The Call of the Desk

My friend Anne is the modern amazon. I’ve thought of her in legendary terms ever since her brother told me she was back at work a week after the birth of her third child by Cesarian section.

Her maternity leave was actually only four days long.
It got me thinking about the contemporary equivalent of our mother-ancestors who lay down in the field, gave birth, strapped the babies to their backs and got back to work.

Anne’s tale of her rapid return to work is not a tale of an abandoned infant. In a recent email she told me about taking the baby to work every day for three months.

“I figure that I was holding the baby for 20 hours out of 24 during weekdays,” she wrote. The other 4 hours were spent in travel to/from the office and just plain down time.”

Anne, clearly, is not alone among new mothers. Who among us has not heard the seductive call of the desk even while our – ahem – tender parts are still too tender from giving birth to let us sit there comfortably.

I personally don’t remember being in a hurry to get back to work after my first child was born, but that was when everything related to motherhood was new. Since then, the routines of family life has enabled all of us to thrive intellectually, physically and even spiritually. It just made sense to me, after the birth of my second child almost five months ago, to get back to that routine. Which, for me, includes working.

Technology has certainly played it’s role too. Not only are our ideas of workplace and working hours more flexible because of the tools we use, but we’ve become dependent on staying in touch and online.

That dependence is evident even when we’re on vacation as Anne noticed while taking some time out in March. “Most of the parents were multitasking,” she noted, “looking after their kids in the pool while using their Blackberries. It’s not gender-specific either, both moms and dads couldn’t let go.”

I can’t say I’ve ever found letting go easy myself. During my unexpected hospital stays both after giving birth and when the baby was re-hospitalized for jaundice, I missed the other members of the family, my own bed and my office. In that order.

If you’re working, do you think you’re missing out at home and if you’re at home, do you feel you’re missing out at work? Do any of you bring your babies to work?