Never had dibilitating morning sickness, have you?:dubious:
Ever tried driving 50 miles to a job having to stop every 5 or 10 minutes to either vomit or dry heave…them spend the day heaving into a wastebasket with your phone on mute? Bosses tend to object to the hurling thanks to the volume of HR complaints from co workers.
Some of us have serious morning sickness issues that basically mean you are stuck for varying times from a couple hours to all day and evening worshiping the porcelain god.
And in frustration once I actually walked my breakfast dish into the bathroom and flushed the contents because I was tired of eating and throwing it up immediately. :rolleyes:
And, while it isn’t common, women do get hospitalized for morning sickness. For months at a time if its bad enough. Morning sickness CAN stop you. But when pregnancy stops you, it arguably isn’t a “healthy” pregnancy.
Yeah, trying to plan pregnancy timing is nice and all, and it sometimes works (I got pregnant the 2nd month we were trying, my BFF got pregnant the first month after quitting the Pill, even), but all plans go out the window once you have the actual baby. You need to get used to flying by the seat of your pants–I say this as the former planning mother of a very, very easy seven-month-old. Seriously, she’s the easiest baby on Earth and still manages to wreck the best-laid plans.
I think people are painting a bit too much of a gloom-and-doom scenario when it comes to you finding work while pregnant. Social work is a female-dominated field that is (in many cases) known for high burnout and turnover rate. Hell, my office has had a social work position open for several months now. I would think that pregnancy is something that your employers would be used to dealing with. Oh and my previously-mentioned BFF got a job while pregnant after her husband moved the family from Seattle to Texas to do his post-doc. So it’s certainly not impossible. The one thing you will want to consider, of course, is benefits. You’re definitely going to want to be covered by medical insurance for your entire pregnancy, so you don’t have to pay out of pocket for anything. My emergency cesarean birth was about $27,000.
13 years ago: My first job had no maternity leave. When that happens you revert to state coverage under short term disability, which is a percentage of your paycheck. They don’t pay your first week because that should be you using up your vacation/sick days, and they don’t pay your last week. You get the amount of weeks your doc says you can have. Typically that’s 6 weeks for vaginal or 8 weeks for cesarean. It’s way less than unemployment, BTW, my 4 checks were about $160 per week each. If this is the way you end up having to go, I strongly suggest applying for WIC. I didn’t and I regretted it b/c I thought they were food stamps and I’d be ineligible. It’s not the same thing.
10 years ago: Much better job that had short term disability, and an actual maternity leave policy. three months paid at varying percentages of salary, I think the last month was at 75%.
9 years ago: Same job that was going down the crapper. They convinced me to come back after 8 weeks b/c they were doing layoffs and being the person in the chair was much less likely to be laid off. Yes, I know that probably wasn’t legal. They made it up to me by allowing me to work from home 2 days a week.
Got pregnant the first month we tried! (In December of final year of residency-finished in late June. Able to arrange my schedule beforehand to have “easier” rotations in final year-fewer 36 hour days)
Morning/all-day sickness for 13 weeks. Vomiting at the side of the road during drive to work-yep. Trying not to vomit in the patient’s open wound - yep-thankfully made it to the bathroom in time. Vomited home-made chicken vegetable soup, then ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that stayed down. Dry cereal was a lifesaver-carried bags of it in my pockets to snack on-was “roasted” for the cereal and the fatigue during the graduation party.
On active duty in military, so no problem going to new assignment while pregnant. Given 2 hour lunch break in final month to rest, and no call in last month. Worked on Friday, had baby on Sunday. 30 days maternity leave. (45 if c-section) For some women, 30 days off is too much. Others, not enough. (you won’t know how you will react until after the baby is born.) Going back to work, I cried every day for a week, and I left my son at home with my husband! (who took a year off from school to be a stay-at-home dad)
Post-partum depression: 7 months, not helped with medication. One night when husband was at a meeting, had to put the crying baby in his crib (after trying all known solutions/causes) and go sit on the front porch so I wouldn’t hurt him. We both survived.
You don’t know what will happen to you until it happens. You try to make plans, and then have to make new plans in the reality of what happens.
I realized that I could not work full time, and be a wife, and a mother, and maintain my sanity. Some women can to it all, and they are a wonder to behold. I chose to work part-time to be able to be a part of my kids lives.
Sometimes I wonder where my career would have gone, and how much more money I could be making now, but mostly, I look at my 2 boys (Yes! after all the trouble, I did it again!) and I am so proud of how well they have done.
No success can compensate for failure in the home.
I don’t know how full-time working moms do it, either. Some of them have flexible schedules, some have spouses with flexible schedules, some of them have family who they can lean on. A lot of them scramble for care. It takes a lot of energy, just to keep things going.
And it doesn’t necessarily become a cakewalk when they’re in school - my twins just started kindergarten and my daughter’s home sick today. So now I’ll spend the next 30 mins making phone calls to cancel the volunteer things I was going to do today. Next week we’ll be on a field trip. There’s homework, paperwork, things to bring in, volunteering (our charter school carries obligations), meetings to attend. It’s nowhere near as much work as an infant, but it’s not smooth sailing, either.
OTOH, being a full-time SAHM is also enough to drive a person batshit insane. Especially once they turn 2.5. Working part-time is essential for a woman’s sanity, I think. You just need other people in order to pull it off - kids are really unpredictable. Babies moreso.
And yet your love for your children is mind-boggling. The whole thing is this incredible roller-coaster and SO much work, yet absolutely rewarding. Absolutely. It’s like someone took your heart and scooped it out and gave it human form and beauty. I wouldn’t have missed this for the world, even though it meant I had to give up on my life (completely!) for most of the last 6 years.
I have twins (and was incapacitated for most of my pregnancy), and I’m a lot older than you are, I was 38 when I became pregnant. And my husband has NOT been a full partner in this (in fact, it just about killed our marriage) but he IS doing the best he can. So those are probably vast differences between us.
And yet, I can imagine how you and your husband are, I think you’re ethereal people - I’m like that, too, and it takes a lot of energy to just process all of it. And deal with the crap from your own past that re-surfaces.
And I can imagine you are the kind of person who will expect to be an excellent mother. There are those who just go through the motions (and sometimes their kids turn out great) but some of us aren’t like that. Some of us form close bonds with our kids and it’s really hard to get them out of our minds, even when we can.
So my two pieces of advice are, (1) Give yourself space to make motherhood your first priority and accept the price you pay for that, and (2) find girlfriends. I have an extensive network of girlfriends (which I never had before) and it makes a HUGE difference.
If you want a fairly accurate, reasonably hilarious telling of what motherhood is like, read Vicki Iovine’s “Girlfriend’s Guides”. She’s written several, the one on pregnancy and the one on the first year of motherhood are my favorite.
I had none of these, yet I managed it. It wasn’t the easiest thing I ever did, but also not the hardest, not by a long shot. I look back on those years now with great fondness. We didn’t have much (monetarily) but boy did we have fun.
Child-raising isn’t some huge monster of a thing. People have been doing it for centuries. Trust your instincts, and a lot of it will just come naturally to you.
No, but my wife has, my sister has, and all their friends have, and they kept their job. I can think of literally dozens of women I’ve known who worked through morning sickness. Is it awful? Yes. As it was once described to me, “First you’re afraid you’re going to die, and then you’re afraid you won’t.” Would it prevent you from holding a job? It’s theoretically possible, but very unlikely. The great, great majority of women manage it.
On the other hand, there ARE pregnancy-related conditions that absolutely will prevent you from working, such as eclampsia. Making the distinction between very uncomfortable and doctor-makes-you-stay-home dangerous is important here. The OP needs facts, not feelings.
I’d also advise the OP to ensure the financial implications are fully worked out in terms of medical costs. I’ve no idea what insurance they have either through employers or in the State of New Jersey. Here we paid $25. There it might be $25,000, I haven’t a clue, but it might be nice to sort it out before the invoice arrives in the mail.
Regarding jobs and maternity leave: the FMLA says that your employer must give you up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave, but only if the company is big enough, and only if you have worked there, full-time, for a year before taking your leave. Some companies will give you leave even if you haven’t worked there for a year, but they are not required to. So just keep that in mind!
Debilitating morning sickness is rare, but it happens. It’s an actual condition where literally the woman can’t keep anything down, and becomes extremely dehydrated and possibly malnourished. These women are potentially hospitalized for months with IV fluids and so on. It’s not common, but it happens. It’s called hyperemsis gravidarum, and affects 5 in 1000 pregnant women. It can kill. You’re right that the average woman doesn’t have this issue, even if they have horrible morning sickness, but dismissing this serious condition isn’t helping either.
There seems to be a very female view on “career” that it is some sort of hobby that one partakes in on top of their other activities. And that the career is something you can dial back or eliminate altogether if you would rather focus your energies on raising a family or whatever.
From the male perspective, we do not have much of a choice in terms of how much time we spend on our career. We generally have to work as hard as we can to make as much money as we can in order to support the family. IOW, it is difficult for men to choose between family and career because without a successful career, there is no family for long.
I’m sure our OP knows there are medical risks involved in pregnancy; her questrions seemed to be concerning how pregnancy would normally affect one’s ability to work. Obviously the abnormal can’t be predicted. You don’t even have to get pregnant for an unexpected medical emergecy to derail your job.
This seems outdated. Many more employers are sympathetic to parents (both men and women) than they were in the past. Also, men aren’t always the sole money providers, nor the ones with the biggest paycheck in the family, anymore.
I’m sure you didn’t mean it as such, but calling it a “hobby” is a bit offensive, IMO. I raised a family and have a good career. I don’t see it as a “hobby”, certainly.
Olives, I think that’s great that you are looking into having children. I know what a wonderful thing parenthood has been for me.
My thoughts on having a career and being a parent. It’s easy, just be born with that Y chromosome and have your wife take care of the rug rats.
So much for the jokes. I wouldn’t really worry too much about the basics of parenting. One friend described it best, everyone starts out inexperienced and then becomes experts. You will figure stuff out.
My wife works in academia, which offers some more flexibility than other fields, Still, there are papers to be written, symposiums to be attended and presented and classes to be taught. A lot of preparation which used to be done in the evening needs to be done at other times, including in the middle of the night. Fortunately, that’s not every day.
I know that I do more than almost any other father in our group of friends, her relatives, etc., but my wife still takes care of a lot of the logistics. [del]Talking about[/del] minutely planning these things really helps. It’s too easy to get into a rut of one parent, usually the mother, packing the bag, deciding the clothes, scheduling doctor appointments. We’ve had to experiment around to work things out.
Repeated for truth, except it depends on what a career entails. If the field is steady, flexible and doesn’t require 9 billion hours a week, then it’s possible for each to have careers. My attorney comes into the office at ten and leaves by six, and is still known as one of the best in her specialty. Certainly she could have done more, but she likes the time with her child.
Think of parenthood as playing zone defense. Who is going to cover days when the child runs a fever and has to come home from day care? Who will be there at night? Without outside help, both parents can’t have inflexible jobs which involve travel, for example.
I disagree completely with this. There are countless choices of careers and jobs, not all of which require 70-hour workweeks to make oodles of money. I turned down a better paid job which would have taken me away from spending time with my daughter during the week days. I’ve got a successful career but we, as a family, are making financial sacrifices to spend more time together.
We save money, life conservatively, live in a smaller place than what some friends do, but I leave the office at 6 and spend irreplaceable time with my daughter every day. Money and glory aren’t everything.
Olives If you can, I’d talk to people in the field to get a better field for what is required. How many hours a week? How much flexibility? What is your husband doing to do? How much flexibility will be in his field?
And that sucks … especially if you end up divorced with custody … if you get that call from the school and have to leave work to deal with it, people get snarky about why the wife isnt handling the kids issues. Seen that one more than once with a couple of ex coworkers at my last job.
Which country is it where the man get almost as much maternity leave as the woman? Like 3 months or something like that? I seem to remember it discussed here maybe 2 years ago?
One of my friends from my last job just became the stay at home dad as his wife makes twice what he did so it is working out quite well for them. John is a great dad.
I’ve been wondering what Mr.Smith meant ever since yesterday – are women to be denied access to the workplace because we’re not “serious enough” about it?
Are we supposed to choose between work and kids at age 18 and skip college if there’s a chance we might procreate?
And if so, are men going to pay us for making and raising babies for them and provide a lifelong pension?
What choice do women have but to re-enter the workforce in the case of divorce or death?
Are you proposing that mothers NOT stay home with their children, even if they can afford to do so?
I don’t get it - what do you want?
I, too, know a few stay-at-home Dads. And several men who spend their entire evenings with their children. In fact, pretty much any study that discusses successful child-rearing emphasizes the importance of the father. I’m seeing that in my kids relationship with their dad, who works full-time while I stay at home. He is absolutely essential.
I know one kid whose father has clearly rejected him (or fatherhood, I don’t know where the problem lies) and he has the worst behavior of any child in my peer group.
Many good pregnancy books also cover the time you’re in now, olives. For instance, the book I had, The mother of all pregnancy books, has a chapter on "Having a child, is it for you? " Which contains a lot of practical info on the issues mentioned here. If you want to do your research, I’d say that book is a good one-shop-stop.
I don’t dismiss what **mrsmith **has said completely out of hand - he’s got some excellent points there, and I’m saying that as a woman. Yes, things are way different than they used to be, and yes, women can be as dedicated to their jobs as men, but there’s a lot there in the male psyche that, IMO, women don’t understand.
IMO, women have a lot more options, in some ways, then men do. Have a career? Great! Have a career and kids? Great! Work part time and have kids? Great! Stay at home 'till the kids are raised, then work? Great! Be a permanent SAHM and never go back to work? Great! I think there’s a little bit of truth in the idea that women see careers as something else to take on, something else to devote time to, or even something else that can be dialed back as needed. It’s not at all that we’re not as devoted, dedicated, or competitive with our careers as men - this is patently not true. But I do think that we view our careers slightly differently because of our upbringing - we’ve always had options.
The men I was raised with, even with their “progressive” rearing of the '70s and '80s, never had these options. Stay-at-home-dads, while not unheard of, were mostly the stuff of movies or fantasy, yet lots of kids had SAHMoms. For the men I was raised with, getting a job was never an option - it was a necessity. Yes, these men are much more egalitarian than their fathers; they expect to (and are expected to) share in the housework and in the parenting and help the women in their lives do whatever she feels like doing, but they also expect to (and are expected to) work. How many tons of threads have we had about SAHDs and how society views their roles (mostly positively, but also with sideways looks and some derision)?
No one’s saying that women can’t have careers or can’t be successful in them or can’t be as competitive and driven as men. But there’s definitely a difference in how women’s workplace choices are treated and perceived. Not that it’s right or wrong, but it is there.
On the whole timing issue, in addition to the possibility of not getting pregnant right when you want to, you have to consider the possibility that your pregnancy will be shorter than you expect. My daughter was five weeks early (induced due to preeclampsia), and my son was three weeks early (early C-section due to placenta previa). I also spent ten weeks in the hospital with my second pregnancy (placenta previa plus clotting issues that required me to be on blood thinners during pregnancy - this is a recipe for terror for an OB).
That said, I think it would be easier to be pregnant while in school than while working. Pregnancy brain may be an issue, but that may be an issue with work, too. In general, I think that you will get cut more slack as a student than as a newly hired worker.
