“Would you like five months off?” Do me a favor, maternity leave is not a vacation

If you are pregnant and you work, people sometimes want to ask about it. To your leave, in particular. Because: you’re taking a break this year. Not her.

‘Would you like those five months off?’, someone asks me.

I answer that I am indeed looking forward to it, yes. It’s only later that I realize that I don’t have five months off at all and that it will be anything but a vacation. I have to bear a child. Oh yeah. And then trying to keep that little kid alive too. Oh yeah.

My leave falls in the month of May and I travel throughout the summer. It may therefore seem as if I can relax in that most beautiful, sunny time of the year. But believe me: as a mother of twins and soon also a baby, it is just hard work in that luxurious leave. I think that after those five months of ‘holiday’ I am looking forward to a rest day at the office very exhausted. You know, a day without pee, poop and weaning and nocturnal pukes, but with a laptop that just does what you ask.

As far as I’m concerned, the image of being pregnant could be a little less romantic. You are not long off work and you are not yourself. Being pregnant is not fun at all, I think. You feel physically different, but normal life continues. If you are already a mother, you can hardly sit still. I think it’s so nice to be able to experience it again, but at certain moments it’s a big belly that makes me feel fat, a child kicking on your bladder and mood swings that shoot in all directions. Then I’m overjoyed again, then crying with sadness. Hormones do a lot to me, so to speak. Keeping all the balls in the air, next to growing that baby and taking care of him, costs me lots of energy.

And am I looking forward to my leave? Yes, but maybe precisely because I will no longer be pregnant. Because then… it just starts. This great happiness, this present that I no longer dared to hope for. And in May I can finally see and hold my little baby boy in my arms. I love his diapers, pacifiers, night feeds and little cries, his sweet size 50 baby clothes and his first smiles. He belongs to us. It will undoubtedly be hard work at times, but oh, what a wealth. Much – and much – more beautiful than any holiday destination.

Tessa Heinhuis (33) lives in Het Gooi with her husband Billy and their twins Bodi and Daaf (3). She is pregnant with the third and editor-in-chief of Mama Magazine.

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