How I’m Structuring My Maternity Leave

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (00:01.89)
Hey and welcome to Calmer Conversations. I’m Cecilia, your host. Today I’m going to talk about maternity leave. But before you totally shut off, if that’s not a place you are in your life or will ever be, I want the framing in which I’m gonna talk about it is figuring out what you like, because I think it’s really important and it plays a big part in
 
in my maternity leave and how I’m approaching it. So even if you’re not going on maternity leave in the near future or if you will ever go on maternity leave or if you have zero interest in maternity leave, this still might be an applicable episode for you. So you might want to listen anyway. And let’s get started. So, okay. So for those of you who don’t know, I am when I’m recording this, is Monday, October 28th, I am over 40 weeks pregnant. So I’ve, I’m at
 
And if you’re very unfamiliar with pregnancy between 40 and 41 weeks, most countries consider that to be full gestation. So some countries, it’s a little closer to 40 weeks. Some countries, it’s a little closer to 41. We won’t go into that. That’s a whole nother discussion for a whole nother day. But I am technically have reached my due date.
 
For reference, I have two other children. One of them came at 42 weeks, five days. The other one, the younger one came at 41 weeks, three days. So in my brain, I kind of think of my pregnancy being close to over at 40 weeks. So I wasn’t expecting a baby before now, even though I know that some people have babies before 40 weeks for medical reasons and just naturally, but I kind of was expecting things not to happen till now.
 
Whenever you’re listening to this, that’s just kind of the setup. The other important part, and again, like I said, I’m not gonna talk actually a whole lot about, I mean, it’ll come up because this is around having a baby, right? But I wanna frame it more in terms of like how we spend our time and what we do, just like what we do in our lives and how we choose to spend our days. So.
 
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (02:21.268)
Naturally, people have been asking me what maternity leave is going to look like. My clients are very interested in it. Other people are just curious about it as somebody who’s an entrepreneur and somebody who kind of runs their own business and manages their own time. What is it going to look like? I have also, live in the US now. I grew up in the US, but I’ve lived in other places, including Scandinavia, where they have an extremely generous parental leave policy. So I lived in Denmark.
 
and got to see people enjoy taking a year off to be with their young child and or splitting it with their partner in some way. So I’ve kind of seen people and I’ve had friends of mine who have gone back to work after six weeks because they felt they had to. Some people go back after six weeks because they really wanted to.
 
some people who have had very generous maternity leaves or parental leaves and haven’t felt like they’ve been able to take it because they haven’t ever seen anybody else in their, in their company take it. And so I want to just know that there are many different people in many different situations. And I’m not speaking again for maternity leave overall, or what I think policy should be. I’m talking really personally about my own situation, right? I think it’s, I think if you are valuing
 
families and long-term, I don’t know, happiness or thriving, then supporting parental leave is really important. As somebody who, my first child was born two weeks before COVID, before everything got shut down. So she was born February 26th and everything shut down in Virginia where we were at the time, like March 15th or something like that. So it was about two weeks before everything kind of shut down. So
 
I’ve been alone and had long maternity kind of things. I’ve had different situations, So, but what I wanna talk about now is I’m actually not gonna take that much time off. And that’s surprising to a lot of people because I think a lot of people see me and they hear me talk about calm and they hear me talk about ease and they hear me talk about spaciousness in life and they expect that I’m gonna take a very generous maternity leave, like 12 weeks or six months or something like that. And I totally get that.
 
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (04:38.87)
And I think back to when I worked in more corporate roles or more roles that I didn’t love. So when I worked as a geologist, there’s absolutely no chance I would have gone back to work immediately. I would have tried to take as much leave as possible or that was available to me. But the really neat thing is, is I’ve spent a fair amount of time establishing a life, a fair amount of effort, getting really curious about
 
what I actually value in life and what are my priorities right now, and then setting up a life that honors those priorities. And this is not, I’m not trying to tell you that how my priorities should be your priorities or that you should do this at all. So please don’t go down that route. But for me, my priorities are fulfilling work, are having time to spend with my family and support my family, their growth for myself.
 
And that’s part of my business, but like personal growth is a huge part of mine and having common ease in my life and all that I do. And so sometimes people look at what I do and they kind of misconstrue and think like, you must be busy all the time. I do have a fair bit of energy and capacity, but I never feel right now in my life. I do not feel stressed. I do not feel busy. Like I would never describe my life as busy. Sometimes it feels really full. Like this weekend we managed
 
We had a lot of different things that we kind of wanted to do and we did most of them. It never felt busy, but it did feel full. I think part of that is not being afraid to say no to things, even after I’ve already said yes to them too, which can be, I didn’t even think of that when I wrote down things I want to talk about, but I’ll write that, jot that down, because I’ll come back to it. So first I want to talk about when I was in a corporate role, I worked as a geologist.
 
I worked in for a company that was a great company to work for. I had really amazing colleagues. It was a fun job. I was okay at it. I was not great at it. I often found myself really bored. I often found myself not engaged in the work. I often found myself wishing that I wasn’t there and wondering if this was all I could expect in life. And as a result, I didn’t really want to be there most days. I didn’t really want to be engaging in it.
 
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (07:05.11)
I didn’t really want to be spending my time there. And so when the chance, if a chance to take a big leave came up, I probably would have jumped on it, right? After leaving my role as a geologist, I had lots of different random jobs, like working at voter registration and working in the homeless system of care in Charlottesville and working as an accounts payable, I think, or receivable, maybe payable for a podiatry group.
 
So I’ve worked in many different roles and I’ve had lots of different jobs and I’ve had a lot of jobs that didn’t feel really fulfilling. And I intentionally took a lot of these jobs because I wanted to create a life that did feel fulfilling. And I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do and I wasn’t sure how I wanted to do it. And so I spent a lot of time kind of in the process of figuring that out. Where I am now in my life is I understand again, like I said, my priorities.
 
I also understand how I like to spend my time and what gives me energy. So we’re coming back around to the leave part. And one of the things I am aiming to do more and more in my business, and I admit that I’m not always great about this, so I’m gonna talk about this as well, is that I’m aiming to take all the tasks off of my plate that I don’t love doing. And I’m gonna say that again because it’s so radical even for my brain.
 
Right now I’m in the process of taking all the tasks off of my plate that I do not love doing. And this includes things that I feel like I should love to do or should be good at. I’m a Virgo. So people often think that I should be detail oriented. I’m not, I’m a bigger version, bigger vision person. I’m not great at executing things. so I am in the process of building teams and finding people. And this is like,
 
It’s kind of ebbing and flowing right now for me. So that I get to spend time doing things that give me energy. And for me, that’s coaching and teaching. And within teaching, that’s teaching courses, but also creating content for things like this podcast, but also on Instagram.
 
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (09:22.602)
for free classes, for things like that. So those are the two things that light me up that I just love doing. Every time I do them, I get off, I finish, I feel so excited, I feel so energized, I feel so lucky that I get to do this for my life. And I’ll actually include in teaching somatic sessions as well. So guided meditation or gentle movement like yoga or sometimes Qigong based movement.
 
Things like that I also really love because I just think they’re so powerful. Breathwork, I love teaching breathwork. So those are things that excite me. Those are the things that, again, when I finish them, I feel so, it’s just hard to define the right word. I feel like a super person, like a superhero in some ways, right? I feel like, this is what I’m supposed to be doing. And I think that…
 
for the most part, I’m pretty good at those things. Like I’m always getting better and I’m always improving. But I think in general, I’m good at the things that is my zone of excellence. If you’ve read Gay Hendrix, the big leap, he talks a lot about like, your zone of genius and your zone of excellence and your zone of competence and how we can get stuck in different places. And very often people get stuck in their zone of competence or their zone of excellence, which they can be good at, but don’t actually give them a lot of energy or help them thrive as a person.
 
when really we want to be spending most of our time in our zone of genius. So for me, what maternity leave is going to look like is really trying not to do those things that I don’t like doing, right? Handing them over to other people so they can take care of them, so they can do them. Because one, I’m not good at doing them. So that means that I make a lot of mistakes. I mean, if you get emails from me, they’re like typos. Like I send things out at random times.
 
There’s not a lot of, and that’s okay, like I don’t really have a problem with that. But those aren’t things that I’m great at, right? It’s just like not, it’s not important enough for me to spend the time to do it, I guess is maybe the right way to say it. I could be good at it if I wanted to, but at this point in my life, I’ve decided I don’t wanna spend time on things that I don’t love doing, and so I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them or worrying about them, and as a result,
 
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (11:41.494)
they don’t maybe they’re not executed at the level perhaps they should be or I would like them to be. And I am going to continue doing the things that I like doing because I like doing them. Right. So in the way I see it, if somebody really likes moving their body, like they like going for walks, they like doing Zumba or they like swimming after they have a baby or after something happens, like they get hurt or whatever, they’re on leave. There’s a period of time where they might need to take a break from that.
 
right, where their body might need to heal in some way.
 
But they don’t need to step away from it entirely. Right? No one would say to somebody who just had a baby, if they were off for an entire year, like, you can’t walk if that’s something you love doing, or you can’t go to yoga, or you can’t bake bread because you love baking bread. Right? And so for me, my vocation, what I spend time doing and make money from, but really feels like a big act of service for me, is coaching and teaching.
 
And so telling myself that I’m not going to coach and teach for 12 weeks or six months or a year just feels completely absurd to me. Like, why would I do that? Why would I take away the thing that gives me life and oxygen and this kind of like pep in my step and this like this thing that makes me feel most like me? Why would I take it away? Particularly when a lot of other things get thrown up in the air.
 
I will also say that related to this, am very conscientious of the number of clients that I take on at any one time and the number of hours that I have devoted to things like coaching and teaching. And so I am being conscious of that, right? I’m not doubling my schedule over the next couple months. I’m kind of holding steady, even cutting back a little bit, being really aware of who I take on as clients so that…
 
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (13:35.528)
I’m not over stretching myself, right? So they do have time for my other priorities, which are my family, having ease and calm within my life. But I think that to think it’s not, I do not have to remove my work to have common ease in my life. And in fact, I’m very proud of myself for having created a work structure, even right now, where I would like a little bit more support, but having a work structure that
 
helps me feel most like me. I’m very proud of that. I’m very proud of taking the time that I took from, you know, if you listen to my episode about the changes from 30 to 40, from about a decade ago, from feeling in this place where I didn’t feel rewarded by the work I did, where I often felt drained by the work that I did, where I often felt tired and needed something else to kind of stimulate me to a place where I feel really switched on by what I do. I’m really proud of that.
 
I’m really proud of the fact that I’ve created a life that has both ease and drive within it. And that the drive that I have does not come from a place of hustle or overachievement, but comes from a place of love, that comes from a place of excitement for what I’m doing, that comes from this place of having this mission-driven kind of push behind me that helps, like, I want to get up. But I wake up in the middle of the night,
 
and I start thinking about things because I’m so excited about what I’m doing, right? That I wanna talk about it, that I want to do more of it. And so again, going into having a baby, I know that there is chaos that happens, right? I know that there is, I mean, I will say that the way we’ve structured parenting and sleeping and things like that, our newborn phases have actually been some of the easiest parts of parenting and like smoothest parts of parenting. So I don’t expect.
 
a huge amount of chaos. I know that this is a different child and we have two other ones now, so we’ll see how that goes. But this idea that I have to stop my life when I’ve created a life that I love doesn’t totally make sense to me. And it doesn’t totally jive with how I want to be in the world. And so I want to be really clear when you see me working and having a baby, I’m not doing it from a place of hustle.
 
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (16:01.164)
I’m not doing it from a place of inadequacy. I’m doing it from a place of entire love for what I love doing and this place of almost liberation and that I get to choose how I use my time. And I know that this is a privilege and I know that I have support and I feel so lucky and blessed to have that. And I’ve also done a lot to make sure that I have support and that I do have these kind of like…
 
cushion around me to help me be the best that I can be both as a mother and as a coach and as a teacher. I think, this is what I, you know, I said, say no, is what I wrote down in my notebook. One of the most important things I think, or another important thing that, another one thing is what my Sanskrit teacher in India used to say, and another one thing.
 
And another one thing is that I am able to say no. So setting boundaries is actually another thing that’s quite important to me. And recognizing when things, when I need to say no to something that I’ve previously said yes to, and I’m okay doing that. So for instance, this weekend, we had a pretty big Saturday with, it was just a big Saturday, which we wanted to do everything that we did. And that meant that Sunday morning,
 
It kind of dialed things back a little bit for me, knowing that I am 40 weeks pregnant, knowing that I did feel quite tired at the end of Saturday. And so I said no to something that I previously said yes to for that reason. And so I think that I’m also carrying that into maternity leave, knowing that there is a chance that I will feel overwhelmed by having a third child or this baby might be is going to be a different baby than the other babies. We’re not sure how that’s going to go. And so giving myself the grace and the leeway to actually
 
to play it by ear in some ways and also trusting that my clients and the people who are in my world might actually appreciate somebody seeing somebody do this in real time, right? That this, can actually lead by example. I can show that you can have ease and you can have drive and you still can stay committed to something while also being human, while also giving yourself space to relax and rest and do all these things. So.
 
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (18:20.662)
whether you’re going on maternity leave or not. And I know that again, this is different if you’re in a corporate situation and depending on where you are, but maybe it’s just inspiration to start to ask yourself, if I was creating the life that I wanted to, if I was only doing things that really lit me up, what would I be doing? And I don’t mean that you just stop doing everything else right now, but just start to ask that question and start to recognize what your brain says to you so that you can start to make decisions based on that. So you start making choices for the you you want to be in the future.
 
and know that you could have a life that has drive, that has ease, that has fun, that has spaciousness in it, and a life that you don’t actually want to take a break from. A life that you’re not looking forward to just like, I can’t wait until this is over, right? That you’re like, I love this, I wanna keep doing it. I intentionally built this, I want to be in it. Okay, so those are my thoughts on my maternity leave, not anybody else’s.
 
not maternity leave in general, because I do fully support people taking time off and bonding with their baby and having all of that. And that is something that I fully intend to do. And you will recognize as I continue to record podcasts that you will hear a baby. So I’m not going to live life separate from the child. But knowing that it’s possible to, it’s probably not possible to have it all. And in like all in the sense of like everything everywhere.
 
But it is possible to have your all, I think. And I think the art is figuring out what your all is at this point in your life and figuring out how to give it to yourself. And that starts by asking questions of yourself and seeing what the answer is, giving yourself time and space to answer that so that you can…
 
you can make these kinds of decisions so that you feel like you are in a place where you can say, wow, I actually really love doing what I’m doing and I want to keep doing it. Or I don’t love what I’m doing and I want to make changes and I might not be able to make them right now in this moment, but in the future, this is where I’m going. This is who I’m becoming. Okay, so give me all of your thoughts about maternity leave and how it’s gone for you. Perhaps even what’s inspiring about watching somebody do it a little bit differently.
 
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (20:37.75)
And if you feel called to leave a review because those are so helpful. And if you want to feel better today, grab the five minute shift. It’ll help you learn how to shift emotions both right now and in the future. is, I keep getting such amazing feedback from it. So go get that and I will see you the next time I see you. Bye.