Baby vs work: Sometimes you have to choose

Yesterday, my anonymous friend wrote a guest post about bringing her baby to work and how – for now – this works very well for both of them. On twitter, @crazygradmama said the following:

@BabyAttachMode It doesn't work as well when your baby is colicky. :(

— crazy mama, PhD (@crazygradmama) December 22, 2015

… which I wholeheartedly agreed with. Obviously, not every baby is the same and then we’re not even talking about babies with disabilities or illnesses that make it much harder and more intense to care for them. I’m not sure BlueEyes was officially colicky, but he, pretty early on, was able to make known what his preferences were. He liked to be worn, but only if the person wearing him kept moving when he was awake. Only if he slept, that person could sit down, and he usually only napped for 30-40 minutes at a time, in a pretty unpredictable manner. He did not like to spend much time by himself in a playpen or something like that. He did not like to sit in his car-seat and he did not like to be held by unfamiliar people.

In addition, it took quite some time for me to get used to my role as a mother and merge my scientist/professional-me with my mother-me (there’s a post brewing about this, but it’s not quite done yet). Especially in the beginning, this made it kind of uncomfortable to bring my baby to work or to a conference because it felt really weird to be those two roles at the same time. Also, being able to focus on work and a baby on the cra**y amount of sleep I was getting seemed a bit much for my already foggy postpartum brain.

With Little Brother, working during my maternity leave was easier. He was a bit less intense than BlueEyes in making known what he wanted and I was a bit better at going with the flow. At home, I put my laptop high enough such that I could stand and work, so I could bounce him while wearing him and type at the same time. I took him to work every now and then just to check in at the lab, but we were also moving when he was four months old, so it wasn’t that crucial to find a long-term solution of bringing him to work.

With BlueEyes, we were incredibly fortunate because when I had to go back to work three months after he was born, he went to the daycare at our university, where the teacher: baby ratio was 1:2.5. They assigned a particular teacher for each baby, so the babies were mostly cared for by one familiar person. We were fortunate to get a scholarship, because otherwise it would have been difficult to pay for this daycare on two postdoc salaries (and impossible on just one).

Little Brother went to daycare after we moved back to the home country, where the teacher: baby ratio was higher, and the amount of different teachers during the week was larger. He really only started to get comfortable there after he was a year old and could walk and start to talk. Before that, on some days, he would sleep for 6 hours and barely drink anything (which he caught up on at night). When I was a postdoc, I felt that I should keep working to keep up, and that is also what the amount of maternity leave in most countries suggests. I’m also not sure if I would even want to be home full-time (and I realize that for many, this is financially not an option to even consider). For me, the ideal situation would be somewhere in between: work a couple hours a day, but also be able to be with my baby during the first year.

In the end, I think it is very valuable to share these stories, so that we can learn from each other. I’d like to hear how academics from countries with much longer parental leave have experienced their first year with a baby. Do you actually stop working, and do you think it is harder to get back? Share your experience in the comments!

Babyattachmode (@BabyAttachMode) is the pseudonym of a neuroscience PhD turned industry scientist. This story was published on December 23, 2015, on her Scientopia blog, In Baby Attach Mode (available here), and has been republished here with her permission.