Maternity leave, as all mothers know, is not leave from anything except life as you once knew it. The job of looking after a baby full-time for up to a year, for those women who can afford it, can be joyous, lonely, stressful, inane, refreshingly mundane, brainless, hilarious, body-and-soul-destroying, the best thing you have ever done and crushingly boring. Often at the same time.

Every mother’s response to this bewildering, byzantine system will be different. For some, the 39 weeks of statutory maternity pay – which can be divided into shared parental leave, but mostly isn’t because it’s a completely unworkable policy that even the minister promoting it couldn’t take up – is too long and the desperation to return to work increases exponentially with each spirit-breaking viewing of Bing on CBeebies. For others the end of maternity leave looms like a Beckettian nightmare in which your baby is wrenched from your arms and you are expected to act like the whole life-changing thing never happened while quietly spending all your earnings on childcare.

These are the “choices” and they are part of the reason why mothers of young children are up to 40% more stressed than everyone else, while a generation of women say they cannot afford children at all. As the divorce lawyer Ayesha Vardag, who has just given birth to her fourth child, put it in an interview: “It’s like [maternity rules have] been set up by men in the 50s. You should be with your baby all of the time and, if you’re coming back, you better come back full-time or we’re not interested.”

The problems escalate when women return to work – if a job still exists. One report found maternity leave discrimination leads to 54,000 women losing their jobs each year and we now know non-disclosure agreements have been used to silence women sacked after having children. Of those working mothers who keep their jobs, three-quarters say they have experienced discrimination in the workplace. The motherhood penalty, in other words, is the rule rather than the exception.

Vardag’s solution is to invite women to return to her law firm as soon as they feel ready for as much time as they want – even if that is half a day a week. She is open to employees breastfeeding in the office and offers a nanny service to longer-serving staff. This is what a flexible, humane and pragmatic maternity policy could look like. Instead of endlessly obsessing over what makes a good mother, how about overhauling an unfit-for-purpose system that ensures mothers can never be good enough?

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