In a heart wrenching personal essay titled “A Baby Dies at Day Care, and a Mother Asks Why She Had to Leave Him So Soon,” Amber Scorah questions why parental leave is structured the way it is.
Scorah tells the story of how after a little over three months, she had to return to work and leave her baby boy under the responsibility of a daycare. While for many the scenario reads as familiar and in many cases traditional, Scorah was faced with the extreme of the worst thing that could possible happen — her baby passed away on the first day of daycare.
“Our sweet son died two and a half hours after the first time I had left him,” she writes.
While Scorah admits that the essay is in no way a takedown of the daycare system, or even her employer who offered her a seemingly generous maternity leave package, she questions the society that makes leaving a weeks old child the norm.
Things may or may not have been different if different decisions were made, but those are questions Scorah is now left to sit with on her own; in the meantime, she’s started forkarl.com, a website dedicated to enabling parents to send in concerns and comments to their government representatives and presidential candidates regarding family leave.
Cover image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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