Welcome ICLWers! I haven't done ICLW in about six months, but since I'm contractually forbidden to blog about my adoption, no one has missed anything! If this is your first time here, check out my About Me page. And now buckle your seat belts for a long post...
I work in a professional industry where 50% of entry-level people are women. Often in this field, two tiers of advancement exist. The first tier is reached after, say, 8 years. It's typically an all-or-nothing promotion - you either make it or you leave. No set time must pass before you go from the middle tier to the top tier. Reaching the top tier is primarily based on your ability to bring in business.
The work can be grueling. Interesting and intellectually satisfying - but the clock is always ticking. One of the most important standards you're measured by (at least in the early years) is how much time you put in. Every Saturday I wake up and debate whether I should blog... or work. Before I go on vacation, I have to plan out how I'll make up that lost time in the following weeks. When I've been sitting in the emergency room waiting to find out whether my pregnancy is viable or lost, the amount of time I'm losing at work weighs on me. This is why I skipped only 4 days of work through 3 miscarriages. Sick, right? And now to over-generalize, when working women have children, much of the childcare burden still falls on them. Or at least they feel the societal expectation that the burden should be on them. So they leave for greener work-life balance pastures.
You can see why by the time the original group of 50% males and 50% females reaches the first tier of advancement, it might become something like 70% males, 30% females. By the top tier, it might be 85%-15%. And the upper echelons of management - 0 to 5% female.
This is a long way of explaining why, in my industry, employers have begun to adopt policies that try to retain women. Generous maternity leave policies, for example. Which - finally - leads us to the point of today's post. I work for a company that - for positive reasons but ones I won't describe for zee World Wide Web - is re-evaluating everything. Management, policies, structure, benefits - top to bottom. Since I learned about this months ago, I've been nervous. Most of the changes are really good. But what will happen to my adoptive leave?
A little explanation for my non-U.S. friends - in the U.S. many employers are required by law to give 12 weeks off for birth or adoption, but none of it has to be paid. Most employers don't pay, in fact. And employers with less than 50 employees don't even have to allow you any time off - paid or unpaid. It's a terrible system. My employer falls in the generous category, and I am grateful for that. It gave a decent number of weeks off with full pay. Weeks that we've been counting on, since mrohkay wants to take some time off too but won't get paid for it. And of course saving up for this time off would be complicated - we're already using that money for the adoption itself. (As so many of you also face after paying out the wazoo for treatment.)
The announcement finally came this week. It was presented as an improvement over our current policies. And for the most part, it was! Men get some paid leave for birth or adoption. The number of paid weeks off for maternity leave was bumped up a little. Everyone benefited - except, apparently, me. I emailed HR to clarify and learned that I was correct: Adoptive moms get substantially fewer paid weeks than they previously got - and six weeks less than birth moms now get under the new policy. It's not an uncommon disparity for employers to embrace, but it's a step backwards for us.
Ouch. I was fighting back tears before the meeting even ended. I cried all afternoon. I couldn't sleep all night. A jumble of thoughts. You fuckers, I gave up three babies for you. (I know stress doesn't cause miscarriages, but when I get irrational, I blame my job.) I will finally get a baby after 3 years of trying and you people are going to take away some of my precious time at home? I'd love to squeeze a baby out my vagina and get six extra weeks! Your coddled little birth babies don't need as long of a transition time at home as my adopted baby does after going through so much in her infancy. OK, you get the picture. I boarded the train to crazy town.
By the next morning, I hadn't formulated a plan, but I knew I needed support. And this is where the fact that I've become fairly open about my losses came in handy. I put on my advocacy pants and emailed a few people at work who I knew had adopted. That was easy - they were all supportive. I emailed a few other women who knew my story. I got some positive reactions and some negative. (Pregnant women should get longer because they have to give birth, they said to me. Oh really? I never got that far, so I had no idea, I sniped back at them... in my head.) And some people whom I didn't even approach either knew my background or knew I was adopting and assumed an infertile backstory, and they were rarin' to go as well.
Two of the adoptive moms shared emails with me that they sent to the decision-makers. Wonderful poignant emails. One mom explaining the importance of leave to adoptive families, pointing out the obvious fact that this was an expense the employer would not incur very frequently yet they'd benefit very much by having such a family-friendly policy on the books, etc. Money line: "Becoming a parent by adoption should not be treated as a secondary or lesser means of forming a family and whether intended or not that would be the unfortunate message imparted by such a flawed policy." The other mom explaining how she'd given the employer so much free PR because of the positive way she'd been treated as an adoptive mom. Money line: "So much of what I do as a mother is to make sure my children - and everyone else - understand that they are my real children and I am their real mother. We have now adopted a policy that undermines those values." Excuse me, there's, uh, something in my eye again.
I don't know how this story ends yet. I've been told the change in policy adoption-wise was an oversight. While I think that's true, it doesn't explain why they doubled-down and confirmed it to me before the uproar. It's being reconsidered now. I've been told that they'll at least make it right for me. Thanks, and I'll take it, but not good enough. I know, I know - most of you don't get any paid time off. I am grateful for what I have. But I had the chance to take a decent (if unfair) policy and make it better. My losses, and this community, have made me passionate about speaking out. And I did not put on my advocacy pants to fix this problem just for me!
