YO MAMA: The disregarded perks of maternity leave
Head to the local science centre on a weekday morning, and you are bound to find a congregation of yoga-pants-wearing, take-out-coffee-drinking, bleary-eyed moms on maternity leave.
You will find them squinting at the fine print below the bug-pinned exoskeleton of a Longhorn beetle, reading and re-reading the same passage over and over again, force-feeding the facts into their sleep-deprived brains while small children tug at them to move to the next room.
Some moms have newborns strapped to their chests while more mobile children run wild around the centre. You never see many dads on the weekdays, which makes it feel kind of like a new age, female-run society where women and children are conducting ground-breaking scientific experiments.
I spent a good deal of my own mat-leave mornings at the science centre (and other free or cheap places like the museum or art gallery). It was fun to drift around these spaces with no set purpose, soaking up random bits of information while my newborn slept. I learned random stuff like how much a carton of milk weighs on Jupiter and how sound waves can move a ping-pong ball.
One day at the science centre my son and I happened upon a structured activity. The kids were making little rocket launchers out of toilet paper rolls.
My son was just shy of a year old, so we did it together.
It had been a while since I had to follow step-by-step instructions. I glanced around nervously at the other moms and their kids, comparing our rockets. Some of the kids were using their rolls as binoculars, others were making funny noises through them, or using them as bowling pins. A few were actually making rockets, and some of them actually worked.
The energy level was high, but focussed. It was a beautiful display of hands-on, imaginative play. And I was totally into it. When we tested our rocket and watched it sail a few feet, I was elated. I’d never made a rocket, at least not as an adult.
Prior to taking my maternity leave, I did a lot of learning for work purposes; professional development seminars, conferences, online courses — those sorts of things. I read books about my profession. But actual hands-on learning just for the fun of it? That I hadn’t done since… elementary school? I hadn’t had the time.
What a luxurious thing it is to learn something new, no strings attached. Not for professional development, not for money, not for impressing others. Just plain and simple learning for the sake of learning.
The 12-18 months of maternity leave, if you are lucky enough to get it, is a year full of all kinds of unexpected learning. It’s easy to disregard it in the brain fog of first-year parenting, but if you stop to think about it, the opportunity is pretty special.
Later on, after the rockets were finished, my son, who had just learned to walk, toddled over to an automatic hand sanitizer dispenser and demanded I disinfect my hands. The motion sensor amazed him. Suffice to say, my hands were very clean that morning. To him, the sanitizer dispenser was just another part of the technology exhibit.
Other people’s kids were finding their own off-script learning too. Some children had brought their rockets over to the interactive displays and were experimenting with dropping them through tubes or holding them over vents. There was so much learning happening, all at different developmental levels, and yet there was something for everyone to engage with. I read about the local air quality monitoring station for as long as I could before my son tugged me along.
We turned a corner and entered a darkened room. No one else was in there. A light exploded behind us and for a moment, our afterimages were painted on the wall. I didn’t totally understand how it worked. We did it a few more times. I read the blurb a second time. I felt like my brain almost grasped the science — something to do with an optical illusion — but I kept losing it like I lose the concept of infinity when I think about it too hard.
It’s been more than a year since that day at the science centre, and I still remember those rocket launchers, the levitating ping pong ball, and the weight of milk on Jupiter. Like our afterimage, these bits and pieces of information are burned into my memory.
Are they particularly useful? Not really. But neither are they completely useless. Random and irrelevant to my everyday life as they may be, they are little gems of knowledge that I am grateful to have acquired.
— Charlotte Helston gave birth to her first child, a rambunctious little boy, in the spring of 2021. Yo Mama is her weekly reflection on the wild, exhilarating, beautiful, messy, awe-inspiring journey of parenthood.
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