Everyone, Take a Deep Breath: Writer of Buzzy New Novel ‘Meternity’ Did Not Call Maternity Leave a Vacation
When I saw the headlines about my friend Meghann Foye’s debut novel, Meternity , I got excited—until I realized that many of them were negative, with everyone from The Huffington Post to PopSugar lambasting Foye for implying that maternity leave is somehow akin to a vacation. Actually, guys—pretty sure that’s not what she meant, neither in her fictional book, nor in a New York Post essay about the challenges of being a single woman.
Foye’s novel is a satirical chick-lit novel about a 30-something editor working at a parenting magazine (a play on Foye’s real life; she was an editor at Redbook) who ultimately fakes her pregnancy because she’s sick of being treated like she has no life just because she’s not married with kids.
I’m 28 and single, and I can easily see the truth in the dynamic Foye, now 38, is highlighting. Isn’t it the same premise of hundreds of chick flicks and lit that came before Meternity, from Bridget Jones’s Diary to The Nanny Diaries? It’s not about pitting single, childless women against married mothers; it’s about the unspoken bias that single women face in many aspects of life—from their careers to their social lives.
Ironically, that bias is something that’s been well-documented by New York Magazine, which regularly publishes some of the smartest and best content about being a single woman—and yet posted a critique of Foye and her message, saying her “call for flexibility in the workplace… is couched in numerous assumptions she hasn’t bothered to investigate.”
Ironically, I’d say the same about the writer Laura June. Clearly, she hasn’t read the book; nor did she watch Foye’s Today Show segment this morning (which aired hours before June’s post). If she’d done either, she’d know that the idea of Foye likening maternity leave to a relaxed break from work is totally off-base.
Responding to the intense backlash, Foye told NBC’s Morgan Radford: “A maternity leave is a time when you’re fully focused on a new human being; a ‘meternity leave’ is a time when it’s really just for you—a time when you take a step back. I have tremendous respect for moms—pretty much all of my friends are moms, and I see every single day what they go through, and how difficult their maternity leaves were.”
To me, the takeaway from all this is our culture’s heightened sensitivity and inability to see the humor in certain situations or ideas (as Redbook pointed out, “Meternity is just a clever play on words”). Sensitivity is one thing. If anyone earnestly compared maternity leave to a peaceful, spa-filled sabbatical from work, they’d deserve to be criticized. But this seems more like basic media trolling of a new author, who might seem like an easy mark.
If June had bothered to investigate the assumptions she made, I’m sure she’d have quickly discovered that Foye isn’t out to make light of motherhood or maternity leave. Instead, she’s humorously and intelligently highlighting some of the very real challenges single women face—and at the moment, I’d count June and the other journalists slamming Foye for no solid reason among them.
