Maternity leave dilemma

[AuroraB]

Hello,

I hope this is the right place, rather than parenting? I hope some of you who have been there and done that might be able to advise me on the best course of action.

To try and keep it brief:

I'm going to have to return to work full time after my first baby is born, my partner doesn't earn very much and things will be a real struggle financially.

Luckily I have a very good maternity allowance:

weeks 1-28 full pay
weeks 29-39 SMP
weeks 40-52 unpaid

but I do have a dilemma:

I will have 35 days annual leave saved up. I can either tag this onto the end of my maternity leave, meaning 1 year and seven weeks off work. Or I can use it to reduce those 12 unpaid weeks to 5 (actually 3 and a bit because I will also have accrued 8 public holiday days).

My heart tells me that going back to work will be a real wrench and to take off as long as possible. My head tells me that we will be so poor after meagre SMP then nothing that I will rue it if I don't reduce the time I am unpaid for as much as possible.

As a bit of background, I?m no career girl, I find my job very boring and I know won?t be itching to get back to adult conversation etc, I?d be more than happy to stay at home with my baby forever, this is a financially driven thing.

Will the extra time at home watching my baby grow outweigh the short term poverty?

Any advice or anecdotes will be very much appreciated x

honestly I would wait and see
you don't have to think about this now
also in a year's time you might well be craving adult conversation, it is impossible to predict how your life will be

Can't you make your mind up on this closer to the relevant time or do you need to give them an anticipated time back to work now?

I went back p/t and was really glad to get back after 6mo, even though I love ds - it meant that I felt more able to be a proactive parent on the 4 days I spent with him. I didn't expect to feel like this though.

I agree with the other posts. You don't need to decide now and you cannot predict how you will feel after the baby is born. I was craving adult conversation far earlier than a year after DS1 was born!

Wait and see and keep your options open - that's what everyone's advised me.

You can't know now how you might feel in 12 months time. You may well think you never want to go back to work, and this may well turn out to be how you feel - but on the other hand, it may not!

Can you actually work out your money situation month by month over the coming months of mat leave and see if anything really rides on the use of this holiday, money wise? Will you be able to manage, but be poor, if you take longer off, or will you actually not be able to manage?

I would have a chat to your HR - if its anything like my work you can pretty much change your mind whenever you like about how you take your mat leave and holidays, as long as you give them some notice. I think this would be better decided when your baby is 7 or 8 months old, not now.

You are lucky to have 28 weeks full pay! I have only 8 weeks full pay and because I am the family breadwinner I have to get straight back to work when those 8 weeks are up (plus 6 weeks of annual leave, three of which I will take before and three after the materity leave). So basically I will have 14 weeks and that is it. My DH will probably then look after the baby fulltime for a time, until he is old enough to spend some time at a childminder or nursery. (He does freelance work and there is very little of it about for him at the moment).

Lots of people have expressed surprise at my "wanting " to go back to work so early. I don't want to necessarily, but I just have to! I cannot afford not to be on full pay, and that is that. I don't want to have to explain this to people all the time and so I mostly just smile. It does annoy me however when people then push the issue by saying things in a knowing way like "you'll change your mind once the baby is born". I simply can't "change my mind" if the bills are to continue to be paid, and that is all there is to it, I sometimes wish people would think a bit before they talk.

Find out what your company policy is... I believe that your company is not allowed to pressure you back into work. My HR just told me that they will assume I am taking the whole year off unless I tell them otherwise a month before I want to head back to work. I had planned to go back to work at 9 months but ended up taking 11 months off as I couldn't bear to leave DS. Though my DH is the main breadwinner, I found it a struggle financially in the last month as I have always been independent and liked having my own money so seeing my current account dwindling so quick in the last month I was home was painful! In the end, DS went to nursery at 11 months and I went back to work and I found that was the right time for us as I found it also increasingly difficult to get through the days with just DS and myself... I think it really depends on the baby and you just need to wait and see.

I think that it depends on how bad the financial situation is. Can you afford to take the time off? If so then do it.

Plus, remember that you could use the holiday to phase your return back - for example go back 3 days a week and take the other 2 as holiday for a while. (But obviously you need to talk about this with HR)