If you quit your job to raise your babies, you’re not alone. About one in four moms stays at home these days. When it does come time to return to work, though, moms often struggle to explain that hole on a resume. The New York ad agency Mother has the solution: say you worked at The Pregnancy Pause.
Here’s what you do: Add the position of “Mom” to your resume, and list The Pregnancy Pause, a 10,000-strong and growing, “company” as your employer. There’s a company website, a LinkedIn profile page and a legit phone number to include. They’ve even provided a job description in their toolkit of instructions and resume templates: “Firsthand experience in child rearing and development. Maternity leave is a full-time job.”
Yes! Finally someone other than fellow hard-working stay at home moms gets it! Someone in the corporate world is extending an olive leaf to moms who made the often-hard decision to leave adult conversation and gratifying paychecks behind for the unpaid, often thankless job of caring for and teaching the next generation. They understand that we have some anxiety about our choice. That we are a little afraid we’ve rendered ourselves eternally unemployable from this point onwards. That we ARE working and doing, every day. And that we don’t know how to address this gap on our resumes.
“It’s time to make it clear that maternity leave – whether 12 weeks or 12 years – isn’t a vacation,” proclaims text on the Pregnancy Pause website. No, it’s not. And if a company has employees who work half as hard as the stay at home moms I know, they should consider themselves lucky. Maybe one day they’ll have the honor of hiring some of us back. I mean, when we are ready to leave our jobs at The Pregnancy Pause.
