My son Noah was born 24 years ago on a Monday afternoon. Noah and I stayed in the hospital until Thursday. During my free time in the hospital I finished ( on a yellow legal pad) a presentation for a financial institution. I was under deadline.  On Friday the nanny stopped by and for two hours I attended a convention onward the presentation I had completed during my hospital stay.

I did not take a orally transmitted maternity leave. I didn’t feel I needed it. I kept thinking of all those grandmothers who gave offspring and went back to work in the fields. My attitude was "grant that they can do it, I can do it."

I owned an supervision and in order for every unit else to achieve paid, I felt an obligation to continue working.  But that was my choice and I have always known that that is not the choice mostly people would want to make.

While I did not succeed a real maternity leave, I did change my work hours and I was always back home by 3:45 in the afternoon. And to the time when Noah’s dad came home for dinner I don’t venture I stopped holding Noah for one little. Having my afternoons with Noah was a huge gift. It was my maternity leave –it lasted immersing two years until my nanny had a heart attack and Noah went to daycare. 

When my daughter was born, there were more people in the office to do the work and I actually took two full weeks not upon outside of doing any work. But Berit was each easy easy baby. She ate  and slept and so from two weeks Berit and I returned to the berth. That’s where she stayed until she was six months old when she went to the day care center in  my office building.

As the owner of a business, I had the freedom to have the maternity leave I wanted to acquire. Most women and experts agree moms penury those first few months to bond with their baby and physically recover from childbirth. Most women can’t arbitrarily say - I’m leaving work 2 hours earlier than I used to be by my baby ( without suffering a pay cut) I could. I could always cut into my operate day to be with my children.

The despondent economy is causing businesses to rethink maternity leaves. It is a troubling trend. It’s a trend I wrote about at BlogHer.