bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2016), pp. 18–19
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans, wrote John Lennon about his young son.
And life is what happened to Kathryn Hewlett-Jobes as she began her third posting as a Canadian diplomat in 1983. She would become one of Canada’s first diplomats to give birth abroad and stay at post.
Having been told that she could never have children, the last thing Kathryn expected six weeks into her posting to Manila was to be medically evacuated, pregnant, out of northern Pakistan, where she was participating in her first Asian Development Bank (ADB) mission.
Kathryn was suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum, a rare and severe form of nausea associated with pregnancy. However, as a sign of the times, her first misdiagnosis by a doctor on the ground in Pakistan was that she was simply missing her husband. After her condition worsened, resulting in the emergency evacuation, she stabilized back in Manila and received the news of what she calls her miracle pregnancy.
Then came the decision as to what to do next.
“This really wasn’t on anyone’s planning horizon,” says Kathryn. “We had just arrived at post and we weren’t going to turn around and go back home. I didn’t quite see what the fuss was about. We just dealt with it, because that’s what you do in the Foreign Service. You just deal with it.”
But fuss there was as Kathryn’s ambassador tried earnestly to convince her to follow established practice, cut her posting short and return to Canada.
“His first instinct was probably a protective one, but at the time I thought he was determined to ruin my life,” says Kathryn. “He told me that I would lose housing benefits, plus he could declare me in abandonment of my post if I missed any work.”
Kathryn was prohibited by the Foreign Service Directives from using medical or sick leave for pregnancy-related absences and was not entitled to any maternity or parental leave abroad. She would go on to take one week of annual leave at home with her newborn and spread her remaining two weeks of annual leave over the following month by working half days.
“It sounds more heroic than it was,” she says modestly. “I had a very supportive husband, [who was a] following spouse, and also full-time help at home… The logistics were challenging because I breastfed as well. I was determined to do that.”
Kathryn and her husband were becoming accustomed to forging new ground. Not only does she recount being the first married woman to be hired into the Canadian Foreign Service in 1975 and the only female officer working at the ADB when she started her posting in Manila, but her husband was also the first person to resign from the German Foreign Service. He did so to follow his wife’s career.
But like so much in life, these groundbreaking decisions were not plotted step by step.
“I’m not entirely sure how it came about. It was a series of fairly innocent decisions,” recalls Kathryn. “When we met, he was with the German diplomatic service and I was with the Canadian. Getting together would have meant one of us leaving our career. He chose to leave his. The quick answer is because he had a broader skillset than I did. It was also the only way. I knew I didn’t have what it took to be the following spouse in the German diplomatic service.”
While she may have been the first to stay at post to have her baby, Kathryn was not alone among her generation of women Foreign Service Officers facing tough decisions in starting a family. Up until the 1990s, staying at post meant foregoing maternity benefits and returning to full-time work just days after the birth. One dedicated colleague even chose to use telex to work from her maternity ward only hours after giving birth abroad.
“Taking maternity leave back then meant stepping seriously off the career path. None of the women who had babies back then did that,” says Kathryn. “You would have paid a serious career penalty.” Maternity benefits were first included in the Unemployment Insurance Act in 1971 to give birth mothers 15 weeks of paid leave. Ten weeks of parental leave were then added in 1990 and, thereafter, several pregnant Foreign Service Officers would stay at post and receive benefits. It wasn’t until 2001, after new legislation provided for 15 weeks of maternity leave and 35 weeks of parental leave, that a formal policy was developed for employees at post.
Ellen Ruth Zeisler, currently Director of the HR Renewal Task Force, was the officer charged in 2001 with drafting the new policy.
“There was consideration being given at the time to all of the issues that concern our employees abroad,” recalls Ruth. “The department and bargaining agents sat down together and determined what was reasonable going forward in consideration of all the variables but set against the legislation.”
No formal process was undertaken to cost out the expense to the Crown of an employee returning from post or staying for the duration of their posting.
“It was never an issue of what would be most cost-effective. That would have belied the health of the family,” says Ruth. “Rather, it was what would be reasonable given the employee and the FSDs.”
Ruth emphasizes that no two family situations are alike; some employees were anxious to return home, particularly from high-pollution posts. Others could choose to augment or reduce their leave depending on their family needs.
“I don’t know if anyone was ever out of the office six months to the day,” says Ruth. “Some a little less, some a little more. Thankfully, the legislation allows for flexibility in how you adapt those plans. The approach that we took was that you had a foundation upon which you could build and customize within a certain timeframe as set by the legislation. It eased some of the angst.”
Fifteen years later, one constant remains: that much of life is unplanned.
Kyle Sundstrom, a political officer in Mexico, and his wife, an immigration officer, knew they wanted to have children. But he agrees that there is a limit to what one can plan.
“We didn’t map it out strategically from the beginning, though we might be a little more strategic if we have a second one,” says Kyle. “For us, we didn’t have support groups in Ottawa. We’re not from Ottawa, and we hadn’t been there long before we went to Paris on posting. The decision came down to whether we were comfortable just taking six months of parental leave.”
In the end, Kyle took some leave without pay in addition to parental leave, and he and his wife were home together at their staff quarters in Mexico City to care for their new baby.
“We didn’t know what we were doing, we had to navigate the whole system ourselves,” he says. “Neither of us has excellent Spanish, but we were able to hunker down and figure out what we were doing as parents. To be able to do that together was amazing.”
Still, the decision of when and where to have children remains a tough one for Foreign Service parents.
“This ties into a bigger issue and that’s family planning according to posting cycles,” says Kyle. “The decision to have children is very much dependent on jobs and the posting cycle and counting nine months back.”
He adds: “The uncertainty of the Foreign Service life and moving from country to country is a huge stressor. Imagine doing that with a newborn or eight months pregnant.”
As Kyle says, “Changing jobs, moving, having children – these are the biggest and most stressful times of your life. If you put them all together it’s extremely taxing on you and taxing on the family. It’s not always clear what is the right thing to do.” Still, he counts his family lucky.
“There needs to be a balance. I think six months is reasonable because it’s still quite generous compared to a lot of countries,” says Kyle.
Having just gone through the process, Kyle says it would be helpful to have a roadmap or a repository of information available on having children abroad. Christine Climenhage, a Foreign Service Officer currently seconded to Treasury Board in Ottawa, agrees. She recently penned a paper with input from over 30 Foreign Service Officers in order to feed into a meeting of the Department’s Psychological Wellbeing in the Workplace Initiative.
Among the recommendations included in the paper is the provision of roadmaps for big life events happening on posting, such as the birth of a child. The paper suggests the development of a website or app detailing how to deal with emergency medical care overseas, as well as the need for greater support and pre-posting training for family members.
Meanwhile, Kathryn is the first to recognize that life for women has changed dramatically from when she had her children in the Philippines in the 1980s. She says it is difficult for her daughter, now 30, to understand the barriers that once existed.
“It’s a little bit disturbing for my generation, but then we say: well, what would success look like? We fought so hard to make the point that women could do all the different kinds of functions,” says Kathryn.
Today, Foreign Service parents consistently voice appreciation for the benefits that forerunners like Kathryn helped secure over the years.
Doreen Steidle, a Foreign Service colleague who had her first child in Ottawa in 1986 but remained at post for her second in 1997, sums it up best: “There have been many firsts on this maternity leave journey. We should celebrate the first woman to have had the courage to have a child abroad without benefits, as well as all those who broke ground as inch by inch the Department and the Government yielded to the pressure to institute the benefits our working colleagues, and their partners, now have.”
Yet, the final word at this juncture may rest with Kathryn: “In an ideal future, because we’re not there yet, we should not regard people having children as if they have chosen to have an exotic pet and it is entirely their responsibility to take care of this pet. It should be seen as they are doing something for society at large because they are raising the next generation.”
Shauna Hemingway is currently on maternity leave from her position as Deputy Director G7/G20 in Ottawa. This follows postings to Mexico City, where she served as the economic counsellor, and Seoul as a political officer with accreditation to North Korea. Shauna previously worked as a staff reporter at the Toronto Star and then communications manager for the Kent Police in England.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2016), pp. 18–19. Read the rest of this issue →
