Our son is here because my meds reduced the efficacy of the Pill.

Seriously, where the fuck do you live? My husband and I both have good (white collar) jobs and we both had to drain all our sick and vacation to cobble together leave and I still had to take 4 weeks unpaid. No one around here offers paid paternity leave and very few offer any paid maternity. I had to stay home the…

I’m a dude. I have a relatively cushy white-collar job. If I approached my boss and said “hey, I’m feeling burned out, can I take a month long sabbatical?” he would laugh in my face. If I approached my boss and said “hey, my (fictional, nonexistent) wife is having a baby,” he would happily offer me at least a month of…

I’m seeing an awful lot of classist privilege in these comments.

I get the point you’re trying to make, and I don’t have children either and am 30 and have been working full-time for the last 12 years. But I don’t think that having children is the same as the personal goals you list. We as a society acknowledge to some degree that having children is a benefit to society as a whole.…

I don’t like this attitude either.

In the US, I don’t personally know of any dads that have taken more than 2-3 weeks off, unless they are quitting their jobs to be a stay-at-home dad. Maternity leave is the combination of recovering from a medical event (which is why short-term disability often covers up to 6 weeks) and providing 24-7 care to a…

I think that the mothers should apologize to this lady. While you/we were all getting free little bags of soft serve feces, internet dating was forcing this woman and her friend to drink margaritas by the pitcher.

Squeezie bottle of lukewarm water.

It isn’t just other parents. Even on this very article non-parent commenters are talking about how modern parents just “have no life” and have “no identiy outside of being a mom.” Moms literally can’t win.

It’s 100% true that moms have no chill, and moms who start out with chill get it knocked out of them by other parents very quickly. I work at a museum for kids and let me tell you, there is no meaner, no more smug, no more critical or more sanctimonious than other parents. You know the obnoxious standard about diet…

Fully get this too. The idea that taking care of a squalling worm while recovering from what is effectively a traumatic event/major surgery is not my idea of “vacation”

yup that’s exactly what im saying.

Though what you say is true, I think you missed the point of the article. The point is that maternity leave shouldn’t be the only way for a person to get a large chunk of time off of work. That childless/childfree women and working mothers have a common enemy in the corporate culture that doesn’t allow any of us (or…

Yes. That really was it. It wasn’t the subject of her book. It was her idiotic assumption that maternity leave was about resting. Which .... hahahahahaa!

I dunno, I *get* the outrage. This whole “meternity” thing shows that most people think maternity leave is a perk or a vacation and not a necessary time to heal after EXPELLING A HUMAN BEING FROM YOUR BODY ONE WAY OR ANOTHER! I mean, the fact that maternity leave still isn’t mandatorily(ok i made that word up) paid…

I don't know about other companies, but my maternity leaves both required medical proof. I think that's pretty common.

You already need a projected date of maternity to qualify for unpaid FMLA time

You kind of already do. For any time off that is unpaid by the employer, an employee has to file for short-term disability and FMLA - all done through the employer. So literally my first day home from the hospital after having our son, my husband went into work to email my employer all of my documents that had been…

I don’t have kids, but every understanding I have of maternity leave involves no sleep, falling behind on everything, dealing with far too many visitors, and not being able to wipe your ass with toilet paper for a while. I don’t envy anything here.