural touch points that a company rallies around for years to come. In the US, I’ve encountered multiple instances of the “taking calls in the delivery room/went right back to work the next day” story from members of an early team. These stories are particularly insidious, because they indirectly stigmatize the desire to pause for a child’s birth as a lack of career dedication. Decades of these stories got inside my head and influenced how I viewed the time around my first son’s birth. Let’s lose them and focus instead on the many other acts of early stage heroism that there are to celebrate - career heroism AND parental heroism.

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On the morning of my rentrée, I’m grateful for the time I’ve had for my family and the support along the way from the Mirakl team. Special appreciation goes to Adrien Nussenbaum and Philippe Corrot , to my colleagues, and to my rockstar team led by Fareeha Ali , Hannah Corey , Virginie Dupin I Marketing Leader , Anne Kelley , Maya Pattison , and Angela Morel Troccoli who supported me during this time.

I am, above all, over the moon for this now-smiling, cooing little guy who has joined me and the rest of my family for a lifetime adventure!