Returning from Parental Leave

Days like jet lag

Half a year has flown by since returning to work after childcare leave.

That said, many changes occurred during these six months. First, my wife returned to work three months after me (*1). Our daughter Kokeko started daycare. Kokeko stood up. Kokeko took a few steps in a pose like the Awa Odori dance. Kokeko turned one. When I returned from a week-long business trip, Kokeko gave me a "Koke?" look. Kokeko weaned herself (*2). Rina Ikoma graduated (*3). Kokeko caught a cold, then my wife caught a cold, then I caught a cold. And so on. Each moment felt special, yet aside from Ikoma's graduation, I suppose they were all rather ordinary.

Now, this series "A Male Copywriter Takes Parental Leave," which you've followed for a little over a year, will come to a temporary end with the next installment, "Continuation: Back from Parental Leave," to be posted one week after this article.

But what to write about life after returning to work is a tricky question. "Men taking paternity leave" itself is like a "travel destination that's just started getting attention" – since so few people have actually been there, anything written about it could pass as a "travelogue." But now that I'm back from that journey, I'm just an ordinary, company-employed father. Nothing remarkable about me. That's what I meant by "ordinary" earlier.

Moreover, the main focus of this column isn't childcare, but paternity leave itself (*4). Is there really anything noteworthy to report?

At the very least, I thought I'd write about the everyday life seen after the trip—no, not some heartwarming story, but rather the feeling of jet lag experienced by someone returning from a journey.

A Greater Barrier Than "Men Taking Paternity Leave"

The first thing I realized was that "shortened work hours" (※5) are actually quite tough. I understood that by watching my wife.

Currently, only my wife is working reduced hours. She mechanically repeats the same routine every day: arriving at work at 9:00 AM (her company's start time), leaving at 4:30 PM (her original end time was 6:00 PM), then picking up Koke-ko and preparing dinner.

No matter what happens, she has to force herself to stop work at 4:30 PM. This must cause significant inconvenience and frustration in her work. It's easier to understand if I put myself in her shoes.

If Koke-ko runs a fever at daycare, the first call goes to my wife, who is on reduced hours. She informs her company and sometimes leaves early before 4:30 PM.

Either way, compared to me, who can somewhat control when to wrap up work for the day, how inconvenient it must be for my wife!

Thinking this, I looked around and realized that reduced work hours are almost exclusively taken by women. It's far harder to find men working reduced hours than men taking childcare leave. Who knew there was a higher barrier than childcare leave right here?

In dual-income couples, if one partner takes reduced hours, why does it have to be the wife? The more I pondered this, the more I realized... wait, there's no definitive answer.

If there is a reason, one is breastfeeding. The wife returning home early allows for more breastfeeding sessions. But there's also the option of switching entirely to formula, and even without that, this issue resolves itself when weaning time comes. That's the case in our household now.

Another reason is income. In our case, I earn more. But does having the lower-earner work reduced hours really minimize the financial impact on the household? This should actually be case-by-case. We didn't run detailed simulations either.

As my parental leave neared its end, seeing my wife prepare to apply for reduced hours at her job, I found myself wondering quite naturally, "Hmm, maybe I should consider reduced hours too." In the end, though, I chose not to take reduced hours.

That's because around the same time, I heard some news. Namely, it seemed like the "Super Flex System" was coming back to my department starting in the new year (※6).
Super Flexible Hours! It felt like a godsend (*7). I didn't know where that ship was headed, but I thought it might be a viable alternative to reduced hours.

Revival! Super Flex

Super Flex, in a nutshell, is flex time without core hours. It's a system where you decide your own start and end times for the day. Of course, the total hours you must work each month are fixed, calculated as the standard 7 hours per day multiplied by the number of business days in the month. Any hours worked beyond that are treated as overtime.

This level of freedom. I hoped it might even allow for more flexible hours than reduced-hour work.

For example, just recently, I got a call from the daycare around 10 AM. They said Koke-ko had a fever of 38 degrees Celsius (※8). Thanks to super flex time, I was still at home since I start work later. I rushed to the nursery, picked up Kokeko, and took her straight to the hospital. After the checkup, we stopped by the pharmacy to get her medicine, then went home for lunch. I handed her off to my wife, who had left work early that afternoon, and headed back to work.

In this way, super flex is convenient when you really need it. However, in the case above, I had to make up for the entire morning's work hours on another day (like working until 9 PM), so overall, the amount of time my wife had to handle Koke-ko alone didn't really change that much. Just because you can start late or leave early doesn't mean it counts as reduced hours. That's obvious since the standard is seven hours a day – even an elementary school kid could figure that out. What's with this "might even save more time than reduced hours" nonsense?! Being with Kokeko seems to have turned my brain into that of a toddler.

Crawling around on the floor

As for my weekdays lately, while there's some variation depending on the day, this is pretty much the average. Even with super-flexible hours, it's become fairly regular.

First off, physically, I'm pretty much at my limit. I'm 37 now. If I catch myself thinking, "If only I were in my twenties," what else can you call me but an old man?

I wake up after 6 AM and use the brief window before Koke-ko wakes up to get her breakfast ready. That mostly means reheating something I made the night before, chopping things up, or occasionally whipping up an extra dish like miso soup or scrambled eggs with egg. It's no longer baby food; it's toddler food now (*9).

When Kokeko wakes up, I feed her, mostly using the "hand-feeding" method. After eating, I brush her teeth. The upgraded Britto Cannon (i.e., poop) usually explodes (*10), so I clean that up. During all this, my wife gets ready for work. Writing comments in the nursery's communication notebook every morning is also my job as the writer. After that, I put on E-TV (*11) for her and get her dressed before taking her to daycare.

Then I carry him in the baby carrier to the nursery, an 8-minute walk from home. After dropping him off, if I have time, I stop by a nearby coffee shop for breakfast (*12). I really enjoy this little moment. I head back home, take a quick bath, and then go to work (I'll explain why I bathe in the morning later). Oh, and by the way, this is the routine on days without early meetings or presentations.

For dinner, I grab something light during work breaks, like at the company cafeteria (※13). This is because I'm currently trying to diet (※14) and deliberately want to keep dinner simple and finish it early. Please don't ask about the effectiveness of the diet.

When I get home after 7 PM, Kokeko has often just finished dinner. My wife really values her bath time, so I let her take hers first, relaxing by herself. Afterwards, I hand Kokeko over to her.

After giving Kokeko water post-bath, dimming the room, and settling her down on her baby cushion, this old man's batteries are nearly depleted. It often happens that, still keeping eye level with Kokeko, I simply collapse on the floor, exhausted. And so, I miss my own bath that day. There are days when I scrape together enough energy to crawl off the floor and stay up late preparing the next day's baby food.

Wow. Seeing it laid out like this in a diagram really makes me realize how much the burden still falls on my wife. I've always been skeptical of the much-touted "visualization" (*15), but writing this article has given me a fresh shock. Imbalances are everywhere.

A New but Not Beautiful Life

Take cooking, for example—something I'm not good at. Since I have the chance to prepare toddler meals, I wish I could apply that to cook more for us, but I just can't seem to do it. As mentioned earlier, we rarely eat slowly at home anyway.
I do wish the three of us could gather around the table together (*16).

Incidentally, I realized during my childcare leave that cooking skills heavily involve "the art of managing ingredients in the refrigerator" (*17), and my wife excels at this. This skill also comes in handy when planning toddler meals. For ingredients scheduled in daycare lunches, we need to feed them to our child twice beforehand. My wife's skill in systematically clearing them off the "unconsumed list" (*18) is impressive.

Or take sleep, for instance.
Over the past few months, I've only slept in my own bed once or twice a month. My wife? Zero times! What's going on here?

Our home is an old two-story house. My wife and I have our bedroom upstairs, while the living room is downstairs. We've fenced off part of the living room for Kokeko, and at night, we lay down a baby cushion inside that fenced area to put Kokeko to sleep. Kokeko moves around so much while sleeping that a crib (also in the living room) or our upstairs bedroom is too cramped. Plus, even after Kokeko is asleep, we need to keep her in our line of sight.

My wife sleeps right next to Kokeko on a futon laid out beside her. I sleep on the sofa next to that. Since my wife is taller than me, and there's also the height difference between the floor and the sofa, it creates an awkward (or 3D) "river" shape.

I sleep on the sofa for practical reasons—like being able to get to the kitchen instantly when I wake up—but also for emotional ones: I feel lonely leaving the "river" formation, and it feels wrong to be the only one sleeping in the bed.

It feels downright foolish, or at least reckless, so starting this month, I've occasionally slept in the bedroom. I've even suggested to my wife, "I'll sleep next to Kokeko, so you should sleep upstairs," but she stays downstairs. If Kokeko wakes up in the night, she won't settle easily unless her mother is there beside her.

"Well, that's pretty much how it is for now," is all I can say.
What do you think?

I know it's a tough question to answer, but in the seventh installment of this series, I anticipated that life would be "almost entirely new." Well, it turned out to be something like this. It's not beautiful at all. There's no exhilaration that comes with novelty. It's not smart, and it certainly isn't a "careful life" (※20). It's just drastically different from before.

By the way, some of you reading this far might be wondering: Looking at the timetable, it seems like there's hardly any overtime. Can advertising work really be done with this average number of working hours? Well, about that... that's a topic for next week's installment.

 

※1
Incidentally, my wife's company operates in a different industry from mine.

※2
Just before she turned 1 year and 1 month old, we adopted the method of drawing Mickey Mouse's face on the breast to say goodbye. Apparently, some babies laugh, some cry, and some make complex expressions. We were curious how Koke-ko would react, but she just stared blankly. Weaning turned out surprisingly smooth. Thinking that the problem that had troubled my wife so much ended so easily left me with a tinge of sadness.

※3
Rina Ikoma (1995–) is a former member of Nogizaka46. She served as center for the group's representative songs during its early years. She graduated from Nogizaka46 on May 6, 2018. She also made headlines when she declined an offer to be center for the group's final single, "Synchronicity," despite being approached, in order to fulfill her own role.

※4
See Part 1 of the series.

※5
Reduced working hours refers to a common term for the shortened work schedule style stipulated by the Child Care and Family Care Leave Act. At Dentsu Inc., it can be utilized until a child turns three. It seems plans are in place to expand this system in the future.

※6
The term "revival" is used because this system was previously in place. At least 15 years ago when the author joined the company, the super-flexible system was available only to creative staff, but it was subsequently abolished.

※7
A proverb. It means getting what you want at just the right moment. As an aside, the author often experiences the luck of "the bus arriving at the bus stop."

※8
While there is a "sick child/post-illness child care" facility nearby, the process requires extensive paperwork and a doctor's signature, making it impossible to use it on short notice, like that very afternoon.

※9
For baby food, I used to cook and chop ingredients, freeze them in ice cube trays, then thaw and combine them before meals. Toddler food, however, is more like regular cooking. While the seasoning and ingredient sizes differ, it's largely the same as adult meals, requiring standard cooking steps. My daughter transitioned to toddler food at 11 months old.

※10
The slang term "Britto cannon" ( refer to Part 2 of this series ), which means poop in the Ugae household, has now evolved to a grade where it should be called "poop" rather than "poo."

※11
The official name is "NHK Educational Television." Formerly known as "NHK Educational" or "Educational TV." Its current catchphrase is "Discover E-TV."

※12
As a complete aside, this is not what's commonly called "Nagoya Morning." To begin with, very few shops are open at 8:30 AM.

※13
Dentsu Inc.'s company cafeteria, commonly called "4-kai," is divided into four distinct stores. The variety of cuisine genres, along with the weekly and daily changing menus, is unusually diverse. It has a somewhat food court-like feel. The author often eats soba or udon there.

※14
See Part 6 of the series. The weight I gained due to lack of sleep, lack of exercise, and my love of beer just won't come off, and I feel strangely off physically.

※15
This refers to the "visualization" of household chores and childcare. It is advocated as a means to make "unnamed chores" explicit and foster shared awareness between spouses. However, the mainstream method involves listing every single chore and childcare task, a level of precision my timetable lacks.

※16
Baby food requires seasoning, size, and texture adjustments for infants, so it cannot be prepared simultaneously with adult meals. Furthermore, Kokeko's "hand-feeding" speed is so rapid that it is currently difficult for the author or his wife to "feed him while eating themselves" at the same table.

※17
What ingredients are currently in the refrigerator, and what are their expiration dates? What is on sale cheaply at the supermarket today, and what should I buy to combine with what in the fridge to make what? How much time will it take? All that deliberation and calculation is cooking.

※18
The nursery school issues monthly lunch menus listing all ingredients used. Each family marks ingredients they haven't yet fed their child with a circle and submits it to the school. The school then returns a form listing only those "unconsumed" ingredients. It's a checkbox format.

※19
Quoted from the lyrics of Sunny Day Service's early representative song "Youth Rhapsody" (released 1995): "How about you? Doing okay? Over here, well... it's hopeless. For now, yeah, that's about it."

※20
"Mindful living" is a value system frequently advocated since the 2000s in women's magazines, lifestyle publications, and organic culture journals. While lacking a strict definition, it often encompasses tendencies like "living naturally," "prizing DIY," "loving simple, minimalist living," and "respecting sustainability."