My Boss Called Me Back to the Office a Week After Giving Birth

Maternity Leave

This post was featured on Scary Mommy.

The question caught me completely off guard. “Well, I guess since she’s still in the hospital, I could come in this week,” I heard myself answer as a lump formed in my throat. My boss had called my cell as my mom and I were driving to visit my newborn daughter in the hospital NICU.

What I thought had been a check-in to ask how I was doing after my first baby arrived five weeks early, was instead a request to come into the office for a few hours and train my replacement.

Yes, my daughter had arrived at 35 weeks with no warning and no, I had not trained the person who was going to be covering my maternity leave. But my boss hadn’t even figured out who my replacement would be. Now the team was scrambling and I was asked to lug my one-week postpartum body, which was still shuffling instead of walking thanks to an unexpected c-section. And my emotionally unstable postpartum mind, that couldn’t go an hour without sobbing, on a 45+ minute commute downtown, up an elevator 40 floors, and back into work while my new baby lay in a hospital hooked up to tubes. I wish I would have articulated all of these considerations out loud to him, but instead, I hastily hung up the phone and promptly burst into tears.