This will warm your hearts
- Thread starter fred mertz
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captainmcd
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I hope your husband and you do a good job, but after half a year living off the work of others, I hope you and your offsspring are able to give back to society what you have taken from them in the form of either inflation or taxes. I doubt that many will.bebero said:
ghost
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There's another part of being a father that you missed. It's about providing shelter, protection, food and economic stability. Sharing is a wonderful idea but having everyone in the family doing the same job at the same time is redundant and unproductive. And honestly, if I had been stuck at home for 6 mos. after our son was born I would would have gone completely mad.bebero said:
fred mertz said:
The law is to extend maternity leave to 6 months and paternity leave to 25 days. Currently maternity leave is different from province to province, some as little as 42 days (which is why the daycares take from 42 days on) and others (Cordoba province) are 6 months. In Capital currently most women are lucky if they get 3 months.
Paternity leave is 2 days. There was talk to extend it to 10 days a few years ago and the bill didn't pass.
Anyone who thinks that 6 mos is too much for a mum is just an a&&hole and obviously has never had kids (OP does not have any as far as I know). Until 3 mos you don't really even feel like you can function, and until 4 mos you don't start to feel close to normal. I don't understand why an office would even want someone that is barely able to form a sentence to come back to work.
A friend of mine in NYC is a contract lawyer -- her boss was pressuring her to come back after 3 weeks -- really? Really? that's what they want? They truly want someone back in the office that is dealing with a few hours of sleep and still can barely sit down properly due to the physical effects of having been in labour for 18 hours sitting at her desk and trying to concentrate on multi-million dollar contracts while all she can think is how engorged her boobs are, how painful it is to move, and hoping she can get an ice pack on her episiotomy stitches ASAP? And then if she makes a mistake in the wording of a contract that costs the company millions, will they truly feel that was the best person to have on the job?
Really Fred, I challenge you to push a canteloupe out of your penis and deal with the stitches every time you pee, bleed out for 6 weeks straight, have painfully engorged breasts and survive on 4 hrs of sleep -- AND tote around a creature that is one hundred percent dependent on you to survive, and then you can tell me whether or not you really feel like sitting down at your desk after 30 days -- if you can even sit, thanks t the painful haemerrhoids you may have been left with after carrying all of that weight around on your pelvis for 10 months. Then you can tell me whether or not you think 30 days is reasonable.
I don't even need you to do the above -- just do me a favour, go to sleep at 1030pm. Get up at midnight for 1 hrs. Go back to sleep for 1 hr. Get up at 2am for 1.5hrs. Go back to sleep at 330am for 1.5hrs. Get up at 5am for 1hr. Go back to sleep for 1hr. At 7am take a 5mins shower. Then since you don't have a newborn just run around the house half-naked trying to do 10 tasks at once for 1.5hrs to mimic the hectic nature of morning with a baby. At 8:30am grab an unpressed shirt, a pair of pants with just a touch of vomit on them, and head out the door. Take a Russian novel with you. Go sit and try to concentrate on that thing for 8 hrs straight, no nap time. By 5 pm I want a full dissection of the plot developments in chapters 22, 14, 9, 31, and 3 -- in that particular order just to mimic the scatterbrained feeling most new mothers would have. When you get home, DO NOT SLEEP. you're not allowed. That would be cheating. Instead when you get home make sure to run around doing laundry, cooking dinner, and keeping yourself busy with anything but sitting down for 2 mins.
See how you'd feel after a couple of days of this? It's how run down a women with a 1 or 2 month old baby is. A newborn needs to eat every 2-3 hours. Unfortunately because they are newborn and their suction reflex isn't fully developed yet, it can take them 1.5 hrs to eat. That means you get a 30 mins break and then you're feeding them again -- because it's 2hrs from the START of one feeding to the START of the next. Once they're a few months old things start to get much more manageable, but the first 2-3 months are a doozy.
As a new mum you can see that even 5 months on I'm rather emotional about this argument against maternity leave. I'm obviously pasionnate, a tad bit angry, and perhaps even a little close to going off the rails about it. I'm still lacking in sleep and I've definitely lost it on a few people the past few months. I am extraordinarily easily distracted at work and tasks are taking me much longer to complete. My productivity is down. And I got side-tracked this morning by some jerk who says 6 months is too much mat leave. I'd say I'm still sleep deprived that I'm moody enough that were I to encounter the OP in real life this morning I would certainly throw a glass of water in his face. You really think you'd want me in your office after only 30 days of mat leave? I don't.
fred mertz said:
As far as I understand, Fred mis-read the article, or the Herald did yet another bad job writing a sentence. It should read:
A new bill is going into effect that will extend maternity leave to 6 months and paternity leave to 25 days.
(This is an extension from current maternity leaves which start at anywhere from 42 days to 6 months depending on province -- ie some provinces won't see an increase since they already have 6 months -- and an extension on paternity leave from 2 days to 25 days. They did try to extend to 10 days for paternity before but the bill didn't pass. )
A note on paternity leave: it is for days consecutive after the birth of the baby -- not dias habiles. So if your baby is born on a Friday, as was ours, your husband is expected to be in the office on Monday because he will have already had his 2 days leave. My boss blackmailed my husband in a way -- when I was 39 weeks pregnant he sent him to Mexico on business for 4 days, telling him that if he did it he'd give him an extra 5 days paternity leave. He went, fortunately our baby didn't come until 41 weeks -- so my husband went back into the office the Friday after baby arrived.
also he should try to experience one of those growth spurts when the baby is sucking on your boob for 7 hours straight for a few days in a row...PhilipDT said:
An investment in your employees can save the company money in the long run. Especially when you are talking about highly skilled positions - such as at law firms, accounting, finance, medicine etc -- these companies can lose more money in the process of recruiting and training an employee instead of paying mat leave benefits.
Secondly, try firing a pregnant lady -- you'll have a wrongful dismissal case on your hands in a second -- and probably end up paying out 2-3x what you would have paid in maternity benefits.
As a man and I presume an American, I can't expect you to understand mat leave benefits. And I can only assume that a man that doesn't understand paternity leave benefits has never had kids or just didn't like them enough to want to spend those initial few days at home with them without stressing about lost salary.
ALSO -- Philip -- what is your solution then? Is it just that you think women have no business having children? How do you propose we should do it? Should it simply be a choice of work or have children, but don't dare do both? Or should all the stress of the finances be laid on my husband's shoulder, like a nice step back to the 1940s and 50s? I can be the baby maker and he can bring home the bacon. I guess you think that one salary should be more than enough to look after a man, woman, and newborn? Because how dare a woman hope that her company hold her position for a few months while she has kids. I guess we should just leave the having of kids to the unemployed and the people who have jobs should never dare to think of taking time off for such a fickle experience.
I always think that men who say no to maternity leave must think that one income is more than enough to raise a family and must be of the opinion that women are only good for making babies and have no place in a company. They're obviously not men that have had families, or that at lease haven't had them in the past couple of decades.
