The most unexpected part of my postpartum experience ironically came from the one thing that I thought I had sorted out beforehand: my paid leave. I had always hoped and planned to take 16 weeks. Because I work for a nonprofit in Washington, DC, I was eligible for DC Paid Family Leave [editor’s note: up to eight weeks capped at just over $1,000 a week]. I was going to take that, plus six weeks of disability, and my organization was planning to top up as well to allow me to take 16 weeks—some weeks fully paid, some partially paid, and some completely unpaid. It was a complicated combination, but it was all going to work out.
But here’s the thing that’s important to talk about. In order to be eligible for all these benefits, you have to worry about filling out a ton of paperwork in the hospital and at home days after the baby is born. You can only do some of it beforehand because you don’t know when you’re going to give birth, and for DC Paid Family Leave, you have to upload all this paperwork, proof of birth, and so on. So we were printing and scanning and trying to figure out how to do this whole thing, and I just needed and wanted it settled.
I called the disability number, and it seemed like it had all gone through, but my DC Paid Family Leave claim got rejected. I thought I’d done something wrong because I was so exhausted. It turned out that I’d been accidentally registered as a Virginia employee because I live in Virginia, even though my DC company thought they had done otherwise. But no matter how much we tried, there was nothing I could do to rectify it. So the first three weeks postpartum were spent trying to figure out how to make it all work. My organization was great and immediately agreed to cover what I was meant to be getting paid from DC, but imagine counting on that money and then not having it. I was one of the lucky ones.
