When I was pregnant in the early 1990s, I was working in a downtown San Francisco office, writing a monthly health newsletter. I had planned a three-month maternity leave, which was the most you could take off and get paid for. It was my last day in the office before maternity leave started, and colleagues had planned a lovely baby shower kind of party thing for me in the afternoon.
Before the appointed time of the party, my supervisor called me in to her office. She told me that the powers-that-be had decided to stop publishing the health newsletter that I wrote, and that I would not have a job to return to after maternity leave was over. They would pay me for those three months of negotiated leave, and then I would be out in the cold.
She also swore me to secrecy, because the higher-ups had decided to wait until I was gone from the office to “share the news.”
I can scarcely tell you how hard this sucked.
For one thing, we had recently taken on some financial responsibilities that we wouldn’t have taken on if I had known my income was going to evaporate. For another: What the hell, man?? I was about to have a baby. Didn’t anyone ever tell her that you shouldn’t stress out a pregnant woman? For still another: Now I was supposed to go to this office baby shower and act like everything was normal.
I am very bad at faking emotions or facial expressions. I have been told that when I fake-smile, it looks like my legs are breaking.
Well, the party started and one of my work friends said, “Speech! Speech!” I must have had one helluva look on my face, because the supervisor who had canned me said, “She doesn’t want to do any speeches.” Remember? I was sworn to secrecy. She needed to make sure I was silenced.
Then I started crying. Another friend said, “I think it’s just the hormones,” a noble effort to right the vessel. But there was no way that party was going to get crunk after the pregnant woman started weeping.
It remains one of my lifelong regrets that I didn’t say, “I’m sorry, folks, not to be very festive and all, but I just got pink-slipped, and this is not, ‘Good luck with your birth! Have a great maternity leave!’ This is sayonara.”
Today, I don’t think My Now Self would hesitate to do that, which, by corollary, would out my supervisor for her thoughtlessness. My Younger Self found that impossible to do. I recall that my boss insisted on driving me home that day that she canned me, obviously to keep me from talking to anyone about what had happened. I was so shellshocked, I didn’t even consider resistance.
What would I have preferred? I mean, if the decision was made to axe me, what difference would it make when my supervisor did the deed? It would never be a good time, right?
True; there would never be a good time. However, in this situation, there were bad and worse times and she chose the worstest. It would have been less worse if she waited until after my baby was born, so that I wasn’t stressing about having lost my job and those financial responsibilities I mentioned as I anticipated my baby’s birth. Also, I get that she wanted to get this off her chest and checked off of her to-do list, but couldn’t she have imagined that it would totally make mincemeat of my workplace baby shower? That it would be emotionally and practically complicated for me to process this big, heavy news; to not breathe a word of it to anyone; and to go party like Martha Stewart at her Connecticut farmhouse? Could she have considered me in the equation for 35 seconds?
No, she couldn’t, because she was neither a thoughtful nor a considerate person. She revealed that many times during my tenure working under her, but this time took the cake.
Something very interesting emerged from all this, though: I came back to the office a few weeks after my baby was born to conclude some paperwork. One of the production assistants said she wanted to talk to me—privately. We went out somewhere for tea or something, and she proceeded to laundry list for me a parade of women who had been canned from this organization while on maternity leave.
The more I talked to people, the more stories like this I collected, of women being booted from various workplaces, typically during their leave. (My experience of getting dropkicked before my leave even started was apparently unusual. So, I guess, props to my supervisor, who was artless and oafish, but at least not a complete coward.) Here’s a doozy: A friend on the east coast had been working at a publication there. The art director had gone on maternity leave. She was in the hospital with her baby twins, hours after the birth, when she received a telegram explaining that she had been “let go.”
Sooooo….What does it all mean? Do women who have babies and take maternity leaves longer than three weeks need to be punished? (For context, the supervisor who canned me had taken a three-week maternity leave because—her words—“she didn’t want to seem like a flake” by taking a longer leave.) Do women who have babies and take maternity leaves of any length need to be punished? Does it seem a convenient moment to get rid of someone you don’t want around any more? Is this another expression of our culture’s aversion to motherhood and all things maternal? Is it simply that women who have babies need to be punished because somehow they’re deviating from the relentless ethic of a certain kind of productivity?
From the employer’s perspective, maternity leave must present a unique opportunity. A woman who has been fired and who has just had a baby is unlikely, I think, to pursue legal action, even if it’s warranted. That’s not true of all women, of course, but I’ll bet it’s true for a lot of women. Who wants to marinate in the negativity and stress of a lawsuit when your instinct is to provide your new baby with love and a positive environment? And you’ve just lived the miracle of childbirth. That kind of mind-blowing, cosmic experience doesn’t jibe naturally with the antagonism and steely hardness necessary to litigate.
Here’s an ironic twist: The organization that I worked for, at its main offices in New York, made a series of lunchtime seminars available to employees on family/work balance.
One way to improve that balance, of course, would have been to allow the women with families to continue to work.