2024-01-13 04:00:12
A chubby baby, wrapped in the first layers of autumn, suckles the breast of Léa (at the request of witnesses, all first names have been changed), employee of a small company in the culture sector. The noise of the percolator which raises the voices of the customers of this café in the 18th arrondissement of Paris seems to lull the child. She is 2 months old, and will soon begin adapting to daycare so that her mother can return to work. In these last tight moments, Léa thinks about this future return to school, a slight apprehension in the pit of her stomach.
She remembers the first time she experienced this, for her eldest daughter, Nora. At the time, she was coming out of maternity leave in the cocoon of an apartment with light blue walls where the sun shines through every afternoon. The return promises to be smooth: from the announcement of her pregnancy to her departure, including the months away from the office, everything went very well with her employer. Her management had asked her if she would like to be kept informed of developments in the sales department during her absence, she had said yes, without being required to do anything. “I appreciated being offered it, being made to feel that I was a central person in this small company. »
A few weeks before she was due to return to work, she was asked to participate in a meeting where she was offered a promotion: the position of sales director was for her, if she wanted it. She accepted, grateful that motherhood was not an obstacle in her professional life. “I was lucky that people trusted me, that no one thought that I was going to be less capable of doing things because I had become a mother”insists Léa.
LOLA HALIFA-LEGRAND FOR “THE WORLD” “Having a child is not compatible with shining professionally, even in an open-minded company,” says Louise, 31, a salesperson in the digital sector. LOLA HALIFA-LEGRAND FOR “THE WORLD”
For her, the rest is on the same tone. The company is caring in every way. But, when talking about her day of recovery, Léa nevertheless remembers a difficult moment. It’s a Monday in November, when the second confinement has just started. She finds herself alone at home, in the same setting where she spent two months rocking her newborn, sitting at the dining room table, with a computer under her eyes and a breast pump suctioned to her chest. “But what am I doing here? », she repeats to herself, over and over, her eyes clouded with tears that she is unable to keep on the “unread e-mails” tab.
“I felt transparent”
Even in the best scenario, returning to work is marked by this intimate upheaval: spending most of your day without this being you have not left for more than a few hours since birth. Cutting the cord a second time, with the impression of “betray this little baby, still a defenseless animal”, illustrates Léa. A guilt which also shines through in the words of Elsa, 38 years old, employee and mother of two young children. “When you leave your baby, you enter into a first movement of symbolic separation: you pass the baton”she said wistfully over the phone.
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