Woman...

As I catch up with a long lost friend of mine who migrated to the Netherlands, motherhood & the overall experince of being a woman. I heard of maternity leaves in certain EU countries reputed to be 2-6 mths! With such info, I can't help remembering an incident I heard from a friend.

There's a woman in office who's very near her delivery due date (about 2-weeks to go), so she tried to finish as much work as she can, try to get her alternate to know what are the things that she perform so that there are back-up in her absence, etc. However, there's still 1 last item that her boss thought that it is extremely important that only she can do it & no one else; so she said to the lady "Can you postpone your leave till next week?" (& very seriously I must tell you... no kidding!). When the story was relayed back to me & my friends, we didn't know whether to laugh or be horrified... We asked the lady how she responded & she said "If you can keep that little fella in from coming into this world..."

On another incident, a friend of mine delivered a healthy baby boy & when we visit her, I was of the impression that I will be meeting the new mum & her baby happily in each others arms, getting acquianted with each other. I'm shocked to find though that the mum was "harrassed" over the phone to the point that she had to turn on her laptop & go on-line to work. & even when I commented about it, she thought there's nothing wrong with it & maybe she's just a plain workaholic...

The point of all my rambling is...

I'm just curious to know if this only happens to women in the East OR it happens everywhere in the world (even in the West where the Feminist & gender awareness seem to be stronger there) OR this is just a matter of personal choice / experience? Comments?