I married a man who said, “If we ever have kids, I’d love to stay at home them.” Slam dunk.
A core reason for dating-then-marrying him was this very feminist perspective and his understanding of my (insane, at times) desire to work. As we saw into our future, we embraced the notion of one parent staying home with our future kids. We both knew it was more likely to be him than me.
So we moved to Canada.
Quite simply, the Canadian year-long paternity leave option* drove our decision to say yes to a new job offer. For a newly married couple with plans for kids, we saw this as the best opportunity to craft our dream parenting scenario.
See ya later Family & Medical Leave Act and your paltry 12 weeks.
Fast-forward five years.
It took us longer than expected to get pregnant. In that time, as we watched our friends and colleagues have babies, the shiny gloss of Canada’s paternity leave started to show signs of wear. Off-handed comments by both mothers and fathers started to erode the utopia we were hoping to create. From mothers, I heard: “Aren’t you going to take the year? You deserve it.”, “It’s the only time you’ll have with your child, work will be there when you get back.”, and “We (The women) worked hard to fight for those weeks. You need to take them.” From the fathers, we heard, “Isn’t your wife taking maternity leave?”, “Dudes don’t take leave.”, and “Your company lets you do that?”
Even before I got pregnant, I started noticing a stark lack of men taking their paternity leave privileges and was concerned by a lack of female role models returning to the workplace early. For all of this “liberal” progress, it wasn’t manifesting as I anticipated.
When our real conversations began, my husband moved from our 50/50 leave-sharing-plan to a “I think I can take three weeks or a month.” Huh? WTF? I’m six months pregnant and now I hear about this? My rage/anger aside, he went on to explain the social norms within the company. “Michele, men just don’t take paternity leave. I’m actually lucky because there’s a precedent in my group.” (The three week precedent.) My sharp retort, “Did you know this when we decided to move here?” Silence.
Perhaps, it’s because I’ve just finished How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran and am feeling all femin-feisty, but Canadian social norms around paternity leave much to be desired. For gods-sakes men, it’s federally mandated. That’s like women saying, “nah, we don’t really wanna use our right to vote” or gay couples saying, “thanks, but no thanks on that marriage thing”. What enrages me is that Canadian paternity leave is waved around so smugly in the face of Americans. “Oh how could you possibly only take 12 weeks off, you poor dears. Up here in Caaaa-naaaa-daaa we have a year – for BOTH parents!” (Health care is done in much of the same way, sweeping its own dirty secrets under the rug.)
What was visioned as our utopian opportunity to have a family has now degraded into my insistence to go back to work, our rush to find childcare, and my husband’s idealized notion that his three-week leave will be a really great time to travel as a family. To have a privilege which is federally mandated, that offers a wage-subsidy for families, and opens choices for women & men is awesome. To have its usage mired by old social norms, frankly, sucks.
There’s been so much written lately on the ongoing challenge for women balancing maternity and work (to the point of this post, one argues for federally mandated leave as the way forward). Another article actually pulls men into the equation to say, hey guys, it’s your problem too. And that’s the truth. Raising these crazy kids is a two person, if not more, job. Here in this great tundra of the North, there is an amazing opportunity to slice, dice and create a variety of permutations of how this looks all without needing to surrender your job, your livelihood, or your health insurance.
Indeed, there are the brave pioneers who are doing this…men using their paternity leave to care for their babies as their baby mamas get back to the work they love. Gasp, horror, shock! Yet for all their bold acts they still must endure the snickers, the backhanded comments, and being labeled as “one of those guys.”
This isn’t just a feminist issue. It’s a parenting one. And creating the family life you want to have. How does the government get that before we do?
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*For Americans its hard to believe that 17 weeks of maternity leave is guaranteed to the mother, and then an additional 35 is guaranteed for the parents to use however they’d like. All of this with 55% of your salary paid in employment insurance benefits (most of the time) and some companies top up that amount.
