When is it okay to call the stork?

Another thing to consider is how much maternity leave do you want to take? My mother took a week with me and four weeks with my brother. After that, she was back at work. I'm much the same way and don't plan on taking more than a week or two of maternity leave when the time comes.

With tele-work and remote work becoming more and more popular, consider whether your employer would allow you to start integrating back into work from home, so that it's a smoother transition for you. If you're comfortable with it, perhaps you could work for an hour or so in the evenings to help your co-workers out? It seems that lessening the burden on them is important to you.

View Quoted Comment Thanks for tour polite and constructive feedback.

There is no time that how things will be for your co-workers should be a consideration in when or if you conceive, any more than you check with your neighbors or the school committee. If pregnant, you try to minimize impact on others. But not a moral choice, and not a consideration before conceiving.

View Quoted Comment Hi Judith, thanks for your honest feedback.

View Quoted Comment The right to interview for a job and have employers barred legally from asking about birth control or pregnancy plans, and the change made in the policies of hiring, that unmarried woman could not be let go, that woman not loose a job to a male because it was assumed she would have 2.8 children, all were hard won rights of women and families. I hate seeing it go backwards.

View Quoted Comment I'm a paralegal and I was working for an attorney's office which makes it even worse. They knew when they hired me I had gotten married, but didn't bring up the fact I might want children until about three weeks in. I was horrified.

View Quoted Comment Oh no! That does indeex sound horrifying. Are you working for a better organization now?

View Quoted Comment When I first lost my job we weren't sure where we were going to be willing because the lease on our apartment was up and we wanted to buy a house closer to my husband's work. So I was looking for jobs, but it was hard because I didn't really know where to look. In the meantime, I also became pregnant which we had been trying for over a year so yay! So I haven't actually started a new job. I've been looking, but my options are limited because I want something I can do from home because daycare is crazy expensive so most of my salary would go towards that and we don't have any family around us to help watch the baby. Plus with Covid we don't really want to send our newborn to daycare.

View Quoted Comment Okay, well I wish you the best of luck.

View Quoted Comment Thank you 😊

There will NEVER be a "good time" or "convenient time" to have a kid, and you can't predict whether paternity/maternity leave will coincide with "crunch time" at work because...you don't get control over when you conceive. So, my opinion is, have kids if/when you want to, and have as many as you want to. There really isn't a moral conundrum...it's work versus your children. I think it's total BS that we (working women) have to do so many calculations about this. We deserve more support than we get from our governments and jobs and we DEFINITELY deserve not to feel selfish or foolish for having kids.

View Quoted Comment Hi Chelsea,
Thank you for your honest feedback.